On Editing II
Lately I’ve been rereading The Deverry Cycle by Katharine Kerr. I read the first two and half books (out of sixteen) when I was eighteen. My tastes back then were not very discerning, and normally I would have devoured the entire series that year, and in truth, I had the next three books in the series on my bedside table ready to go. But in the middle of the third book the author committed character assassination, and while I skipped around in book four, and read the first few pages of book five, I could not forgive such an egregious sin. Now that I am rereading, I’m realizing she butchered these characters and plot all the way back in book one, and I’m now enjoying the story as a trashy fantasy entry, one I can shut off my brain and enjoy. Did I mention this series was started in the eighties?
I think we’ll all familiar with books that exist for content reasons alone. The romance genre on a whole falls into this category, but for a long time fantasy and sci-fi were that way too. Still are…I don’t know when it was decided that these genres had more merit than generic entertainment. I guess one could make the argument about Tolkien and Herbert (though I wouldn’t), but reality is from the get-go a lot of these books were churned out to make a fast buck with very little regard to content or grammatical editing. And that would be fine if that was understood by everyone involved. Publishers would often look for quantity over quality when it came to authors, and would spend little to no resources on editing, hence some of the more interesting themes in Stephen King’s It. The problem with this is now we have generational rot. For so long it was about how to churn and burn through books that editing took a backseat, and in my opinion, the publishers who were trained by this heavily corporatized model don’t even realize they don’t know how to edit.
Which brings us back to Harry Potter. By the time the fourth book was published, the series had sold millions of copies. The publisher knew the label alone would sell. Why waste resources like editing and set the publication date back, possibly by a full year, when no one would really care. And therein lies the crux of it all. Editing is hard. Editing takes time. Editing can set timelines back by months or years. And no one seems to really care or notice if something is well edited or not. The deluge of trash in the eighties proves as much. So the publishers get lazy, do a quick grammar pass, and who cares if the content has too many plot holes, no one will notice. And in truth, no one did…
To be continued….