![]() It should also, if the editor can possibly manage to nudge it in this direction, be written in a voice and vocabulary appropriately challenging for its target readership.īringing out any of these laudable traits is not only a matter of critiquing what could be improved quite a lot of what I do involves helping the author see what is already good and could be made better. Ideally, a manuscript should be both elegantly written and market-appropriate - which means to the pros, contrary to popular opinion amongst frustrated aspiring writers, not that it should resemble the latest bestseller, but that its tone, subject matter, and use of literary conventions is appropriate for the book category for which it is aiming. (And while I’m bursting philosophical bubbles: I hate to break it to you, Keats fans, but truth is not always beauty, and beauty is not always truth. I like to think of myself as the book’s advocate, trying to figure out all of the little ways to make it as beautiful and marketable as humanly possible.Īnd no, in response to what a good third of you just thought very loudly, beautiful writing is not always marketable, any more than marketable writing is always beautiful. ![]() Obviously, that’s necessary in order to edit well It’s not as though an editor (or an agent, or an agency screener) can plop herself down and read a book like any other reader it’s our job to be alive to every detail. As I may have mentioned once or twice before, it’s exceedingly easy for those of us who read manuscripts for a living to forget just how differently we read than everybody else. My apologies for the earlier oversight, of course. Today, I’m going to begin to rectify that. I made it clear that seeing the same phrasing turn up again and again on the page does in fact irritate our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, almost as much as it tends to annoy the agent for whom she works, the editor to whom that agent likes to sell manuscripts, and, ultimately, the reader that buys the published book. After Friday’s omnibus rant on the frequently-related subjects of Frankenstein manuscripts - texts written over such a long period and/or revised so often that they read as though several different authors had written their constituent parts, then stitched them together with visible seams - and phrasing repetition in submissions, I realized that in my great eagerness to stop you fine people from repeating yourselves inadvertently, I had neglected to provide you with much evidence why.
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