Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

This year at YeahWrite our free workshop focuses on everything BUT the writing, with an editorial series that’ll take the words right out of your mouth and put them on the page. Of course, we’re also including some tips on writing so that the eventual edits to your story won’t be the heartbreaking kind where you have to remove an entire character or plot arc and re-evaluate every interaction in your 300,000 word novel.

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 speaking of navigation, don’t worry: our Navigating Prompts workshop from last year hasn’t gone anywhere. You still have a handy tool to refer to when you’re stumped by a prompt or need help on how to approach it or what judges might be thinking as they read your story.

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month (usually on the Second Sunday) 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.

October is the scariest month

When we sat down in 2021 and mapped out the Scarlet Quill Society’s yearlong structure, there was a debate about what to do for October. And it all came down to “what’s the spookiest subject in editing” and we finally agreed that this was it. Line editing and copyediting. These are the most difficult edits to get right, and the most noticeable when you get them wrong. And what’s scarier than that? 

Before we get into this month’s tricks and treats, let’s spend a few seconds talking about what line editing and copyediting (and proofreading) are. Because even though here we are, nearly through the year, this is what most people are thinking about when they say “can you edit my work?”

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. At this point grammar is cleaned up, style is smoothed out, and sentence and paragraph structure is revised for clarity. Writing is tightened up and unnecessary digressions are deleted. Your line editor is the person who will murder your darlings for you.

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.

In other words, a structural or developmental edit (remember those?) is “does this need to be reorganized to make sense and does everything belong here, or do you have huge conceptual holes” but a line edit is “does this make sense as written or does it ramble or need support” and a copyedit is “did you just use the word finally three times in three sentences?” Proofreading is “did you spell finally wrong and use two periods?” We’ll be dealing with proofreading (and other finishing touches) next month, so we’re going to focus on the first two this month even though as you do them you’ll catch proofing errors and should fix those.

Tricks

In the spirit of tricks before treats, let’s start out by talking about some common misconceptions people have about the job of a line editor or copyeditor. In other words, we’re putting the don’ts before the dos. That’s because these principles are some of the most important principles in editing, and you should be familiar with them before you ever pick up your red pen.

You are not here to change the writer’s ideas.

The writer is entitled to their thesis, their plot, and their narrative structure. Your job is to make this piece of writing the best example of that thesis, plot, or structure it can be. To make the characters come through as true to what the writer wants as they can be. Your job is not to agree with the story or thesis, nor is it to make substantial changes to the characters.

That said…

You have a right as an editor to point out ways in which a writer’s work evokes or perpetuates harm. You can absolutely offer alternative suggestions for that. And if the writer doesn’t want to make those changes or to get a sensitivity reader in to examine things that are raising red flags for you but that you don’t feel competent to handle, you have the right to walk away from the project while being paid proportional to the time you have put in on it. Ultimately, though, the writer’s name – not yours – is going on those ideas and they will be the ones responsible for the fallout from them. (There’s a side issue here for people doing sensitivity reads- you can request that your name be taken off the project or never used, and note that a condition of your walkaway is that if they want to use those ideas fine but if they say “I hired Rowan as my sensitivity reader” when challenged later, you have the right to defend yourself without having to worry about violating any confidentiality agreements.)

You are not here to change the writer’s voice.

Forget what your grade seven English teacher told you. There is no objectively correct way to use the English language. It’s fine to start a sentence with and or because. It’s ok to use the habitual tense (she be going). The catch? It has to be on purpose. Voice is the way in which authors break the rules of the English language to sound more like themselves. Your job as an editor is to help them do that in a way that makes it look deliberate rather than accidental. There’s a big difference between your average runon sentence and James Joyce.

If the author no longer sounds like themself, even if the grammar is technically correct, you haven’t done your job well. It’s possible to edit a writer entirely out of their own work, and that does no-one any favors.

Note: if the author is writing in dialect (even if it’s just for some dialogue and not the narration) and you can’t parse the dialect comfortably, your job as a good editor is to refer that to someone who is competent to work in that dialect.

This one’s hard without an example, so here you go. That’s a nice scholarly discussion of AAE in linguistics and how it’s constructed appropriately. You want more? Listen to how Michael Harriot breaks rules to sound exactly the way he wants to. Or L. Frank Baum. There’s a reason human translators are still in demand; AIs can’t quite capture the nuance of voice yet, even if they’re able to convey meaning. One of your most important jobs is to preserve voice, to make the writer sound the most like themself possible, while still factoring in the reader’s need for consistency in grammar and spelling.

You are not here to make this the best story you think it can be

This one’s a little counterintuitive, but it builds on the last two tricks. See, your best story or essay isn’t this writer’s best story or essay. If you make it “better” but less like them and what they’re trying to do, you’ve actually made it worse. Make sense? The writer is the one who has to talk about “where did you get your ideas” and defend “why did this character act that way” and they’re much less able to do that if you’ve superimposed your own ideas or constructions onto the project. Remember, by this point the work should have had at least two pairs of eyes on it already (the writer and their betas/sensitivity readers/dev editors) and it’s pretty close to the shape the writer wants it in. Your job is to make it more effective at being that thing no matter how much you might think it would be better if it were a different thing.

Not all work is as ready for a line edit or copyedit as the author thinks

This is kind of a trick for the author, not for you as editor. If you’re line editing and copyediting and things are VERY out of order or incomprehensible or there are giant plot holes, it’s ok for you to point those out and stop working. You should still get paid for the work you’ve put in, but absolutely if there are still issues that should have been caught at a structural edit level, it’s ok to say “this doesn’t need a line edit yet and that would be a waste of time and money. Let’s stop and kick this back to your dev editor, or wait for another round of beta reads, so that it can get to where it needs to be for a line edit to make sense.” Remember, at this stage of work you are changing things at a word and sentence and paragraph level, and it’s a huge waste to do that if the author has to discard or rewrite those sections to have a functional story.

So the trick for you? Don’t be afraid to pull the plug. Stop, back up. If the work still needs dev edits or a sensitivity read or even a complete rewrite, identify that EARLY and hand it back. It can come to you when it’s ready for you. And if the author insists that it just needs a copyedit and it’s done? You need to decide if you need the money more than you need your reputation for high-quality output. You might. We won’t judge that choice. But get in writing that you said the work needs more than a copyedit and the author told you to limit your scope of work, because we’ve pretty much never seen this NOT backfire on the editor. Ugh. We want you, your authors, and their works to be as successful as possible, and sometimes that means hitting restart on the editorial cycle.

Treats

So now that you have your goals clearly in mind and the scope of your work established, and a piece in front of you that’s truly ready for a line edit or copyedit (or some combination of the two), what do you do? Here are some treats of the trade to help you out:

What’s my job again?

Now that we’ve overwhelmed you with what your job isn’t, let’s talk about what it is.

Line Editor

As we said above, “By the time a piece is ready for line edits most structural issues should have been addressed. At this point grammar is cleaned up, style is smoothed out, and sentence and paragraph structure is revised for clarity. Writing is tightened up and unnecessary digressions are deleted.”

Your job as a line editor is to spot those sentences that don’t make sense and fix them. You’re also reading for whether information is presented before the reader needs it. Are characters fully introduced when they’re met (or at least, as much as the reader needs them to be) or do they just show up and everyone’s using their name and the reader doesn’t know who they are, then later there’s a full introduction of “my brother, Mako” that makes no sense where it is? If a character starts a scene wearing silk, do they finish it by taking off their cotton shirt?

You should be making sure that the work is readable within the rules of its own voice. That is, get grammar as good as you can without losing the author’s unique voice. Breaks with the rules of grammar should sound deliberate and consistent, not like the writer doesn’t know any better (for example, long complicated sentences that meander through fields of punctuation can be an author’s voice, but a runon with a comma splice almost never is).

Where a dev editor is more likely to leave comments and flags for the author to fix, line editors turn on track changes or suggestion mode and do it themselves. The line editor is the person responsible for consistency throughout the piece. If a work has more than one author, the line editor is the one responsible for the edits to make it sound like one person was writing (with a very few exceptions, such as POV-shifting stories where the narrative shift marks an entirely new voice).

Copyeditor (or copy editor)

Copyeditors, your job is determining whether that should be one or two words. Not even joking. A copyeditor is responsible for the final smoothing-out of the piece and minor corrections. Running spellcheck and taking out double spaces after periods are jobs for this stage. And then the proofreader will inevitably find some spots you missed but do your best to leave a completely clean copy behind you. As with the line editor, the copyeditor should return the manuscript with changes tracked so that the author can see what changes were necessary. At this point you’re finding extra “the”s and checking whether dialogue is correctly punctuated (making sure that dialogue is clear and the reader can see who’s talking is a line editor’s job–see the difference?). You’re checking for spacing around em dashes, and you’re the final doublecheck on grammar.

A copyeditor is still more than a proofreader, of course. By this point in our series you should see that each editor’s work cleans up anything the last stage of editing missed, and then adds their layer. So if you see necessary line edits go ahead and make a few. But if the whole piece needs line editing, you should be getting paid for line editing, not copyediting (even if you’re getting paid in cupcakes). (Now I want cupcakes.)

Spoilers: Most authors hand their work to an editor thinking that it just needs a light copyedit. Most work needs more than a light copyedit. As always, tap out early and loudly or, if you’re positioned to expand your scope of work, check in with the author and let them know that in your opinion the work needs [this other type of edit that the work needs] and this is what it would cost to do that.

Make and use a style guide!

The thing that will make your life easier at the line and copy editing stages is a style guide. That way you know if the changes you’re making are “correct” for the work you’re editing. Some writing already has a style guide attached. If you’re looking at an article for journal publication, it will have to adhere to the style used by the journal (often, but not always, APA). If you’re looking at a newspaper article, it should probably be in AP style. YeahWrite (mostly) uses CMoS. But what does all this mean? What is a style guide? And why do you want one?

A style guide ensures that a work has consistent voice, vocabulary, grammar, and usage.

Style guides are great for telling you whether that serial comma (the one before “and usage”) should be used, but they’re also useful for fantasy novels so you can make sure you spell Daenerys Targaryen correctly every time, or remember which characters come from which locations so that their anecdotes about their childhood have the correct settings. They can be as formal as one of the style guides linked in the first paragraph of this section or as informal as a google doc with brief notes to self like “Anna never uses contractions in speech” and “all color descriptions should use types of stone as comps.”

Making a style guide is much easier than holding these ideas all in your head while you edit 100K words of manuscript. You can make one yourself, agree on one with the author, or ask for a list of important style things (super technical term there) so that you can keep it nearby as you work.

Some things you might want in your style guide:

• What’s capitalized that wouldn’t ordinarily be?
• Are we using semicolons or em dashes preferentially?
• How are names spelled?
• Are you using italics to indicate words or phrases not in the work’s primary language?
• How do characters speak?
• How old is each character?
• And anything else you don’t want to have to look up every time it comes up in the text, but that is unique to this work.

You can even get as granular as making a list of what characters are wearing.

**a note on conscious language**

Style guides are a great place to keep reminders like “don’t use food words to describe POC” as well as the more purely technical aspects of the work you’re looking at. As an editor you should familiarize yourself with conscious language and usage and probably have a personal style guide that you add to as issues come up, so that you can help authors present their best selves and easiest to engage with work. Something like this can be a good start. It looks overwhelming at first, like most significant style guides, but just knowing it’s there and you can look things up when they’re relevant to your work? Super useful. Then you make the Cliff’s Notes version for yourself to keep close at hand. Don’t forget to update!

In conclusion…

Hopefully by this point in the year you have a solid grasp not just of what editing a work might entail, but of who is responsible for each step. So this is probably the best time to remind you that not every work needs every single editing step to be isolated and formalized. Some editors can slide easily between roles. Some authors turn out first drafts that barely need more than a line edit to be print-ready and can skip most of the middle steps. Identifying what editing a work needs is as valuable a skill as being able to do the edits. Confused about any of this? Meet us online midmonth when we get our editing nerd hats on with a special guest or two!  

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 on the (usually; we’ll warn you!) second Sunday of every month at 2:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time. This month’s meeting will take place on Sunday, October 9.

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: Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors!
• $3 monthly subscription: Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors!

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.

Rules of Order. Order of Rules. Something like that.

Wondering what the next meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society will be about? Here's our club agenda for the year.

September:

• Read: Editing nonfiction: how much is enough?
• Watch: September meeting

October:

• Read: Line- and copyediting: getting picky
• Watch: October meeting

November:

• Read: Finishing touches and final checklists: more than just spellcheck!
• Watch: November meeting

December:

• Read: DIWhy? what you can (and can't) do yourself
• 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

About the author:

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

About the author: