Do Indie Writers Need Editors?

(Note: I wrote three posts to set up context for this -- Editorial Standards, eHow and Pulp Fiction, Slush Pile Thoughts Part 1 - Teaching, and Slush Pile Thoughts Part 2 - Levels of Writers.)

I was prompted to write this post by two things:

One: the reason I quit Kindleboards was because so many indies think that editing = quality, and they cover their ears and scream when you want to talk about actual craft. And Two: I read a series of rants by various more traditionally oriented writers saying, basically, "you indie writers need to get editors!" And even they were talking about typos and usage, and not about craft.

But my thinking has evolved since I first drafted out this post. Here is the introduction to what I was going to say:

First, I want to make two things very clear:

1.) A good editor, like a good housekeeper, is prized above rubies, chocolate AND bacon.

2.) Every writer -- I'm talking 100 percent of writers -- started life as a mewling, puking baby who not only had zero words in his or her vocabulary, but also no sense at all of dramatic structure, characterization, or even the ability to recognize what a book is.

And guess what?

Item #1 is not the solution to Item #2.

I still believe this is true. I haven't changed my mind on it. So why don't I care to say that any more? Because I was caught in the same trap as those who annoy me.

In traditional publishing, you can, with some assurance, tell people what they need. There are so many hoops to jump through, that the arguable issues of higher literature don't matter. Every writer -- from pulp to literary -- has to jump through those hoops, so you can safely yell at them for doing a bad job at it.

And I am as stuck in that mindset as anybody. The original thesis of this post was going to be "... and if you want to really learn to jump through those hoops as an indie, you don't need an editor, you need a teacher."

And that's still true, but as the old joke about the lost helicopter goes, it isn't relevant.

So do indie writers need editors?

The problem lies with the word "need." And (given that) the answer is, always was, always will be for all writers, and cannot be anything else:

NO.

That's a no-brainer. Of course we don't need no stinkin' editors. We don't need no stinkin' apples either. We may like them, we may find them beneficial and tasty and all that, but we don't need them.

We think we need them (editors, not apples) because in traditional publishing the editor is critical to the process. The editor is responsible to the publisher and to the booksellers. And the writer needs publishers and booksellers, so they need an editor. QED. But in that system, the writer doesn't have any responsibility, except meeting the contract terms and expectations of the editor.

(But but but, a writer always has a responsibility to write a great story! On a moral level, before the judgment of the Gods, maybe. But in traditional publishing, the writer's responsibility is only to meet the needs of the editor.)

With Great Responsibility Comes Great Freedom

In self-publishing, the writer is the one with the responsibility. It's a responsibility greater than any editor ever had, because it's total responsibility. Even if you hire an editor, you're the editor's boss. The buck stops with you, end of story.

This is terrifying for many people. I can understand why it leads to so much screaming about the need for a safety net. After all, if an editor fails, it not only threatens her welfare, but also that of a whole lot of people down the line. But the consequences of failure for a self-published author these days can be next to nothing. You don't need a safety net. You can fall, and fall and fall, and still be okay.

The great freedom that total responsibility gives you means that you can go after any market you want. Not just markets which will be profitable for your boss, or those which please the booksellers. You can even build your own.

Earlier I posted three essays to set up context for this post:

The point of my first context post (Editorial Standards, eHow and Pulp Fiction) was to point out that different markets have different standards. Electronic publishing has just expanded the market exponentially. What we consider "publishing" today is a tiny fragment of the number of markets and forms that are already in play. And new forms and ideas are cropping up all the time.

The two later posts about the slush pile were to illustrate that good writing isn't about good spelling, and good spelling is certainly not about great writing.

"But but but, are you actually advocating bad spelling?"

A week ago I would have replied, "Of course not!" But now... I can only say:

Advocating is a strong word, but, um, yeah. I am. Sorta.

What I'm advocating for is learning the standards appropriate to your venue, and excelling that them.

For instance: Some top notch New York writers I follow on Twitter have taken to using all those texting shortcuts that we decry as a sign of the downfall of literacy -- because they have something important to say with only 140 characters. And I've read long, funny essays written entirely in LOLcat-speak.

"Oh, but those are sophisticated writers who know how to write correctly, so they get a pass!"

No, they're smart writers who know how to use the tools they have to communicate the effect they want.

Consider this:

Back in the 70's and 80's breast feeding became all the rage among the upper classes, and someone did a cultural study among the doctors who were pushing it. What they found was that the very same doctors who advised modern, rich white women to breast feed, turned around and advised non-white immigrants NOT to breast feed.

Why?

Because those ignorant immigrants didn't know how to raise a baby the right way, and must be trained out of their raw and uncivilized habits first. Breast feeding is only for the most sophisticated of mothers.

Sound familiar?

You don't need to be able to spell correctly before you can write something funny in LOLcat-speak. You just have to understand how LOLcats think.

Like it or not, the wall has come down between LOLcats, online chat, blogging, fan fiction, and you. You can't go around telling others the right answer any more. You can only look for the right answer for you. So....

Do you need an editor?

That's up to you.

If you lack time and have money, absolutely -- hire someone to take over the annoying proofing jobs.

If you are an unskilled writer, however, an editor won't fix your lack of skill. And if you're not ready for it, neither will a teacher or a critique group. What you need is experience.

Get writing, make mistakes. Make intentional mistakes. Learn from them. You need to get those million words under your belt. (They don't all need to be fiction.) And if hiring an editor helps you get on with writing those words, that's fine too.

In summary:

1.) Kittehs doant needz no steenky editurz.

2.) And writers need to stop having kittens at the prospect of all those unskilled writers out there who don't listen to them. (Because they don't have to listen, so they're not gonna.)

Thus ends the rant I hope to put behind me....

Next week I want to get on with this concept of Artisan Writers. The idea of a writing movement focused on craftsmanship really jazzes me. I might go back to posting 5-6 days a week. I might write and post a Manifesto.

Stay tuned, and see you in the funny papers.

Slush Pile Secrets Part 2 - The Bell Curve

One more post to give you context before I get to my "We don't need no stinkin' editors!" post:

The Slush Pile Bell Curve

I don't have a typical experience of the slush pile. My experience comes from three areas -- teaching (which I talked about last week), script analysis for a couple of managers and small producers, and judging competitions.

These three jobs have one thing in common which is not a part of the normal slush process: You have to read every single solitary manuscript carefully from beginning to end, and then analyze it. Every. Stinkin'. One. Every. Stinkin'. Page.

I never had a job where I got to stop reading after the first couple pages and stick a rejection slip on it. No matter how bad or inappropriate the manuscript was, I had to do a full and fair analysis with ratings according to a specific rubric, and very often detailed explanations of those ratings.

This gave me a learning advantage over those who could stop reading and reject as soon as they saw a manuscript wasn't right for the list. I think they got a warped view of what they were rejecting, because they never really had to think about it -- even when they did read the whole thing.

Me, I got a look at the bell curve, in detail. Actually, make that several different bell curves: I judged some competitions for published fiction, as well as those for writers with no sales or production credits, and most of my script reading clients were not open to unsolicited submissions. (But they were open to illiterate Hollywood types with connections.) And as I said last week, in education, I saw manuscripts which would never make it into the slush pile. So I got the full spectrum.

For this post, though, I'm going to stick to the kind of stuff I saw in competitions open to unpublished/unproduced writers. That is, approximately what you'd see in publishing's slush piles.

Level 1 - Maybe 5-10 percent were complete non-starters. Major major issues, and didn't even feel like a book or screenplay. Just rambling in an unrecognizable format. Signs that the writer had never read a book or screenplay, or seen or film, and was possibly crazy -- but the writing was too bad to actually tell.

Level 2 - The next 25-30 percent had major issues, but the author had some sense of story. I would classify these as like beginning student stories. The manuscript might have formatting or serious language issues, but mostly these writers could spell and form sentences and follow directions -- at least to the extent that you could figure out what they meant. And the story had scenes and dialog and a structure and some kind of character arc, though these items were fragmentary and often went off the rails. In other words, the rudiments of a story were there, even if they weren't done well.

Up to this point, things like cliches and shallow characters or poorly thought-out ideas really didn't matter, because the problems were more fundamental than that.

Level 3 - The middle 25-30 percent tended to be more correct in terms of formatting and usage, and showed more mastery of those fundamentals. But the stories seemed to struggle for consistency and follow-through. They might begin to show signs of more advanced elements, like pacing and subtext and voice, but were pretty shaky. And here is where the writing was just good enough that cliches, weak character motivations and poorly thought out ideas were obvious.

Level 4 - The next 25-30 percent had all the fundamentals in place, plus the characters were better defined with proper motivations. The author showed an ability to use pacing and timing and tools. But there were still problems with cliches and shallowness. And though they might be developing a voice, it wasn't well developed -- and might be generic or imitated. And these stories often lacked subtext or subtlety. But the main thing these stories suffered from, especially toward the top of the batch.... polished ordinariness.

This level seems like a choke point in the development of many writers. While some catch fire at Level 3 and zip right on through to Level 5, way too many writers, I am sorry to say, stall when they get here. Level 4 is where you get to be the big fish in a small pond. It's where you have learned all the rules and have learned to apply them. And if you have learned to stifle your own voice -- stifle your uniqueness -- you will never get beyond here.

Level 5 - The top 5-10 percent or so were stories which I would like to read if they fit my tastes. Here is where the characters were complicated and had motivations which drove the story. If there were cliches, they had a little more oomph to them and strayed more into the area of archetypes. Here the author had a voice, and the story had a theme and subtext. The voice, theme and subtext might not be fully developed, but it was there and gave the story some weight.

The really interesting thing about this top tier:

All the other levels showed authors making progress in fundamentals. Spelling, sentence structure, formatting, neatness, following directions. Understanding and implementation of any rules (like avoiding passive voice or adverbs or using "show don't tell"). All that got better as you progressed from Level 1 to Level 4.

But at Level 5, fundamentals took a step back. Oh, not a big step back. Nothing at this level was embarrassingly bad. But they were almost always more sloppy than Level 4. They were not as tightly edited, and the authors were more likely to let it all hang out, and use all the adverbs they wanted to, and get creative with capitalization.

This seems related to the fact that these authors had a much more developed voice. And they could express what they wanted to express much better than the polished and pretty sentences of the top Level 4 writers.

Now that may sound ironic to you, but I remember hearing about a phenomenon like this in competitive skiing and biking:

I'm told that if you take any skiing competition and line up everybody in order of how well or badly they did, and then looked at their equipment and training and such, you would find a similar break down as above. Those at the bottom had crappy, hand-me-down equipment. Those in the middle had better equipment, and those just above the middle had spectacular equipment, and those at the top -- the very best athletes who won competitions -- had equipment which was good enough but not great.

Great skiers don't look for an edge in things they can buy. They know it isn't about the skis. It's about how well you know your skis and how they differ subtly from other skis, and how much control you have over your body, and how observant you are about snow and geography and physics. How strong your legs are, how flexible your knees and back are. And how well you can compensate for any of these being a little off.

Now, given that this post is context for a later post about quality and editing of indie writers, I can hear some disgruntled voices in the background:

"Well, sure a brilliant writer may not proof his own work fully, but that's because those errors are always corrected by someone else in traditional publishing! So it's no excuse for being even a little bit sloppy!"

Mmmmmm maybe.

Consider this:

The writers in that top group who did a sloppy job? They did it in spite of the fact that they've already been told not to. They aren't listening. So they're gonna do it anyway.

And screaming and ranting and frothing at the mouth is not going to change that.

Because, and let's be honest here, their work is better than the group below them, and their attention to voice and story, rather than editing, is one of the reasons it's so good.

I'm just sayin'.

Next week, though, when I get to the "We don't need no stinkin' editors!" post, I'm going to talk about those in the lower ranks, and how editors are not the way they move up.

See you in the funny papers.

Slushpile Secrets Part 1 - Teaching

I'm still building up to a post about why I think most of us -- indies and traditionalists alike -- have the wrong end of the stick on the subject of writing quality and what we need to do about it.

Frankly, I think the emperors of both sides of this issue ain't wearing any clothes, but those who are most nekkid are those who are sticking to traditional ideas.

The problem, as I see it (aside from fear and defensiveness) is that everybody makes assumptions about where everybody else is coming from. So before I say much, I want to give you some context.

Last week I brought out an old post about pulp fiction and editorial standards, and how different markets have different needs. eHow didn't need perfect spelling. Pulp Magazines didn't need literary grace as long as giant earthworms attacked buxom women.

This week, and next, I'm going to talk about my experiences with the slush pile.

The Slush Pile's Dirty Little Secret

When I started writing, I was told time and again about how those of us who took the time to learn manuscript form and to proofread our work were far ahead of 90 percent of the slush pile. We were told horror story after horror story about manuscripts which were written on pizza boxes, and authors who sent nude pictures of themselves, or threats to the editor's life, or nude pictures with threats written on them which were included in pizza boxes.

Most writers submitting over the transom, I understood, did not type their manuscripts neatly in black ink on white paper, double-spaced, single-sided. And most could not spell or put a sentence together to save their lives.

I heard this from everyone -- editors, agents, well-established writers, teachers, and especially my fellow new writers -- and I believed this so completely that once I was published and got a job teaching writing, I passed it on to my students.

Eventually I did get some experience with the slush pile, and what I discovered is that it was not nearly as bad as I was led to believe. Sure, there was a lot of really bad writing, and mediocre writing. But not that many personal threats or pizza boxes, or even all that many which were single-spaced on pink paper with red ink.

I'm going to talk more about that tomorrow, when I discuss the actual breakdown -- level by level -- of what I saw in the slush pile.

What I want to talk to you about today is what I saw as a teacher.

Because frankly, those editors who complain about the slush pile are wimps. Seriously, they never see the worst of the worst, and they don't have to take it seriously, word-by-word, the way a teacher does.

Most of the students I had in teaching Introduction to Creative Writing never submitted a single manuscript to an editor, and are not self-publishing either. (Not unless their teachers are making it a part of the class to do so.) And the very worst stories? Never got finished. I noticed this even in advanced classes.

What really interests me, though, is the best writing I saw. (Most of which I doubt was ever submitted to a magazine either, for reasons I'll mention below.)

Generally, as a teacher, I was dealing with raw material. Unstudied, untutored. Sometimes students who had never read fiction or poetry at all. Even so, I've got to tell you that I did learn something:

I believe in a thing called talent. (And it ain't what people think it is.)

First year of teaching I had one class with two very different students. One student -- I think of her as a little girl, not a woman, because she was small and shy and immature. She couldn't spell, and did not naturally write in grammatical sentences. She was, however, very bright, and had got into college in spite of that. The other student was a very well-schooled and intellectual young man. He always got top grades, and he was artsy too.

The first assignment in that class was to write a descriptive poem -- to use visceral detail to show something without telling. The intellectual wrote a "poem" with no physical detail at all. He told us what to think of his subject, and that, to him was "describing" it. He did a good job of writing a clever essay, perfect in language use and presentation, but it was a lousy descriptive poem.

The shy "little girl" wrote a poem in which every third word was misspelled, and it took effort to figure out the sentences in a few places, but even so... that poem grabbed you by the gut. I'm trying to remember what it was about. I think it described the clothing of a humiliated child or something like that. Oh, my God, she zeroed in on exactly the right details in every line.

The intellectual never learned a thing in that class. He was as smart as he wanted to be, and his stuff was all perfectly proofed and presented and he resented not not getting an 4.0. (His last project was a screed attacking ignorant young women who get favored treatment for their asinine emotional girl poetry.) But he was smart and driven, and he knew what he wanted out of life, and so if anyone in that class grew up to be a writer, he probably did.

The young woman took the criticism of her spelling and grammar seriously, and improved dramatically. She went to tutoring to deal with it, and by the end of the class, she was handing in properly proofed work. The high impact of her writing never waned, but I suspect she did not go on to be a writer, because the spark that made her writing so good was not limited to writing. She was a "noticing kind of person." She saw subtle details and understood what they meant. She also had high empathy, and I suspect she went on to be a crusading lawyer, or a doctor... or a teacher.

The difference between these two students was that the shy kid was more mature than the arrogant young man. That's what talent is. She could see further. She had her eyes open so she could learn.

Now, I bring this up for two reasons -- there are two lessons here. One is the above lesson about what talent and potential are. The other lesson is the poem itself.

When you're reading raw student work, you don't often get pleasure out of the writing itself. You get the intellectual pleasure of digging out potential instead. But those poems that young lady wrote -- in spite of the spelling and grammatical problems -- were worth reading just for their own sake. If I wasn't required to read them, I would still enjoy reading them, spelling mistakes and all.

That young lady may have needed a tutor to get a decent grade or be respected by fellow students and potential employers, or to be traditionally published. And if she were self-publishing, she would need a tutor to help make her presentation more... well, presentable.

But her poetry did not need an editor.

Next Thursday I'll talk about my experience of the slush pile, and the way manuscripts stacked up within it. And also a curious factoid about skiing competitions which lines up exactly with what I saw.

See you in the funny papers.

Editorial Standards, Pulp Fiction and eHow

I used to have a blog of tips and information for eHow writers.

eHow was an SEO article farm, which specialized in "How To" articles. The articles were "consumer written" -- which meant often by non-writers, or by writers who were hacking out crap just to make money. And there were no actual "editors," only a team who swept through the site after publication, looking for spam and other undesirable articles to delete.

I stumbled across this article in my archives, and I thought, golly, this is really apropos to the discussion of writing quality and editors, etc.


Editorial Standards, Pulp Fiction and eHow

The front page article today on eHow has some typos in it (probably fixed by now). This has prompted much green-eyed discussion (especially among writers who have had articles deleted recently) about how low eHow's standards are.

Don't get me wrong. Scads of typos in the front page "Article of the Day" doesn't look very professional. eHow should at least spend a little editorial time making sure that one article is perfect. It's not like it would cost much.

But eHow is not a slick (i.e. a high end magazine). They don't pay hundreds or even thousands for a front cover article. They don't even have a real editorial staff. eHow is more like a pulp magazine. They're down, they're dirty, and they are focused on giving the readers what they want. Pulps are more pragmatic and less polished. That's just the way it is.

I'll tell you a story I heard from Harlan Ellison to illustrate the point:

Ellison is an amazing, prize-winning short story writer. His stuff is gut-grabbing and literary, but he started in the pulps. He wrote for fractions of pennies per word, so he had to write a lot to make a living, and that volume made him fast and sure. Every word became like the strokes of a chef's knife, pretty only when necessary, but always accurate and to the point.

Now, the editorial needs of a pulp magazine are somewhat different than a fancier, high-paying magazine. They need what they need when they need it. For instance, the magazines would commission their lurid covers well in advance of getting the stories for the magazine. They'd just make up titles and author names, and writers would compete to get to write the stories. Of course, the biggest prize was the cover story itself - the story that matched the glowing yellow cover with the monster and the sexy babe on it.

Harlan tells of one time getting the cover story by luck. He found an editor one day all in a tizzy. The writer for the cover story of the next issue had flaked out on him. He needed a 20,000 word story the very next day, and he had nothing.

Harlan looked at the cover, which featured a giant glowing earthworm tearing the clothes off a buxom woman, and thought about it.

"You know, I've got a giant earthworm story that might fit."

"Great! Can you have to me tomorrow?"

"Gee, I don't know. It's only 18,000 words. I guess I could stay up all night working on it...."

Harlan got the assignment, got the money and glory for writing a featured cover story, and got paid extra for doing the rush job.

The thing is, he didn't have an 18,000 word story about alien worms raping the women of earth. Until he saw the cover, he hadn't even thought about such a story. He just went home and wrote the whole thing from scratch that night, turned it in in the morning and took home his payment and honor.

That story probably wasn't very good. Even with the Ellison touch, it probably would have been rejected by that same editor if it had come in over the transom (i.e., if it had been an unsolicited submission).

But because it was exactly what that client needed at that time, it didn't matter. It got the money and glory anyway.

That's just the nature of the business.

So, when it comes to the front page articles on eHow, let's spend less time being jealous and disdainful, and more time trying to understand just what makes that article so valuable to eHow - our client. Because when it comes down to it, it doesn't matter how professional or not eHow's standards are, our professionalism demands that we understand what they need.


Next Thursday I'll talk about why this is relevant, and also my experiences reading slush and grading student papers.

See you in the funny papers.