 Short Stories: November 07, 2018 Issue [#9213] |
This week: Developmental or Line Edits? Edited by: Jay's debut novel is out now!  
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This Issue:
Developmental or Line Edits?
When you sell a short story, what happens next? EDITING! Here are some common types of edits you may encounter.
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Now that I've finally finished edits for my authors in this upcoming anthology, I thought I would talk about how we processed all the pieces we worked on for this project, once we selected our preliminary lineup and sent out all the rejections (bummer) and started to prepare for the bigger picture, since we had a theme element and a core concept for each of our authors to work around and we want to make sure that the stories not only look great and read cleanly, but that they also do well to represent our theme.
My co-editor and I divvied up our stacks of stories, as we each had a few that we took point on shepherding through and a few that were more or less unanimous choices to split up. Once we had those set up, our first round focused on developmental edits, with other changes pending at the line edit stage.
If you haven't gone through the editorial process before, it can be hard to picture how it works, so I thought I'd spend a little time delineating these stages. Most people assume that short fiction for professional publication goes through a minimal copy edit and then gets pasted into place in a magazine--and that can be true! Some writers have extremely clean work that is very polished, but for many of us writers, the different phases of editing offer a lot of opportunities to polish your work even beyond the beta reading and reviewing or critiquing phases before a story goes out on submission.
Developmental editing is where all your big-picture story elements go: is the viewpoint as clear as possible? Are all the core thematic elements in place? Does the reader need more information earlier in the story to help later parts of the story make more sense? Is there an unintended problematic plot twist that needs ironing out? Are there plot holes you missed in your last revision?
Even stories that sell to professional magazines and anthologies can still have these kinds of problems, so it's not a failure to receive a developmental edit pass from your editor--far from it!
Focusing on what the individual elements bring to the whole story is a big part of developmental editing--I like to think of it as the stage where it's easiest to rearrange the furniture, add strong motifs, and give an overall impression of What the Story is About.
Once those things have been refined, the next step!
Line editing is where the larger elements have mostly settled into place--you might still do some rearranging, but this is where your editor hammers out your language choices and knocks out weak words or detail filtering, so that the story is more immersive to the reader. This is were sentences might be evaluated for how they sound, how their rhythm works with the other sentences around them--ie, literally at the line level!
For me, this was the round of editing where I have done the most cheerleading for my authors by picking out good sentences and story elements and lightly adjusting them, rather than having to do all the heavy lifting of developmental editing--even though I consider dev edits a stronger specialty of mine, I think that line edits (sometimes referred to as copy edits, though I think of "copy" as nonfiction--like this newsletter) are one of the places where the right author/editor team can really bring something to life.
While your editor might choose to do some proofreading at this stage as well, it should be noted that proofreading (what most people think of as "editing"!) comes last, after all the structural work is done! That's where the editor divorces their attention from the meaning of the content and looks specifically for stray elements that need to be fixed--misplaced punctuation, misspelled words, etc. This is the part that I usually find the most challenging and leads me to feeling like my eyes are burning out while I'm reading and rereading but not taking in information--it's hard work!
All this, though, is in the service of the story--the author's vision! I know some authors don't like to receive revision requests and it can be hard to hear that even though you've sold your story it still requires a lot of work. Trust me, though--the editor is on your side and really wants your story to be the best version of itself it can be! (And that's what your editor is for.)
Until next time,
Take care and Write on!
Jay |
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No questions to answer this time!
If you have any questions after this little rundown of editing processes--or anything else about short story craft, publishing, editing, you name it--let me know and I might address it in a future newsletter topic or in the Q&A section right here! |
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