How to Make Sure an Editor Meets or Surpasses Your Expectations

By

Tiffany T. Cole, Copy Editor

www.TiffanyTCole.com

My first experience working with a copy editor was terrible. I gave her my short story, and a few days later, she gave a completely rewritten story back to me. I expected the editor to leave comments explaining the changes she’d made, but there were no comments or markups. It didn’t even feel like the story was mine anymore, and I was so upset I refused to work with an editor for years.

Now that I’m an editor, I’m grateful for that experience because it taught me the importance of understanding and respecting an author’s expectations. It also helped me to realize why I had such a terrible experience with that editor. I didn’t ask myself what I expected from an editor nor did I discuss my expectations with the editor.

After figuring out your budget, one of the most important questions you need to ask yourself is “What do I expect from an editor?” Furthermore, you need to answer that question thoroughly before you start your search for an editor. If you hire an editor assuming your expectations are the standard, like I did years ago, and the editor edits your work in such a way that doesn’t meet your expectations, even if the editor did a great job you’ll still be disappointed. By not writing out your expectations and discussing them with an editor, you do both yourself and the editor a disservice.

Below are common expectations as well as my advice for each expectation:

Expectation: I need an editor to help me develop characterization and plot.

If you need developmental help, you’re looking for a heavy copy editor, a substantive editor, or a developmental editor. Otherwise, part of my duties as a copy editor is to keep track of characterization and plot to make sure everything is consistent, and if I notice that something is inconsistent or seems off, I red flag it and offer suggestions to fix it. Not all copy editors offer suggestions, so if you want your copy editor to do so, it’s best to ask.

Expectation: I want the editor to explain all changes outside of basic grammatical and style guide changes OR I don’t want explanations for changes.

I’ve worked with authors who were very hands off and didn’t want me to explain any of my changes. With track changes on, they could see what changes I’d made, and if they didn’t agree with a change I’d made, they could easily reject the change. Furthermore, they found the comments where I explained my changes overwhelming and preferred I only commented if it was absolutely necessary. Others want me to write a comment explaining my changes whenever I make substantial changes to a sentence, paragraph, or scene because they want to understand why I made the change in order to learn from it.

Regardless of which you’re more comfortable with or your reasoning, you should tell the editor ahead of time so they deliver an edit that works best for you.

Expectation: I only need a light grammatical edit.

First, you have to be honest with yourself about if you truly only need a light edit. Many editors will ask for a sample of your work before they start editing it, and whether they provide a complimentary edit or not, from that sample they can tell what type of edit you need.

Usually, when authors come to me saying they only need a light grammatical edit, it’s because their book has already been edited and they just want a second set of eyes to go over their book one final time before they get the book formatted. If all you need is a light edit, a proofreader is who you’re looking for, but most copy editors are capable of completing a light edit.

Expectation: I want to meet in-person or schedule a phone call/video call to discuss my book.

Some authors are comfortable with all conversations, from start to end, taking place through e-mail. Other authors don’t feel comfortable unless they can talk to the editor consistently, usually before the start of the edit, after each round of revisions, and when the edit is completed. If you will need any type of call or in-person meeting to feel comfortable, that is an important conversation you need to have with any editor you’re considering working with.

As long as the meetings are to discuss the book and/or my edits of the book, authors can schedule a complimentary 60-minute meeting with me. For meetings about marketing or building an author platform, authors get one complimentary 60-minute meeting. After that, it’s $60/hour for meetings that are not about editing.

This is not, by any means, an exhaustive list of all the expectations you might have. Your list might contain completely different expectations, and that’s fine. When you’re searching for an editor, present your list to them and ask if they can meet those expectations. If they can’t, that doesn’t make them a bad editor—just not the right editor for you and your book. Keep searching for the editor that can meet your expectations.

Let’s say you give an editor your list and they tell you they can 100% meet your expectations. Before you send them money, the best way to see if their editing style matches your expectations is to ask them to provide an edit of a sample of your book. Oftentimes, 1000 words from the middle of the book is a good choice. If they agree to edit that sample, you can make sure the edit reflects your expectations. If you’re considering more than one editor, it’s also a good plan to give them all the same sample and see how they compare.

I hope this article helps you find an editor who will meet or surpass your expectations! If you want to learn more about how to find an editor for your book, you can come to my panel, “How to Find the Right Editor,” at the 2018 Steel Pen Conference on October 27, 2018, at Fair Oaks Farm Conference Center. You can learn more about me and my services at www.TiffanyTCole.com.

Go to www.steelpenconference.org to learn more about and register for the conference.

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Tiffany T. Cole graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Purdue University Northwest and was inducted into the Alpha Iota Nu chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, an international English honors society. She has over five years of copy editing experience. She’s worked with small publishers, Purdue University’s award-winning newspaper, professors, and authors.

Make Powerful Connections at the 2016 Steel Pen Writers' Conference

by

Tiffany T. Cole

When I was in middle school and high school, I spent a lot of time vicariously living through multiple authors and writing books I would eventually hide in my closet. Every day, I would open a number of tabs and spend a few hours reading authors’ blog posts, especially if the authors’ posts allowed me to peek into their day-to-day lives as full-time writers. One such author whose blog had a huge impact on me was Neil Gaiman. I remember fondly when he talked about the conferences he’d attended when he started writing and the conferences he became a keynote speaker for when his career took off.

Neil Gaiman made it clear that conferences were not only lots of fun but vital, in a myriad of ways, to helping an author succeed. I dreamed of attending these conferences but, because I didn’t have the money or the means, conferences just seemed like another out of reach dream.

Last year, I finally attended two conferences—AWP, which was in Minneapolis, and the 2015 Steel Pen Writers’ Conference. Both were equally exciting, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Steel Pen—a smaller, local conference—had more of an immediate impact on my creative life. I expect that same impact will be prevalent November 12, 2016 at the Radisson Star Hotel in Merrillville, Indiana during this year’s Steel Pen Writers’ Conference.

Steel Pen, which is hosted by the Indiana Writers’ Consortium, is a one-day conference brimming with workshops, panels, manuscript critiques, and networking. There are so many opportunities for writers and poets in all stages of their career. You can sell your books at the bookstore or book fair, have lunch with keynote speaker Cathy Day and the other panelists and attendees, advertise your work in the pamphlet, and apply for a scholarship.

The panels have been carefully chosen to ensure there’s something for everyone. To give you an idea, here are just a few of the session topics:

Writing Effective Dialogue
Marketing Your Book
Getting Published
Working With Editors
Writing Nonfiction, Memoirs, Poetry, and Fiction

Last year, even with fewer options, I felt a genuine connection with the other writers and panelists in each room, something I suspect was because of its local nature. When I talked to others, shared my opinions in workshops, and exchanged information with those who wanted to help me as much as I wanted to help them, it just felt more substantial than it did when interacting with hundreds of people at AWP.

To this day, I can still turn to the authors I met at last year’s conference. I’d like to invite you to this year’s conference in the hopes that you will make as many connections as I have as well as take your career to the next level in the way that going to conferences should.

To learn more about the panels, the scholarships, the keynote speaker, the bookstore and book fair, and how to register, visit http://www.inwriters.org/steel-pen-conference/. Be sure to keep an eye on the Facebook page as well (https://www.facebook.com/steelpenwritersconference/).









Setting Development: How to Breathe Life into Your Settings

by

Tiffany T. Cole

 

I’m a huge fan of Batman. At first I just liked it for the action and the darkness, but the more I watched the movies and cartoons and read the comics, the more I found myself genuinely interested in the characters and the plots, the more I began to look closely at all the elements of Batman that made me enjoy it on a deeper level. Then I realized something that jumped out as powerful to me, something that made me re-evaluate and further appreciate works like Harry Potter and Alice in Wonderland…

Gotham is alive. It’s a living, breathing entity that is as dynamic and important to the story as Batman, the Joker, and all the conflicts. It, in itself, is a character with moods and history, with attitude and layers, and if there were no Gotham, just as if there were no Hogwarts, there would be no Batman.

Unfortunately, of the many stories I’ve edited or even read, I rarely see settings brimming with such life. This isn’t necessarily a problem. Just as some types of stories are better being character-driven while others are better being plot-driven, not all books would work very well with a setting as significant to the plot as the main characters themselves. In fact, with the wrong type of story, that could be detrimental.

Even so, you never want to your settings to be at the total opposite of the spectrum. If the setting matters to the plot at all, if an important scene occurs there, it’s vital to breathe life into the setting.

When editing books, a particularly disorienting problem that I hone in on immediately, next to vagueness and awkwardly written sentences, are scenes where characters are talking or are in the middle of some kind of activity and there’s lots of dialogue and action sentences with little to no description of setting or placement, giving readers an eerie, disorienting feeling that characters are in a blank white space, doing stuff…somewhere.

So, how do you go about bringing you settings to life and developing them as though they are characters? First off, I want to start by saying that I don’t suggest thinking too intensely about settings and getting caught up in details when writing, especially when writing a first draft. Just get the story written first. That’s most important. After and before you write the story, you can better write well-developed settings when you ask the right questions.

·         What kind of scene is taking place in this area? Is it informative, emotional, casual, unimportant? Based on the type of scene, how will characters interact with the setting?

·         What are all the objects in the area? Are there other people in the area? Even if these objects of people play no direct role in the scene(s), is it likely they can interact with the characters. For instance, let’s say the characters are talking at a crowded party. It’s very likely someone might bump into the characters or interrupt to ask them to dance or drunkenly mistake them for someone else. That, or it’s likely the characters in the scene might notice someone or something while talking. Sprinkle in examples here and there to bring the setting to life enough to keep readers realistically privy to the fact that the setting is as alive and dynamic as your characters.

·         How many characters are interacting in the scene? What are their placements? How involved are they in the scene? I remember editing a scene where four characters locked themselves in a school office. Two of the characters got into a heated argument, one rolled their eyes because they were tired of the arguments, and the other got nervous they were going to get caught. This is the perfect scene to bring a setting to life, a scene that I’d have a lot of fun writing. However, the writer got fixated on the two characters who were arguing, and very quickly the nervous character and the irritated character were completely forgotten, so much so I had no idea where they could even be standing or sitting in the room, and the argument became two talking heads and no setting.

Don’t let settings just be flat backdrops where your characters interact. If you bring your settings to life by asking the right questions and letting the settings breathe, you have a story that’s even more dynamic.



Adopting Ideas and Maintaining a Journal

by

Tiffany T. Cole

 

Adopting Ideas

I'm one of those writers who gets more ideas than I can handle. Possibilities and what-ifs are constantly on my mind, and I'm acutely aware that nearly everything I look at and everything I hear has some kind of story if I ask the right questions about whatever features stood out to me. When I walk past a group of people and hear fragments of an animated conversation about something that happened, I automatically fill in the blanks of what I didn’t hear with a what-if story of my own. Similarly, when I see an item that is out of place or unusual, I start asking how and why until a scene emerges.

Sometimes, though, those ideas are too self-contained for me to develop a full story—maybe just a character, scene, or setting. When too many of my ideas are self-contained, I consider adopting ideas in one of three ways:

Nanowrimo's Adopt a Plot Thread

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a writing movement that takes place every November in which people write 50,000 words in 30 days. NaNoWriMo has a writing community that's beneficial all year around, especially if you're just trying to find ideas. The Adopt a Plot thread is viewable even if you're not a member. You can simply scroll through the pages of the thread and adopt as many plots as you want. To access the Adoption Society, where you can pick from a variety of adoption threads, go to http://nanowrimo.org/forums/adoption-society.

Because anyone else on the thread can also take the ideas, I suggest you change any specific setting or character names and give whatever idea you choose your own personal twist.

Dreams and Nightmares

My dreams are vivid with recurring themes, so much so that I make a habit of recording all the characters, settings, and feelings in a dream diary because I'm certain I can get a story out of it. If your dreams aren't vivid or you don't remember them, that doesn't mean you can't benefit from this method of idea adoption. You don't have to use your own dreams, especially if you're close to them. You can always ask your friends and family to share their dreams with you or just go on Google and read about people's dreams.

Writing Prompts and Idea Generators

For me, the only type of writing prompt I can get a full short story or novel from are prompts that indicate characterization and specific conflicts. However, there are many different types of prompts, and every writer responds differently to them. Finding prompts and idea generators is as easy as doing a quick Google search. However, here are a few recommendations:

·        http://www.writingforward.com/writing-prompts/creative-writing-prompts/25-creative-writing-prompts

·         http://creativewritingprompts.com

·         http://writingexercises.co.uk/plotgenerator.php

 

Maintaining a Journal

Regardless of whether you adopt ideas or they just bombard you on a day-to-day basis, it's absolutely vital to have two journals:

·         A small journal or some place on your phone to record any thoughts that occur to you. Often, I just end up writing ideas all over my hand and arm, but that makes washing my hands a devastating process.

·         A document or idea journal where you gather all these ideas and then, later, go through the ideas and section them. In my idea journal, I categorize each idea by its genre; whether it'll be a short story, flash fiction, novella, novel, or part of a series; and if I'm likely to actually pursue the idea. I then flesh out the ideas I'm likely to pursue.

Ideas come in all shapes or forms. No matter how they come to you, whether you borrow them from someone else or they pop up when you least expect it, each idea is valuable and has the opportunity to be the story you were looking to write.  

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Tiffany T. Cole is a freelance editor and a copy editor for Limitless Publishing and the Purdue University Chronicle. She has edited and critiqued dozens of newspaper articles and dozens of books, fiction and nonfiction alike, in a variety of genres. Before that, she was an editorial assistant for Month9Books and the president of Reader's Den, a website where she reviewed and promoted books for small publishers, self-published authors and traditionally published authors, for two years. If you need an editor or editorial advice, e-mail Tiffany at editor@tiffanytcole.com.