On Editing IV

So the Deverry Cycle has officially jumped the shark for me. Admittedly, it was going down hill since book three, but I stubbornly kept pushing forward against my better judgement. While I still have two more books in the current arc to get through, and I’ll mostly likely read them for closure, I will be stopping there. I will say though, it’s a testament to how good of a writer Katharine Kerr is that I even got this far. Usually, I won’t read these longer series because I know they’re going to devolve around the third book, but Kerr kept me coming back. And I think that’s the most disappointing part of all this, there was so much potential with this series. The concept was interesting, the prose was great, and even though I could tell she had no real plot, there was nuggets of something and a promise of something that just kept me going. It was very obvious that a lot of good editing went into the first two books and then started to deteriorate. By the sixth book, I questioned if there was any editing being done at all. Which brings me to my final point, there is no good writing without good editing and writers cannot edit their own work.

The worst part is that with the industry being the way it is, very little editing is getting done and a lot of writers feel like they have to do the edits themselves. Freelance editing costs an arm and a leg with no guarantee that the editor will be worth their salt. In fact, I’d argue most people who call themselves editors are not. Editing is not just knowing grammar and finding plot holes, editing is being able to comprehensively critique a piece of work to make it better. For example, Ford Rayburn is a pulp, military thriller. One of the rules of pulp stories is the heroes cannot kill defenseless villains. They have to try to bring them to justice. I had a to rewrite a scene after my editor pointed out I had my hero kill a villain execution style. I thought since this villain was particularly evil and more beast than man, it was allowed. But after talking it over I realized, my editor was right. I now am very conscientious of the body count in my book. the heroes cannot draw their weapons on defenseless men, and almost always have to be attacked first to kill. There is the one exception of faceless mooks, they’re of course cannon fodder. But would anyone have faulted the hero for killing that particular villain in the original draft? No, but it degraded the character and I kept finding myself putting him in more and more degrading situations until he was becoming morally gray and I was having to resolve situations that shouldn’t have arisen at all.

I am only as a good as I am because of my editor. Without him…well let’s just say there are a lot of half-finished novels lying around the house that now embarrass me to no end. I will never assume I don’t need my editor, no matter how much experience I garner. Because there is the reality that the more I work with my editor, the more I can anticipate his complaints and write accordingly. Most of his criticisms are rules I should abide by, so there could be the argument that once I learn the rules, why do I need to be ‘babysat’ as it were? Because why else did the Deverry Cycle fall apart? Answer: lack of editing. An experienced author should be easier to edit, not need no editing at all. But realistically, the better I get at writing, the more reliant I become on my editor as I realize just how much I don’t know, and how much much I can only see from my own perspective. A writer is only as good as their editor, and with so many books being badly edited, or not edited at all, is it any wonder the publishing industry has degraded? And it has degraded, mark my words. Because there’s one other point to be made…