Copy editing
Just for the hell of it, I went back to the Harry Potter for Grownups list and and spent way, way too much time digging out this old message I sent to the list from the archives because I wanted to have it for my records, and I decided to post here because I thought people who want to learn about the process of how books are created might find it interesting.
What prompted this message was the discussion about the priori incantatum error that J.K. Rowling let slip into Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was subsequently changed in later editions (reversing the order in which the ghosts of Harry's parents came out of the wand during the fight with Voldemort). What follows is the snip of the message I was responding to, and my answer:
> Just wanted to say that I am in no way trying to imply that you're
> not telling the truth Penny, it's just that I find that hard to
> believe.
> I would like to see this from JKR if it was indeed meant to be
> corrected. What I mean is that the whole chapter is undermined if it
> says that "Harry knew it was his mother b/c she was the one he had
> thought of more than any other that night." He DID NOT think of his
> mother that night, he thought of his father, and the story doesn't
> make sense anyother way, in my not so humble opinon.
> Lastly I agree with the person who said that this type of mistake can
> undermine the credibility of an author.
>
Okay, I think I should chime in here as possibly one of the only people on this list who has ever seen a book shepherded from manuscript to print (am I right?)
You have to realize it's not just the author, and it's not just a monolithic publisher. It's the author, and the author's word processing software, and the editor and the copy editor, and the book designer and the typesetter, and the software they use for spellchecking, and the software program they used to translate it to because they don't have the same word processing software that the author uses . . .
Jo works differently than I do, I understand: she writes her first draft longhand. I type directly on my computer and do rolling revision, meaning, I just keep reworking and reworking a scene, writing directly over what has been written before. I keep a dump file for each chapter, and if I cut something big, I put it there, so if I need to reconstruct something or I change my mind and decide I will use a bit later, I can find it.
When you change your mind on a big plot thingummy, you have to make a mental note about all the other things in the plot this affects and remember to change them, too. Say you decide to change what character X is wearing, not only do you have to change it in the scene, but you have to go back to the earlier scene where you described the character getting dressed and fix that, too. And you can miss them. Sometimes you just throw something in, and you forget all about it and write two hundred and fifty more pages and then decide, "I'll make Lady Isabella's eyes blue"--forgetting that you declared them to be a ravishing emerald green when you wrote that earlier scene six months ago.
Then, let's say, like Jo, you miss your deadline. Suddenly, you're short on sleep. And when you re-read the damn thing, the words dance on the paper in front of your eyes because you've read it fifty times before, and what you've written and what you've erased and what you intended to write and what you've forgotten about and what you still intend to fix but haven't gotten around to fixing jumble about in your head, and so you miss things.
You send the Ms off to the publisher, and then you wait and chew your nails. Finally, the editor sends you back the revision requests. You take forty-eight hours for your blood pressure to subside, and then you read her letter again, decide she's four-fifths right, and why didn't you ever see that, but you will NOT give on the last one-fifth, and so you call your editor and have a phone conference and finally hammer out that you'll change three keys scenes, but that means you'll have to write a new chapter two, and while you're at it, you can clear up those discrepancies about your hero's family history and change the younger brother's girlfriend to the reporter's cousin.
You send the manuscript back to the publisher, both hard copy and on disk, and she finally gets back to you and says she's accepting it. Huzzah! You open some champagne and celebrate. [You should realize, of course, that the final check you've been expecting won't show up for six months, because of that contract change you signed eight months ago that your agent sent you, changing your payment schedule from 1/3 upon outline; 1/3 upon final draft; 1/3 upon publication to 1/3 upon signing, 1/3 upon first draft; 1/3 upon final draft but no one forwarded the changed contract to the accounting department, so when you call and ask your editor "where's my check?" she sends a note to accounting saying, "Pay her what we still owe her," and the accounting department looks up the old contract and say, "We've already paid her everything we owe her," not realizing that they haven't, and this isn't figured out till five months later. But I digress.]
Anyway, eventually, the copy editor sends the manuscript back, marked up for the typesetter, with a whole list of queries, and they want you to look the whole six hundred pages of manuscript over with a fine tooth comb, and they need it back in New York in three days. You pay the express shipping charges, of course. I personally read both copyedit manuscript and typeset galleys BACKWORDS -- word by word. That way the meaning of what you are reading doesn't trip you up, and you see things with a new eye. And you realize -- hey, do I want to say door frame or doorframe? If I make it two words, what should I do about windowsill? Should that be two words, too? Should I say "was" or "were" here? Is that the subjunctive mood? You pull out your grammar handbooks. You pull out your editing handbooks. You read the copyeditor's queries and realize "Good god, that's an enormous plot hole! I never thought of that! What should I do about it?" You tear your hair out. You call the editor and say, another week, please? "No way," your editor says. "You've got the March slot, and if we let it slip . . ." she lets the threat hang in the air. You hang up the phone, cravenly giving in, and make another pot of coffee and curse.
Finally, you finish and send the copyedit off and just when you think you're free again, you get the printed galleys back (the book as typeset) and you're told to go through it again. And it has to be back to the publisher in three days to a week. Omigod--did you get that copyright permission lined up for that epigram you used as a chapter opener? The type is so close together. How can you read it? You're going blind. You read it backwards. Again. If you hurry, will you have enough time to go through it twice? Those spaces after the periods--is that the right amount of space, or is a space missing, and how can you tell if you've never seen this typeset font before? Why is that word spelled that way? You know you didn't spell it that way. It's not spelled that way on your manuscript, and the copyeditor made no changes to it. And you gave the editor the book on disk, so there's no excuse for this! Weren't they going to set the book directly from your disk? You call your editor, who explains that they run a spellchecker which routinely changes words without asking for anyone's permission. But you didn't spell anything wrong. The spellchecker took your perfectly spelled word and turned it into a different perfectly spelled word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence. It did that same change everywhere throughout the book. Are you sure you caught all of them? You have your style handbook, your grammar reference guide, your dictionary, your thesaurus (did you really use the word "ringing" THREE times in that one paragraph?) your two volume Oxford English Dictionary with the magnifying glass to help you read the itty bitty type, lots of pencils and erasers, your guide to typesetter's marks, your fat volume of character notes, the previous draft of the book, your previous book to check for continuity errors, your xerox of the marked up copyedited version (you DID keep a xerox, didn't you?), the typesetter's notes, your answers to copyeditor's queries (you did keep a copy of those, didn't you? Did the typesetter catch them all?), the editor's original revision letter, and your own notes for last minute revision all within arm's reach. Don't forget you can't make too many changes to the typeset version. That gets expensive! You curse and cry some more. If anyone talks to you, you snarl at them. Your spouse shoves sandwiches in through the office door and continually stokes the coffeepot, and your children avoid you.
I may be exaggerating a little, but not by much.
I have a friend whose book schedule went all awry, necessitating rushing the book into print with many errors because it hadn't been properly copyedited because the copyeditor who had her manuscript had a psychotic break and they found him wandering around talking to himself in Central Park, and by the time they got her manuscript retrieved from his apartment it was too late to do anything but a rush job (she sometimes jokes that she wonders whether it was her book that pushed him over the edge). I have had friends who had their books put in print, in error, from the PREVIOUS version of the book. I've mentioned before that I lost a whole moon in my first novel. I saw the cover and groused about how I hadn't put a moon in my world, damnit-and then re-read the first chapter, which I'd read a million times, and there, dagnabit was the moon I'd put in that I'd forgotten all about.
And I didn't have several million people waiting with bated breath for my next book, and I didn't have an editor who KNEW I had those million people waiting for my next book.
So . . . yeah, I can understand how errors can get introduced. Believe me, I do.
What prompted this message was the discussion about the priori incantatum error that J.K. Rowling let slip into Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was subsequently changed in later editions (reversing the order in which the ghosts of Harry's parents came out of the wand during the fight with Voldemort). What follows is the snip of the message I was responding to, and my answer:
> Just wanted to say that I am in no way trying to imply that you're
> not telling the truth Penny, it's just that I find that hard to
> believe.
> I would like to see this from JKR if it was indeed meant to be
> corrected. What I mean is that the whole chapter is undermined if it
> says that "Harry knew it was his mother b/c she was the one he had
> thought of more than any other that night." He DID NOT think of his
> mother that night, he thought of his father, and the story doesn't
> make sense anyother way, in my not so humble opinon.
> Lastly I agree with the person who said that this type of mistake can
> undermine the credibility of an author.
>
Okay, I think I should chime in here as possibly one of the only people on this list who has ever seen a book shepherded from manuscript to print (am I right?)
You have to realize it's not just the author, and it's not just a monolithic publisher. It's the author, and the author's word processing software, and the editor and the copy editor, and the book designer and the typesetter, and the software they use for spellchecking, and the software program they used to translate it to because they don't have the same word processing software that the author uses . . .
Jo works differently than I do, I understand: she writes her first draft longhand. I type directly on my computer and do rolling revision, meaning, I just keep reworking and reworking a scene, writing directly over what has been written before. I keep a dump file for each chapter, and if I cut something big, I put it there, so if I need to reconstruct something or I change my mind and decide I will use a bit later, I can find it.
When you change your mind on a big plot thingummy, you have to make a mental note about all the other things in the plot this affects and remember to change them, too. Say you decide to change what character X is wearing, not only do you have to change it in the scene, but you have to go back to the earlier scene where you described the character getting dressed and fix that, too. And you can miss them. Sometimes you just throw something in, and you forget all about it and write two hundred and fifty more pages and then decide, "I'll make Lady Isabella's eyes blue"--forgetting that you declared them to be a ravishing emerald green when you wrote that earlier scene six months ago.
Then, let's say, like Jo, you miss your deadline. Suddenly, you're short on sleep. And when you re-read the damn thing, the words dance on the paper in front of your eyes because you've read it fifty times before, and what you've written and what you've erased and what you intended to write and what you've forgotten about and what you still intend to fix but haven't gotten around to fixing jumble about in your head, and so you miss things.
You send the Ms off to the publisher, and then you wait and chew your nails. Finally, the editor sends you back the revision requests. You take forty-eight hours for your blood pressure to subside, and then you read her letter again, decide she's four-fifths right, and why didn't you ever see that, but you will NOT give on the last one-fifth, and so you call your editor and have a phone conference and finally hammer out that you'll change three keys scenes, but that means you'll have to write a new chapter two, and while you're at it, you can clear up those discrepancies about your hero's family history and change the younger brother's girlfriend to the reporter's cousin.
You send the manuscript back to the publisher, both hard copy and on disk, and she finally gets back to you and says she's accepting it. Huzzah! You open some champagne and celebrate. [You should realize, of course, that the final check you've been expecting won't show up for six months, because of that contract change you signed eight months ago that your agent sent you, changing your payment schedule from 1/3 upon outline; 1/3 upon final draft; 1/3 upon publication to 1/3 upon signing, 1/3 upon first draft; 1/3 upon final draft but no one forwarded the changed contract to the accounting department, so when you call and ask your editor "where's my check?" she sends a note to accounting saying, "Pay her what we still owe her," and the accounting department looks up the old contract and say, "We've already paid her everything we owe her," not realizing that they haven't, and this isn't figured out till five months later. But I digress.]
Anyway, eventually, the copy editor sends the manuscript back, marked up for the typesetter, with a whole list of queries, and they want you to look the whole six hundred pages of manuscript over with a fine tooth comb, and they need it back in New York in three days. You pay the express shipping charges, of course. I personally read both copyedit manuscript and typeset galleys BACKWORDS -- word by word. That way the meaning of what you are reading doesn't trip you up, and you see things with a new eye. And you realize -- hey, do I want to say door frame or doorframe? If I make it two words, what should I do about windowsill? Should that be two words, too? Should I say "was" or "were" here? Is that the subjunctive mood? You pull out your grammar handbooks. You pull out your editing handbooks. You read the copyeditor's queries and realize "Good god, that's an enormous plot hole! I never thought of that! What should I do about it?" You tear your hair out. You call the editor and say, another week, please? "No way," your editor says. "You've got the March slot, and if we let it slip . . ." she lets the threat hang in the air. You hang up the phone, cravenly giving in, and make another pot of coffee and curse.
Finally, you finish and send the copyedit off and just when you think you're free again, you get the printed galleys back (the book as typeset) and you're told to go through it again. And it has to be back to the publisher in three days to a week. Omigod--did you get that copyright permission lined up for that epigram you used as a chapter opener? The type is so close together. How can you read it? You're going blind. You read it backwards. Again. If you hurry, will you have enough time to go through it twice? Those spaces after the periods--is that the right amount of space, or is a space missing, and how can you tell if you've never seen this typeset font before? Why is that word spelled that way? You know you didn't spell it that way. It's not spelled that way on your manuscript, and the copyeditor made no changes to it. And you gave the editor the book on disk, so there's no excuse for this! Weren't they going to set the book directly from your disk? You call your editor, who explains that they run a spellchecker which routinely changes words without asking for anyone's permission. But you didn't spell anything wrong. The spellchecker took your perfectly spelled word and turned it into a different perfectly spelled word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence. It did that same change everywhere throughout the book. Are you sure you caught all of them? You have your style handbook, your grammar reference guide, your dictionary, your thesaurus (did you really use the word "ringing" THREE times in that one paragraph?) your two volume Oxford English Dictionary with the magnifying glass to help you read the itty bitty type, lots of pencils and erasers, your guide to typesetter's marks, your fat volume of character notes, the previous draft of the book, your previous book to check for continuity errors, your xerox of the marked up copyedited version (you DID keep a xerox, didn't you?), the typesetter's notes, your answers to copyeditor's queries (you did keep a copy of those, didn't you? Did the typesetter catch them all?), the editor's original revision letter, and your own notes for last minute revision all within arm's reach. Don't forget you can't make too many changes to the typeset version. That gets expensive! You curse and cry some more. If anyone talks to you, you snarl at them. Your spouse shoves sandwiches in through the office door and continually stokes the coffeepot, and your children avoid you.
I may be exaggerating a little, but not by much.
I have a friend whose book schedule went all awry, necessitating rushing the book into print with many errors because it hadn't been properly copyedited because the copyeditor who had her manuscript had a psychotic break and they found him wandering around talking to himself in Central Park, and by the time they got her manuscript retrieved from his apartment it was too late to do anything but a rush job (she sometimes jokes that she wonders whether it was her book that pushed him over the edge). I have had friends who had their books put in print, in error, from the PREVIOUS version of the book. I've mentioned before that I lost a whole moon in my first novel. I saw the cover and groused about how I hadn't put a moon in my world, damnit-and then re-read the first chapter, which I'd read a million times, and there, dagnabit was the moon I'd put in that I'd forgotten all about.
And I didn't have several million people waiting with bated breath for my next book, and I didn't have an editor who KNEW I had those million people waiting for my next book.
So . . . yeah, I can understand how errors can get introduced. Believe me, I do.