Poets & Writers – July-August 2019

the practical writer ODE TO A COPY EDITOR

JULY AUGUST 2019 66

LOOKINGFOR THE RIGHT

magazine to publish your

poem,story, or essay?

Let Poets & Write rs help.

Our free,eas y-to-useLite rary

Magazines database includes

tips from editors, submission

guidelines, reading periods,

reporting times, and pay­

mentdetailsfor ove r twelve

hundred magazines an d

journals.

Tools for Writers

Online

at pw.org.

But when the first pass pages ar-

rived with edits from the freelance

copy editor Tin House had hired,

Anne Horowitz, it felt like the arrival

of a marriage counselor that our rela-

tionship didn’t need. Jolted from the

felted cocoon of developmental edits,

suddenly the system that I’d built with

Masie was being prodded, poked. In

her notes on the text, Anne gracefully

reminded me that more than a decade

of life lived on the Internet has ru-

ined my ability to spell (“it’s sleeping

berths, not births”); that my historical

research wasn’t airtight (“parenting

might not have been a very common

word during this period; keep anyway

or maybe change to something like

child-rearing?”); that I was sometimes

incoherent (“This is another sentence

that makes sense once the situation

comes into focus for the reader but

on a first read is quite confusing”) and

repetitive (“The phrase ‘of course’ ap-

pears sixty times throughout. Perhaps

do a search to decide if it’s too many?”).

But there was also the suggestion that

the house rules Masie and I had in-

vented were jeopardizing the reader’s

enjoyment of the text. “Okay that

some of these entries lack end punc-

tuation?” she asked. “Foreign words are

italicized on first usage (in accordance

with CMS 11.3),” she noted, referring

to the Chicago Manual of Style, the

copy editor’s bible. The confidence

I’d had in the novel’s scaffolding was

punctured, as was my confidence in the

novel itself. With every query that po-

litely indicated a section was confusing,

irregular, opaque, I was reminded that

just because I loved this book didn’t

mean it would sell.

I remember stepping away from the

computer where the red Track Changes

glowered from the screen and going

for a run. I remember telling myself—

while running—that the copy editor

wasn’t there to compliment me or to

tell my editor and me what a pretty job

we’d done. It was this person’s calling

to identify the places where the story

went off track. Anne was a metal detec-

tor on a beach of grammar, a hunter of

the wrong. Additionally, I assessed—

still running—she was a newcomer to

the party. Maybe she just needed time

to warm up to our text.

These affirmations allowed me to go

back to the copyedits with less defensive

eyes. And something magical occurred

when I let down my guard. Somewhere

around the sixtieth query, I could actu-

ally see Anne surrender to the rhythm

of the text and the rules that we’d

defined. By the seventieth, Anne was

dabbling in some rule-bending her-

self. (Comment 71: “‘our same house’

is colloquial but seems intentionally

so.”) By the eightieth, she was actu-

ally starting to defend t he narrator’s

style. (87: “In general I’m allowing

colloquialisms and some non-CMS

formatting to stand, as this is meant

to be a diary.”) In the two hundreds,

Anne Horowitz was a ticket-carrying

passenger on the train of weird, and

her queries had some bite: “CMS 6.19

might add serial comma after ‘milk’

(unless you want the milk and cream

to be more of a bonded pair?)” and “I

think Jack means that one or some of

his friends committed suicide and oth-

ers walked to Czechoslovakia, but it’s a

little opaque.” Italics hers.

And so it was that my relationship

with my copy editor, and the regard in

which I held copy editors, completely

changed. By sitting with Anne’s copy-

edits and allowing them to help me,

Anne went from policewoman to sty-

listic ally. Better yet, when I stopped

reading Anne’s queries as accusatory,

they became an invitation to dig up the

character motivations I had initially

been so giddy to hide. I wasn’t just

reading Track Changes on my copy-

edits anymore; I was engaged in a dis-

sertation defense. Anne’s queries about

my bonkers use of kinship titles, for

example (the narrator calls her mother

Mum, Mumma, and Mother through-

out the text), forced me to explain—to

know—that my heroine, Lara, called

her mother “Mother” when she was

feeling distant from her, or stung by

something she’d done; “Mumma” for

when she was feeling close to her (not