wherein Liz talks about beta-reading
Jul. 30th, 2012 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingNFE fic number two is successfully beta'ed and sent back. I am slow but I get there!
...
Tangentially, I'm going to talk about myself as an editor, mostly so I have a post I can point people at in the future.
First, I will always correct any spelling and grammar errors I notice. I can't help it; they are like nails on the chalkboard of my soul, and if I get a chance to fix them I have to take it. (Yes, I do go back and edit one-character typos out of my old journal posts when I catch them. No, I am not in fact obsessive-compulsive. I just come off that way a lot. *sigh*) I will also point out canon errors, assuming I know the canon in question well enough to do so.
But other corrections are... more optional, shall we say. Things like awkward phrasing, paragraph length, epithet and pronoun use, all that jazz. It's always a fine line knowing what to change and what to leave alone as a person's deliberate stylistic choices. What I have found over the years is that I tend to compress long, wibbly-wobbly phrases into something pithier, to join ultra-short paragraphs (say, a sentence of dialogue and a sentence of action, both performed by the same character), and to replace pronouns with proper names to help clarify who is doing what to whom. But I leave commas the hell alone, even though my gut reaction is to root out as many as possible without destroying the rhythm of a sentence. Commas are a very personal thing and while I find them maddening in my own writing (to the point where I have been known to edit them out of stories as much as three years after posting, because they burn, precious, they burn), other people clearly have different attitudes. And that is just fine!
Character interpretations, story flow and plot holes, and other higher-level issues get discussed in actual paragraphs of commentary, because they're too complicated to just offer a fix and move on. Those are the things where I like to point out that there may be an issue on Point X, here is why I think there's an issue, and here are a handful of suggestions for dealing with the issue. I don't like to be too prescriptive, because after all I am not the person writing the story, and everybody has a slightly different interpretation of canon, not to mention a slightly different idea of what can be assumed and what must be explained in order to connect Point A to Point B, whatever those plot beats are.
My current system is to mark all necessary changes in //red//, mark all "I think it works better this way, but it's up to you!" changes in \\blue\\, and mark my occasional interjected commentary and explanations in [[green]]. Also I write a letter explaining the markup, giving my general reaction to the piece, and discussing higher-level issues. The better I know the person, the more comfortable I am at including blue and green stuff and going into detail in the letter -- partly because I am less worried they will flip out if I correct more than the bare essentials, and partly because if I've read their previous work, I have a better feel for their style and interpretation of canon.
I don't beta-read often, because it's a lot of work to read a story in critical mode without being allowed to just jump in, tear it up, and put it back together the way I hack at my own stuff. (You should see some of my rough drafts after I go at them with the Editing Pen of Death. Red everywhere.) Also, when I'm editing someone else, I have to explain myself, which is obviously unnecessary when I'm dissecting my own story. Explaining my suggested changes can take a long time, depending on the depth of the problems. For example, in high school I once edited an essay my friend Ryan wrote for AP English. His paper was three pages long. My edits ran six pages. He gave me shit about that for months. (To be fair, I gave him equal amounts of shit for writing an essay so disorganized that I needed to write six pages of corrections and suggested changes.)
...
In summary, editing is complicated, yo. And now I should get back to writing my own story.
...
Tangentially, I'm going to talk about myself as an editor, mostly so I have a post I can point people at in the future.
First, I will always correct any spelling and grammar errors I notice. I can't help it; they are like nails on the chalkboard of my soul, and if I get a chance to fix them I have to take it. (Yes, I do go back and edit one-character typos out of my old journal posts when I catch them. No, I am not in fact obsessive-compulsive. I just come off that way a lot. *sigh*) I will also point out canon errors, assuming I know the canon in question well enough to do so.
But other corrections are... more optional, shall we say. Things like awkward phrasing, paragraph length, epithet and pronoun use, all that jazz. It's always a fine line knowing what to change and what to leave alone as a person's deliberate stylistic choices. What I have found over the years is that I tend to compress long, wibbly-wobbly phrases into something pithier, to join ultra-short paragraphs (say, a sentence of dialogue and a sentence of action, both performed by the same character), and to replace pronouns with proper names to help clarify who is doing what to whom. But I leave commas the hell alone, even though my gut reaction is to root out as many as possible without destroying the rhythm of a sentence. Commas are a very personal thing and while I find them maddening in my own writing (to the point where I have been known to edit them out of stories as much as three years after posting, because they burn, precious, they burn), other people clearly have different attitudes. And that is just fine!
Character interpretations, story flow and plot holes, and other higher-level issues get discussed in actual paragraphs of commentary, because they're too complicated to just offer a fix and move on. Those are the things where I like to point out that there may be an issue on Point X, here is why I think there's an issue, and here are a handful of suggestions for dealing with the issue. I don't like to be too prescriptive, because after all I am not the person writing the story, and everybody has a slightly different interpretation of canon, not to mention a slightly different idea of what can be assumed and what must be explained in order to connect Point A to Point B, whatever those plot beats are.
My current system is to mark all necessary changes in //red//, mark all "I think it works better this way, but it's up to you!" changes in \\blue\\, and mark my occasional interjected commentary and explanations in [[green]]. Also I write a letter explaining the markup, giving my general reaction to the piece, and discussing higher-level issues. The better I know the person, the more comfortable I am at including blue and green stuff and going into detail in the letter -- partly because I am less worried they will flip out if I correct more than the bare essentials, and partly because if I've read their previous work, I have a better feel for their style and interpretation of canon.
I don't beta-read often, because it's a lot of work to read a story in critical mode without being allowed to just jump in, tear it up, and put it back together the way I hack at my own stuff. (You should see some of my rough drafts after I go at them with the Editing Pen of Death. Red everywhere.) Also, when I'm editing someone else, I have to explain myself, which is obviously unnecessary when I'm dissecting my own story. Explaining my suggested changes can take a long time, depending on the depth of the problems. For example, in high school I once edited an essay my friend Ryan wrote for AP English. His paper was three pages long. My edits ran six pages. He gave me shit about that for months. (To be fair, I gave him equal amounts of shit for writing an essay so disorganized that I needed to write six pages of corrections and suggested changes.)
...
In summary, editing is complicated, yo. And now I should get back to writing my own story.
