the practical writer ODE TO A COPY EDITOR69 POETS & WRITERSphone conversation) and compromises
on mine. For example: Tough titties if
no one uses italics in their own diaries;
you just can’t stumble on a foreign word
like genug and keep going about your
business without your brain going,
“What the hell was that?” (Genug means
“enough” in German, and it, like every
other foreign word and phrase that ap-
pears in Costalegre, is now italicized in
t he text.)
I’ve always had respect for copy edi-
tors, but the copyediting process for my
third novel has left me inebriated with
gratitude for what these specialized edi-
tors do—or rather keep us from doing—
on the published page. I look back on my
connection with Anne not as a relation-
ship of circumstance, as copy editor to
author, but rather as a deeply personal
alliance built on the principles of clear
communication. She was more than a
copy editor; she was an online therapist
of sorts—the newfangled kind you can
text at a dark hour when your writing
needs a friend.best-selling copyediting memoir,
Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide
to Clarity and Style (Random House,
2019), as well as Mary Norris’s Between
You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
(W. W. Norton, 2015), has reminded
both readers and writers how much
copy editors contribute to the books
and pieces they love. Nevertheless, even
authors whose copy editors lack Dreyer’s
wit (“If you’re going to have a house
style, try not to have a house style visible
from space” is a personal favorite) should
go the extra mile to show their copy edi-
tor some love. Copy editors are not a set
of red editing commands on your com-
puter screen; they are living, breathing
humans whose eyesight has diminished
from their continued improvement of,
and on, our work.
Anne and I ended our collaboration
on equal footing. There was truth–
talking on her part (“Your book has a
higher curve of getting orientated—it
really takes a while to get your bearings”
was one thing she admitted during ourin which movie stills and asterisks be-
come emotional guideposts, rather than
point out grammatical irregularities,
her task was to assist her husband in his
quest to develop a new form, primarily
through design and storyboarding, as
well as contributing to the book’s many
redactions. There are pages of blackouts
and whiteouts throughout the text that
lend the story an almost unbearably vivid
portrayal of a life in flux. “The reasons
for blackouts were always dependent
on the case: to obscure identifying
information—names, e-mail addresses,
etc,” McIntosh recalls. “They also served
to conceal personal, private, and holy
things, to create big swatches of black
set against white, to overwhelm the text
like a cancer, to adjust speed and flow of
the read without erasing or removing the
actual space, to have something to hide
behind, to avoid being sued for copyright
infringement, to hide the original title of
the original book, to suggest the ever-
present unknown.”
The success of Benjamin Dreyer’s