Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

In 2024 YeahWrite’s free workshop is taking you all the places you want to be published — or at least helping you have the best chance possible at getting there. Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And don’t forget to check out the Writing Resources tab up **gestures vaguely upwards** there to find our previous workshop series on prompts and editing (not at the same time).

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.

Let’s get together!

Most descriptions of YeahWrite start with “we’re writers, too.” But are we? Well, yes and no. Yes, in that we write, and in that we are all published authors. No, in that what brought us together falls a little outside the authorial purview. Bear with us, then, as we put on that second hat and talk about why we’re all really here: we have a hard time looking at struggling writing and struggling writers and not offering help. Back in the Dark Ages of Blogging, there wasn’t a lot of help available. And did people even want to make their writing better? More than a decade later, we know the answer to that one is also yes and no. Yes, in that who doesn’t love the dopamine hit of hearing that their work is good? No, in that getting there isn’t fun and it isn’t flattering and it can actually be kind of painful.

But you need to do it. Yes, you. And the funny thing is, you’re probably reading this like “lol they better hope a great writer doesn’t come along and see them saying this” but the joke’s on YOU, friend, because if you’re thinking of a talented, hardworking, engaging, published, readable author? They already know. And their book very likely already has a line in it thanking their editor. 

So take a deep breath, put your pride aside for a minute, and gather round as we talk about finding and working with an editor!

The elephant in the room

Let’s talk about AI and LLMs for a second, because they’re getting a lot of attention right now and it’s important to be clear about what they do and do NOT do. 

Programs that purport to make your writing better do not do that. They can not do that. Whether it’s Grammarly correcting all your sentences to a stunted Grade 8 understanding of how language works, Hemingway counting the words between periods without analyzing what they say, or ChatGPT “writing a story” that you had the idea for but leaving giant plot holes in it, no program is going to make your writing better. 

Automated tools can be useful in some ways: if you’re prone to homophone errors or even just typos, they’ll flag spots where an error might be occurring. In other ways, they’ll sabotage you: you still need to look up which word is right rather than trusting the program. Ask anyone who didn’t mean to type “ducking.” And if you’re already not sure which witch goes there in their story, the program’s tendency to “correct” the right one to a wrong one is worse than no help at all.

Ultimately, the best use of automated writing tools is a use case where you want to sound the least original, the least like yourself, and the most like a middle class white man trying to describe his workday without insulting his boss. So use the heck out of them at work! Draft that email! Autocomplete that sentence in your estimate to your client! But in applications where you need to sound like yourself or be creative at all, they’re the wrong tool for the job and you need a human being.

This month we’ll talk about how to find the right human being for you. Not every editor is a good fit. Not every editor is competent to improve the thing you’re trying to do with your work. But at the end of the day, they’re all better at it than AI is. (Also, honestly, using AI right now is so fraught in terms of copyright and submissions guidelines that making your work look like AI touched it can hurt your chances of publication, so let’s not.)

So what’s an editor?

An editor is a person, not the author, who reviews a piece of writing with an eye to making it more successful at achieving the author’s intentions. We’ve written about editors before, but here’s a quick refresher on some of the types of edits. This vocabulary is important so that you can describe what you need and find a person who can give it to you.

Developmental or Structural edit – This kind of edit involves organization, major plot or thesis points, and (as the name suggests) the overall structure of the work. This edit doesn’t deal much with grammar or language because the developmental editor will generally be returning the work to the author for restructuring and rewriting. This is where you notice that “the cousin from chapter two turned into an uncle, but neither character was actually in the country when the murder took place so maybe this part of the plot needs to be rebuilt” and maybe skip the difference between “lay” and “laid” other than a reminder note. The one exception is that if the writer has a significant repeating grammatical error like missing articles or verb tense agreement it’s useful to point that out to them so they can be aware of it in the rewrite and save time sand money on later edits.

Sensitivity read – This “edit” isn’t an edit in the traditional sense of the term, but a readthrough by a competent reader who can spot issues with phrasing, characterization, presentation, and problematic tropes. This ideally should happen early in the writing process, before you get so attached to an idea or phrase… or character. When selecting a sensitivity reader, remember that people different from you in one way aren’t different from you in all ways. A person with competence in disability advocacy doesn’t necessarily have competence in racial issues. And a person with competence in issues involving one aspect of race doesn’t have broadband competence in all racial issues (just like you wouldn’t ask someone from New Jersey about the authenticity of a story set in Idaho, or someone from Rajasthan about a story set in Kerala). Sensitivity readers can also help you figure out if this is your story to tell.

Line or Stylistic edit – What most people think of when they think of editing. By the time a piece is ready for line edits most structural issues should have been addressed. A line edit will clean up grammar, smooth out style, and revise sentence and paragraph structure for clarity. Writing is tightened up and unnecessary digressions are deleted. Your line editor is the person who will murder your darlings for you. This is the point at which your style guide first comes into play, too.

Copy edit – Sentence by sentence and word by word analysis of a piece, working for consistency and clarity. This edit usually involves a style guide (does one character never speak in contractions? which names are italicised? which titles are used for alien nobility?). You may need to come up with that style guide for your editor, or they may help you generate one by asking questions as inconsistencies arise in your work.

Proofread – This is the last edit before publication, whether on a blog or in a book. At this stage, the last typos and spelling errors, as well as punctuation and capitalization, are cleaned up. The extra the between the the and the is deleted.

Beta read – A combination of edits done at the same time, usually by a nonprofessional.

Submissions editor – This editor doesn’t edit your work! They evaluate your work and help acquisitions editors reach conclusions about whether your work is appropriate for publication.

…and where do I find one?

A lot of writers seem to still be clinging to the idea that if they can get traditionally published, the house will provide an editor. Why is this a mistake? Well, your piece has to be good enough already to get past the submissions editor. It’s a hard reality of the market, but if your work looks like a lot of, well, work, it’s much less likely to get picked up than if it’s at least somewhat polished and shows what you can do given a chance and a good editor. Yes, the house is likely to have someone else go over your work later, but if you send in a first draft you’re setting yourself up for failure in a very avoidable way.

The natural habitat of the editor is online. You can find them gathered in affinity groups on social media wherever authors hang out. Ask other authors who they use, or do a quick search just as you would for an agent. Look for someone you’d enjoy spending time with, and someone who seems authoritative enough that you’ll trust their feedback (or at least be able to have a productive conversation about things you disagree on). You can also find directories of editors in industry publications, or through groups like the EFA.

And what’s this going to cost me, anyway?

Not five bucks.

And while it might have felt as weird to read that as it did to write it, we have seen five- and ten-dollar edits for sale. It’s not a good deal for you, even if it looks inexpensive: no professional is going to be offering their services for that price, even for a microstory. It simply doesn’t make sense. Another thing we’re seeing in the market right now is offers of low-cost edits with an incredibly tight turnaround time, or edit subscription services, both made possible by LLMs. These AI-enabled editing services are a bad idea for all the reasons we explained above. Even if there’s a human reader “checking” the computer’s work, they’re not getting paid enough to put the time in for a close, thoughtful read. These edits will miss major issues in your work, leaving you worse off than if you hadn’t started them. An AI isn’t going to have the specific value adds of a human reader who will say “it’s weird here that Anna uses slang once and never again in the story” or “if having access to Earth goods is a status marker for this space station, you should consider having replicated or off-earth goods have different names.”

In general, the cost of an edit will depend on four things:

• The length of your work
• The type of work
• The type of edit
• Whether your editor is required to have a specialty

So a 50 page academic paper that requires your editor to be competent in statistical analysis will cost a different amount from a 5 page fantasy story will cost a different amount from a true crime novel will cost… you get the point. In general, expect to pay EFA rates or thereabouts.

But hey it’s 2024 and we’re all sliding down into the pit of capitalism so there are some things you can do to negotiate your rate, whether you’re an author or an editor.

• Consider barter. Especially for beta reads! You can get more eyes on your work if you can trade some of your time and effort for theirs.
• Don’t work for exposure! Do, however, consider the actual value of platforms. 
• Talk about a flat fee for something like short stories rather than a per-page or per-word or per-hour fee, especially if you can bundle several stories together for efficiency.
• Always establish what the actual fee should be at a fair rate before you start bargaining. It’s less likely that people will feel cheated later if you’re making agreed-on departures from an agreed-on amount.
• You not being able to afford something doesn’t make that thing improperly priced.
• For longer works, consider triage. Hit the high points and the things you’re most concerned about, and do your own spellcheck.

What if I just…. skip it?

You know what we said about editors congregating online? Here are some reasons that works have been rejected in the past two-ish years, anecdotally:

• Main character’s name spelled inconsistently – I had no faith in any attention to detail in that work.
• I got three pages in and had already found five typos.
• The verb tenses kept slipping and it made the story impossible to read. I still don’t know if it was any good because I couldn’t get past the first few pages.
• We asked for stories about [redacted location] and got one about [location with a similar name but nothing else in common]. Someone should have caught that early.
• The characters had a lot of inconsistent knowledge about what was supposed to be their own culture and it was pretty easy to tell it was written by an outsider who hadn’t done much research. The whole thing would have had to be rewritten.
• After the first few footnotes were wrong, we just sent it back to be completely redone. I don’t know if it will still be timely when they get it right.
• We got a story that had Track Changes still on and a BUNCH of comments with people’s names, in a submissions process that was supposed to have been anonymous.
• There was one character that was just a glaring racist stereotype and we had enough options that we weren’t going to try to fight the author to take out or change someone who was pretty central to the story, but we definitely weren’t going to publish something with that character in it.

All of these are errors an editor could have saved someone from. And we think you can probably pick out the couple cases where just trading work with another writer would have been enough! 

Convinced yet?

In conclusion…

You can do a lot on your own, but there’s no substitute for having at least one additional pair of competent human eyes on your work. 

Your turn!

Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society. 

Join the Scarlet Quill Society!

Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place once a month. This month’s meeting is still TBD but we’ll let you know when it’s settled ASAP. Stay tuned to our mailing list for the exact date! (Not on our mailing list? Sign up here!) Future dates and times TBD based on member and guest availability, but we’ll try to accommodate as many folks as possible. (Yeah. We know. It’s best to have a fixed time. But we think it’s even better than best to be able to accommodate a diverse slate of exciting and qualified panelists, and we hope you’ll agree.)

You can also sign up for a monthly membership! Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.

• $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session.
• $5 monthly subscription (Pen level): Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where we can discuss tropes in more detail, and your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors! Pen level members can also suggest tropes for future live discussions – our goal is to give you what you want and need!
• $3 monthly subscription (Pencil level): Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded and to the private Discord channel!

A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists. You can also sign up for a $1/month Paper level membership just to show us you love us.

Index

Wondering what the next meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society will be about? Not sure what we've covered already? Here's our club agenda for the year.

September:

• Read:
• Watch: September meeting

October:

• Read:
• Watch: October meeting

November:

• Read:
• Watch: November meeting

December:

• Read:
• Watch: December meeting

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me