[LMB] "Line edit" question

[Lois McMaster Bujold]

[LMB] "Line edit" question
Ed Burkhead edburkhead at insightbb.com
Sun Jan 13 06:10:07 GMT 2008
 
Lois,

Would you please explain to us the editing cycles involved in a book?  What
is the "line edit"?

Ed


*** Sure.

A book has many stages of being "finished", like one of those bad dreams 
where you dream you've woken up, and then wake up, and then find you've 
dreamed you've woken up, nested indefinitely.  Finishing the first 
draft, finishing the submission draft, finishing the line edit (I 
believe there are various other terms for this main editing phase, but 
"line edit" is the one I heard), checking the copy edit, checking the 
galleys.

What I'm calling the line edit is the main editorial pass, where one's 
editor, having read the submission draft, comes back with suggestions 
and questions covering all levels from major re-writes to continuity 
checks to copy-edit-level sentence dinks.

I have never been asked for major re-writes, though I always worry I 
will be.  I have done re-writes covering a scene or part of a chapter, 
from time to time.  I consider it a re-write when I change what actually 
happens in the story, mere polishing when I only change or improve the 
description of what is happening.  (Re-writes on the paragraph level 
occupy a border region between the two levels of aggravation.)  Anyway, 
the manuscript comes back with minor items scrawled in the margins, and 
a list of queries or suggestions requiring more explanation on a 
separate sheet/s.  The one presently sitting on my desk, typical of my 
HarperCollins edits, has 13 pages of these covering 559 numbered points, 
most of them minor, but each has to be looked at carefully.  Sometimes a 
change is obviously square on, and in it goes without fuss, quite 
painlessly.  Sometimes a proposed change is not the right one, but 
uncovers a need for something (else) to be done at that spot to 
straighten out the problem, misreading, or misunderstanding.  Sometimes 
it's just plain off, and needs to be dismissed.

So I re-read the manuscript, look carefully at each of these 559 
queries, decide which category it belongs in (not always easy -- a lot I 
first think are in category 3 move, upon closer examination, into 
category 2.)  And then read it all again, to be sure I was right the 
first time.  And fret about every change, because by this time my prose 
feels set in concrete, and changes are painful.  Then I sit down and 
enter all the changes into my master file, print out a copy, send it and 
an e-file to New York, and go off to await the copy edit.

The copy edit confines itself to sentence dinks, continuity checks, 
screwing with my punctuation, and whatever random grammar tics this 
particular copy editor is prone to.   I spill a libation of thanks for 
the good catches, such as spotting using one character's name when I 
meant another's, etc., change most, but not all, of the punctuation and 
grammar back, and send *this* manuscript back to New York.

By the time of the galleys, which are an exact mock-up of the text as it 
will be printed, one is supposed to be down to only correcting actual 
typos and errors that have slipped through; some writers must be 
forcibly restrained from attempting major re-writes at this stage.  I 
invite another listee to explain the technical evolution of galleys over 
the past centuries and decades of publishing, from lead type to electronic.

A lot of the time-consuming work of writing isn't writing, as such, but 
editing.  One must remember to count it as part of the job, though.

Ta, L.