Jeff Reimer at the Bulwark has one of the best descriptions of my former occupation that I’ve come across, The World Through a Copyeditor’s Eyes:
In general, there are four types of editing in the book world. Developmental editing takes place at the level of the big picture and organizing concepts. In line editing, an attentive editor will help a writer to say what they mean in a voice that best expresses the spirit of their ideas. Copyediting, my own domain, involves cleaving to the precepts of one style guide or another while making precise adjustments to word choice, order, rhythm, and so forth. And proofreading is a safari hunt for any last remaining typos and solecisms.
Because of the apparent overlap between the work of copyediting and line editing, some people conflate them, but those with correct opinions see them as distinct. Developmental editing and line editing both take place early in a book’s development, and they are both messy and more involved. Copyediting and proofreading come into play nearer to the end: They are the finish carpentry of the publishing process. The house is already built; we copyeditors arrive when the tarp is still on the floor to make sure joints and seams are properly aligned, that corners are sharp, and that there are no devils hiding in the details. […]
In my decade-plus of full-time copyediting (I now edit for a magazine), nearly all the books I’ve worked on were unremarkable, and most have been or will be soon forgotten. I edited zero books that people will still be reading in one hundred years. That’s not to say they were all bad, even if most of them were; I edited plenty of good books. It’s just that, in the sad sweep of history, almost all the books ever written and that have yet to be written are mediocre, at best, and destined for few, if any, readers.
But copyeditors read them. It is our job to read them and to bear with them, to fix their shoddy grammar and flag their questionable assertions and spruce up their forgettable prose, and to do it day after day after day.
But how much can a copyeditor really do? I’ll tell you. Judging by another measure I give to my interested interlocutor—whose interest is by now quickly fading—books can be sorted into the following categories: There are terrible books, there are bad books, there are decent books, there are good books, and there are excellent books. A good copyeditor can move the book they’ve been assigned one rung up the quality ladder—at best. You could do more, but a publisher can’t pay you for the time it would take to move a book two rungs.
Given these hard commercial realities, novice copyeditors often need to be induced to give up their notion that every book needs to be perfect. I’ve seen more than one nearly catch fire with frustration and panic because their deadline is the next day, they’ve already spent double the allotted hours on the project, and they’ve edited 27 out of 384 pages. (I have, myself, nearly imploded more than once under similar conditions.) […]
A copyeditor does not formally participate in the intellectual life. He or she is, rather, its adjunct and custodian. A good copyeditor therefore knows when to stop editing, has refined the skill of refraining from the conversation, and knows when not to get involved (which is almost always) in the ideas and the argument. I had been in the book business for a couple years before I realized that at many publishers, copyeditors work in the production department rather than editorial, and aspiring editors who are interested in vision and ideas and decision-making do well to avoid copyeditor positions.
Because when it comes down to it, a copyeditor is a journeyman, a trade worker. The proper domain of knowledge for a copyeditor is not a discipline, but the style guide. In most of American book publishing, that’s the Chicago Manual of Style. Though many copyeditors have some amount of intellectual expertise in a particular discipline, especially if they work on academic texts (as I do), in the end, the job of even a very sophisticated copyeditor is limited to the application of a set of compositional rules to a large body of words on a page, nothing more. […]
But while we copyeditors do not participate in the academic world or in intellectual life, we do listen to it very closely. At least I do. Being a copyeditor means locating yourself everywhere and nowhere, pressing your ear to the doors to a variety of academic disciplines, but not properly entering any of them.
A remarkable education is available to an attentive eavesdropper. While I value the training I received for my degrees, I got my real education copyediting. Not only did I read for a living, but my reading was enormously varied; I listened in on hundreds of conversations. […] I read it all, for eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year, for twelve years. But not all of it made a claim on me. The great privilege and the great downfall of copyediting is that you’re not ultimately accountable for anything but the grammar. You’re a dilettante, a dabbler, a flaneur. You can stroll about uncommitted, browse the arcades, try an idea on for size and take it off when you’re done. Perhaps you throw it in the trash. Or maybe you keep it; you put it in your intellectual wardrobe. It’s up to you! You get to take soundings in a culture or a subculture, to explore points of view you would likely not have investigated otherwise, all while getting paid to fiddle around with someone else’s prose. […]
Publishing trends sometimes interfere with this project of self-making; the books I work on tend to be restricted to either what is new or to secondary or even tertiary glosses on what is old. Textbooks are the surest path to sales in the academic market, so publishers are eager to propose textbooks to authors, and to accept textbook proposals from authors, and to reframe proposals for other kinds of books from authors as—surprise!—textbooks. This means I have read many more overviews of, say, Plato’s philosophy than I have read his dialogues, and more surveys of Karl Barth’s theology than Barth himself. I have labored for hundreds of hours over abstruse and stultifying “introductions” to what are by comparison short and straightforward classic texts. Most of these books have been too long. Not one of them has been too short.
Our experiences were, of course, not the same; he seems to have spent all his time on books, many of them trash, whereas I spent the first couple of decades on business journalism and pharmaceutical material, only turning to books around 2005 — primarily Oxford UP, but also the occasional one-off. There wasn’t much in the way of great writing, but there also wasn’t any trash (well, maybe one book written by a banker with self-help/philosophical pretensions could be so labeled). And I, with my linguistics background as well as exposure to a number of different style guides, did not internalize the diktats of the Chicago Manual to the extent he seems to have done (though of course I did learn them in considerable detail); to me, it was just one more arbitrary set of rules, not stone tablets to judge all writing by. But never mind all that: Jeff is a fellow laborer in the vineyard, and I’m happy to pass on his lively account of his experiences.
By the way, I’ll be away from home and my computer for a few hours, so comments that get eaten by Akismet won’t be dealt with until I get back. Don’t spill drinks and smash up the furniture!
When the Hat is not at home, the commenters dance on the table 😉
SMASH!
Baas kae ka nwaamis di’e pɔɔg!
I got my start proofreading after my grad assistantships ran out before I had finished my dissertation. A lady who organized a loose group of freelancers gave me a proofreading test, which I aced. (The State went after her as an employer, so our informal freelancer group had to disband.)
Apparently my daughter inherited my proofreading eye. I remember her reading voraciously books in the Babysitter’s Club and then Sweet Valley High series (of ghostwritten, formulaic, mass-market stuff) and calling out typos. One book she read had somehow deleted the space after every period, probably by attempting to globally replace two spaces with one space, but mistakenly replacing two with nothing. She wrote to the publisher, who never replied with thanks or a repaired copy of the book. She’s still a voracious reader, as am I.
After finally finishing my dissertation on weekends while working full-time doing tech support for accountants and bankers, I gave up on a linguistics career. Openings in my narrow field were saturated by the 1980s, and I had no interest in teaching theoretical syntax or phonology, so I migrated into academic publishing. Serving as managing editor or review editor is a step or two in the direction of line-editing and developmental editing, especially as I dealt with many authors whose English was a second or third language. Serving as copyeditor and later review editor for a journal in my narrow specialty helped me get up to speed enough to publish more of my own research in that field. My publication record in retirement has exceeded my record while I was working full-time. In retirement, I’m an unpaid adjunct, the best kind for university admins.
Publications in narrow historical specialties have even fewer readers, but often have longer lifespans.
mod’s away, post generative grammar!
I’m back, and you’re all banned! Except for Joel, another laborer in the vineyard.
Copyediting is supposed to improve the writing? Let me confidently declare, then, that it has never existed in science publishing. Any contrary implications I may have made are wrong, any lamentations about its disappearance apply to proofreading.
Well! I was, in years gone by, an editor at both Nature and Science, and I can tell you that both publications employed copyeditors. I myself did line-editing on occasion, and tried to make papers at least somewhat more coherent and clear. Whether we succeeded was in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but we tried.
Tangentially, somewhere in Abraham Pais’s Niels Bohr’s Times he recounts how Bohr’s first visit to the US was reported by the NYT and comments that the paper’s science writers were far better back then than in later times. What he meant, I inferred, was the that reporter wrote down verbatim what Bohr said and made no attempt to paraphrase or explain it, regardless of whether the average Times reader was capable of making any sense of it.
OK, but I’m pretty sure Nature hasn’t even employed proofreaders in this millennium.
@David Marjanović: I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that Nature has proofreaders. The question is whether they are useful. For dealing with rather poorly written (often by non-natives) prose text, I can imagine that they serve a purpose.* However, they are no use when dealing with material that is already generally well written. In particular, since the copyeditors do not really know a meaningful amount of math, they are wont to make changes in carefully laid out equations without respect for their meaning.
* Like The Elements of Style was probably a useful manual for college students who were, to start out, pretty bad writers.
It’s over 25 years since I worked at either publication, and of course it’s all been downhill since I left. My recollection is that the proofreaders would ask knowledgeable editors for help if they were faced with some awkward stylistic/compositional issue. And of course authors would get to check the proofs before publication.
I don’t know how the staffing at Nature is these days. With all the spin-off journals they’ve created since I was there, perhaps proofreading and copyediting resources have been stretched thin.
I worked in academic publishing for nine years, but as a software developer, not an editor. I remember speaking to editors, and got the impression that most academic papers arrived in a shocking state: amateurish, ungrammatical, and illogical, and that the editors had to rewrite them completely to render them publishable. One of their easier jobs was to remove pathetic attempts at humour.
The scene of the crimes: Baltimore, MD., USA, Johns Hopkins University.
Late 1960s. Publication: Modern Language Notes, Spanish issue.
The criminals: Graduate students, professors, leading and rising academics from around the world.
The criminal task, as offered to me and my brethren and sistern: “Mr. Fxxxxxxx, Ms. Gxxxxxxx,
if your schedule permits (and Gawd help you if it don’t!), please edit and proof these articles for the coming Hispanic Issue of MLN.”.
“Oh, and touch up the Spanish as needed, bearing in mind the authors’ positions of hiring authority once your work here is completed…”
SIR! YES SIR DOCTOR DE LOS RÍOS!
most academic papers arrived in a shocking state
I used to tell people that the best examples of well-written papers in clear English came from Scandinavian authors.
Rather than the editors doing this, the reviewers tell the authors to do it; editors usually just imply “do whatever the reviewers say”. In the next round it may be about half done, the reviewers say “publish”, and the editor decides to publish.
I have never heard of an editor editing, in the academic-publishing meaning of “editor” (…which is rendered as rédacteur elsewhere).
The article has a nice summary of the four types, which I’ve never seen explained before, but I’m damned if I can remember them. So it’s:
1. Developmental editing: the big picture, organizing concepts.
2. Line editing: help a writer to say what they mean in a voice that best expresses the spirit of their ideas.
3. Copyediting: Cleaving to a style guide; making adjustments to word choice, order, rhythm, etc.
4. Proofreading: Looking for remaining typos and solecisms.
And 2. and 3. are often confused. Right.
At one stage I did clean up a few papers by non-native speakers (usually Japanese), unpaid work. That mostly involved 2 and 3, of course, because it required fixing the writers’ poor English on all levels. One fellow-student who went on to an academic career in linguistics still expresses his gratitude for the way I edited the English-language summaries of his papers.
At any rate, it looks like I missed my calling. It certainly sounds better than English teaching. Now I’m reduced to editing Wikipedia articles on occasion.
It’s a satisfying job if you’re the kind of person suited to it; I’m glad I discovered it.
I didn’t know you could get paid for it!
It’s a thankless task, as so many tasks are. Payment efficiently compensates for that. Hegel was a cheapskate with his Anerkennung als Lebensmotor spiel. You don’t need a Congressional medal when you’re rolling in dough.
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Hegel hat zum Kern seiner Philosophie der Anerkennung das Sich-spiegeln-im-Anderen gemacht, wörtlich, man „schaut sich in jedem als sich selbst an“. Der Andere als Spiegel. Hegel hat sich in dem Zusammenhang auch mit dem Begriff der Nächstenliebe beschäftigt. usw usf
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Like The Elements of Style was probably a useful manual for college students who were, to start out, pretty bad writers.
From the Reviser’s Introduction to Strunk & Cowan:
I have attempted to remain within the scope of the original. This book, therefore, is intended as a compendium of helpful advice to novice writers in freshman composition classes, not a code of general laws of writing for all works by all writers in all circumstances. Violations of the rules can be found within the book itself — this is neither inconsistent nor hypocritical, as The Elements of Style Revised is not a paper written for a composition class.
most academic papers arrived in a shocking state: amateurish, ungrammatical, and illogical, and that the editors had to rewrite them completely to render them publishable
That’s pretty much what Gerard Piel, the longtime editor of Scientific American, told my father about what eventually appeared in the magazine.
the best examples of well-written papers in clear English came from Scandinavian authors.
Computer science articles, especially those from Bell Labs, tend to have that property as well. Bjarne Stroustrup writes well, but does not IMO particularly stand out among the other Labsites.
Lots of interesting things to compare and contrast between the four kinds of editors and the indexer. I index a few monographs on Greek and Latin literature every year to supplement my Social Security and buy more books. A few thoughts:
1. Obvious similarity: neither needs to worry about the quality of the book. My motto (not usually shared with the customer) is “Even a very bad book deserves a good index.” The first half of indexing – the mark-up that is followed by the data-entry – is very much like the first half of reviewing a book. Indexing names and places is easy, but indexing the ideas in a book requires a very thoughtful read-through to understand them. The big difference from reviewing is that I don’t care about the quality of the book – unless it’s so good that I ask for a free copy as part of my pay.
2. Indexing usually includes a bit of copy-editing and proofreading as a free bonus. I have a good eye for errors, ambiguities, and inconsistencies, and the act of indexing makes some problems appear that even I would not otherwise have noticed. Years ago I helped index a ten-volume technical handbook for landlords. When I noticed that the S section of the growing document contained volume-plus-page references for sulfur, sulfuric, sulfate, and sulfite, but also sulphur, sulphuric, sulphate, and sulphite, I realized (a) that I’d never noticed the alternative spellings (US and UK?), and (b) they looked terrible juxtaposed and the authors really needed to fix them one way or the other. On my latest job, the same ancient work was called ‘Apollodorus, Library’ in one of the two references to it, ‘[Apollodorus], Bibliotheca’ in the other. I didn’t care one way or the other, but asked the author to decide on one, let me know which one so I could put in the index, and fix the other one in his text.
3. Is Indexing a mere mechanical trade, like copy editing and proofreading? I don’t think so, at least if it’s done right, though I’m naturally prejudiced. The rules are rather vague: I have to decide what is important enough to index, what not, and where the likely reader will be most likely to look for information – more art than science. And I have to know the subject pretty well, too: know for instance that ‘Argentarius’ aka ‘Marcus Argentarius’ the Greek epigrammatist and A. = M.A. the Roman orator are probably, but not certainly the same person. That Lucillius and Loukillios are definitely the same person (another Greek epigrammatist) but Lucilius with a single L the Roman satirist is definitely not the same person as Lucilius the addressee of Seneca’s ‘Letters to Lucilius’, who lived ~160 years later, if he lived at all. Some scholars think he’s a fiction of Seneca, who quotes a few lines of Lucilius’ verses, telling L. how good they are. (They are in fact excellent verses. Does that make impersonation more or less likely?) These names and others are often screwed up in indices, especially where a book is a collection of chapters by different authors – conference proceedings or a Festschrift – where different contributors naturally prefer different spelling conventions.
I have tremendous respect for indexers, and deeply appreciate a well-done index. Alas, they’re thin on the ground these days (like well-edited scholarly books).
For me all these editing categories are fuzzy.
I’ve indexed a few large scholarly works (collections and monographs), and I agree with Michael Hendry: indexing usually calls for adjustments to the text itself. Often these are major fixes, and one is dismayed and inconvenienced by the poor copyediting. Best for the same person to be given clear responsibility for copyediting and indexing from the start. I wish I’d had that a couple of years ago, with a collection of chapters that straddled ethics and biology (effectively for OUP, who’d handed most of the work to India but I got the indexing).
Don’t anyone ever call me a proofreader (dismal term from a bygone time), though of course I fill that role as I copyedit, and as I do final checks to see that all remains in order.
I recently led the translation of a novel from Croatian into English, and it was impossible to avoid substantial editing (checking facts, continuity, consistency, and much more) at the same time. I often find myself correcting academics and rescuing them from ridicule – like philosophers discussing music, or the physiology of colour perception perhaps, and getting the theory all wrong.
The Chicago Manual of Style I find seriously annoying and US-parochial (don’t get me started on en dashes, em dashes, or ellipses); but like Hat I am compelled to know its requirements. The nearest Australian equivalent (a federal government initiative) is far worse. I had a great deal to do with the huge core page of Wikipedia’s Manual of Style. I haven’t touched it for a decade – but it’s holding up rather well as a resource for text across the entire web, given the insinuating influence of English Wikipedia itself.
I now edit part-time only. There’s no shortage of work for those that want it. Good luck to them! I’d take on apprentices, but where to find quality candidates?
Line editing is the one that doesn’t occur in scientific journals.
MS Word lets you make your own index. 🙂
It also lets you do your own editing, if you’re willing to settle for their judgments of what’s a word and what’s grammatical. If you want a good edit, or a good index, hire a professional.
Oh, those are atrocious. Just on Friday I read the so-called supplementary information – a Word file of 182 pages – of a Nature paper; I had to switch the spell-and-grammar checker off first, because often blue waves covered half a page or more. (Odd that Nature doesn’t have a PDF policy. Some journals do.)
Making an index in Word consists of highlighting words/phrases at their occurrences by hand and marking them as index entries. It’s very much like making a table of contents.
the spell-and-grammar checker
When composing texts, the spellchecker is useful, as long as you don’t stop relying on your own judgment; the grammar checker complains about so many things that are actually style issues or wrongly diagnosed that I usually switch it off.
Precisement.
David M:
Odd that Nature doesn’t have a PDF policy. Some journals do.
Despite its many quirks and inadequacies, Word remains the best vehicle for searching, checking, amending, and commenting text in submissions to journals. But PDF is generally unbeatable for efficiency, stability, and consistency in the presentation – especially across platforms (Windows versus Mac), where Word performs poorly if there’s anything subtle in the formatting or layout.
Making an index in Word consists of highlighting words/phrases at their occurrences by hand and marking them as index entries.
Yes, and that’s a great start for generating raw index material. But it’s as Hat says: “If you want a good edit, or a good index, hire a professional.” Some content needs close knowledgeable analysis, far beyond identifying “words/phrases” in the text. The end product may call for sophisticated hierarchical arrangement. Especially if the text is also to be given a late copyedit check, customised markup may be needed throughout. That’s how I work. I tell clients that mine is an engineering approach. And it is.
Hans:
The grammar checker complains about so many things that are actually style issues or wrongly diagnosed that I usually switch it off.
But you can customise it. I normally keep it on as I do an initial spellcheck, for consistency with serial commas and the like. Reduces some of the later drudgery.
Often enough Microsoft gets it right. But even apart from the general calamitous decline that came with Word 2007 (never to be undone), its management of basics such as bulleted or numbered paragraphs is woeful. I devise my own more reliable methods to achieve what is actually intended, so that skittish changes won’t emerge later.
I recently led the translation of a novel from Croatian into English, and it was impossible to avoid substantial editing (checking facts, continuity, consistency, and much more) at the same time.
Wait, what? If the narrator says that Croatia was founded in 1941, that means they are an unreliable narrator: perhaps a fascist, perhaps ignorant or confused. If on another page the narrator says 1918 instead, that gives more weight to the second hypothesis. But if you “correct” these dates to 1991, you have in a small but possibly significant way replaced the narrator with a different and more reliable narrator, and a fortiori the novel with a different novel. This is completely different from changing what purports to be a factual article in order to correct a mistake in facts.
(I assume that the “error” is in the Croatian text, not just the English version, and that you have not obtained confirmation from the author that it was indeed an error on his part.)
Yeah, the idea of fact-checking a novel doesn’t make much sense.
By the time a novel is finished, there’s probably not a lot a fact checker can do. However, it seems perfectly plausible that the author may have unintentionally included errors of fact in their setting and plot. The fact checker certainly should not be making changes to a work of fiction without consulting with the author about whether they are supposed to be correct or not—and whether, even if they were unintentionally incorrect, changing them will not otherwise interfere with the work.
A couple years ago I attended a reading with an author of several low-circulation novels, and in her early chapters, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek showed up in America in the early 1950s, to study Southern cotillion culture, which she was interested in bringing to China. This was based on something that the writer had heard actually happened, but I pointed out that that seemed to be about twenty years too late for what she was describing. I don’t think she has finished the book, so I don’t know whether she took this fact checking to heart.
Of course golden age sci-fi would not have been as exciting without bogus science.
Hat (and John C et al.):
Yeah, the idea of fact-checking a novel doesn’t make much sense.
It makes perfect sense. If the author includes real events, institutions, and people for example, and intends these aspects of the fiction to be true to life (a very common aim), then there are facts to check.
Brett:
By the time a novel is finished, there’s probably not a lot a fact checker can do. However, it seems perfectly plausible that the author may have unintentionally included errors of fact in their setting and plot.
Trust me, there is a lot that a fact checker can do when a novel is finished. I did it.
“Reader, I married him”. Drawing a firm line under all the preceding alarms and diversions.
Very unlike, say, the excellent film Sicario 2, which ends in an unanswerable question mark.
It makes perfect sense. If the author includes real events, institutions, and people for example, and intends these aspects of the fiction to be true to life (a very common aim), then there are facts to check.
Novelists very frequently (perhaps nearly always, unless they’re a particular kind of ripped-from-the-headlines novelist) alter facts to suit their needs, placing a monastery next to a river when the actual one is a few blocks away or sending a reporter to Sarajevo at a crucial time when he was actually somewhere else. Unless a novelist specifically asks for a fact-check (and apparently there are such cases, since you’ve done it), it seems to me a fool’s errand to try to second-guess a writer of fiction.
I see no reason to think that’s commonly done consciously at all. I don’t think it occurs to many people just how much shit they can make up against their own knowledge while still implying that their story is set in the real world; not many other than Ephraim Kishon have ended stories in “and then I died” or “I stopped swimming and drowned”. If I read a novel where a known monastery was set next to a known river and I knew it’s a few blocks away, I’d simply assume the author only knew it was close and figured there wasn’t a point in actually looking up how close, given what places the likely audience was likely familiar with. And probably I wouldn’t mind. (I’m not the kind of person that spots every continuity error in a movie.)
I see no reason to think that’s commonly done consciously at all.
Have you read a lot of accounts of how people write novels? Because I have, and I assure you it is in fact commonly done consciously. Novelists have other priorities than precisely reproducing a Baedeker version of the world. That’s one reason you find the disclaimer about how “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”
How much fact-checking a novel needs, or can withstand, depends very much on the subgenre, what kind of novel it is. So-called ‘hard’ science fiction, where the science is the main thing, needs a lot. Soft science-fiction, where it’s more concerned with human relations or other non-scientific things, a lot less. Fantasy (I mean the dragons and princesses kind) hardly any, though the editors do need to check for consistency: “The dragon’s breath was blue in the previous chapter, but now it’s orange. Is it something he ate? Or should we be consistent?”.
Historical novelists certainly try to get their cultural and sociological facts right, because their readers will complain: “Roman soldiers did not have pockets! Or stirrups! Or pet guinea pigs – wrong continent!”. There’s also a whole subgenre of alternative history with or without science fiction mixed in. Someone wrote a novel in which an entire brigade (I think it was) of U.S. Marines with attached tanks and helicopters somehow (no explanation ever given) find themselves in an open field 30 miles from Rome and soon realize that they’ve gone back in time to the early Roman Empire. Part of the story is a puzzle: will they survive? Can they defeat the empire, if the Romans decide to fight? Obviously they would do very well in the short run, but replacing their bullets and aviation fuel when they run out would be extremely difficult. It’s not the kind of book I’m interested in, but I know people who are, and who would certainly argue with any scientific or historical inaccuracies, as in “No, you can’t run a helicopter on olive oil, no matter how pure, and here are the scientific reasons why!”
Even standard human-relations set-in-the-present-real-world novels tend to have back-stories and such that cover a few decades. And readers will argue about any details that seem false.
So, is there any kind of novel that couldn’t use even a little fact-checking? Magic realism? Stream-of-consciousness monologue of someone suffering from schizophrenia or compulsive lying? I’m sure there are some.
Now that LH has posted, I agree that most readers aren’t going to care whether a real monastery is or is not next to a river. So maybe it is more the genre novel that attracts picky readers. Or rather specific genres: in addition to hard science fiction and historical novels and the weird hybrid I mentioned, also detective novels, where it would ruin the story if the criminal’s methods or the detective’s could be proven not to work in the real world.
P.S. I hope you’re all having a lovely Groundhog’s Eve.
Yes, as I said – I’m sure few are actually looking at a map while they’re writing. You make it sound like most are in fact looking at a map and consciously deviate from it.
Yes yes, of course – to much of that. In my novel work there was a great deal of specific real-world information and commentary, and that needed to be checked as part of the editing into which the task of translation merged. And often it needed to be corrected, or at least supplemented or made clearer for the reader. I was working closely with the author, and it all went well. Quite different if I were translating Ulysses into Kusaal (with David Eddyshaw’s assistance).
Hatters will recall, in any case, that Joyce was assiduous in checking Dublin details – in copious painstaking correspondence from his self-imposed exile. He got a surprising amount right, but would have wanted just about everything right. The publishing was famously chaotic.
Hat:
That’s one reason you find the disclaimer about how “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”
Quite. The English version of the novel I worked on has a note like that, but it makes an explicit exception for persons and events that feature in public real-world history. (I will get around to sending you a copy soon.)
I think the main reason for disclaimers about how, “Any resemblance… is purely coincidental,” is as a shield against libel (or other tort) suits. It’s harder for a plaintiff to claim they have been shown in an unflatteringly light if there is an explicit statement that the story is not about them. Of course, those disclaimers are also frequently well known to be lies. A couple amusing examples:
I recall the Oregon author Walt Morey telling about an awkward conversation he once had with the real person who the villain in one of his books (Year of the Black Pony? Runaway Stallion? I think it was a horse book; Morey mostly wrote young adult books about relationships between people and animals, most famously bears) was based on. The guy asked Morey some probing questions about the character, but in the end didn’t actually accuse him of anything.
After Law & Order started advertising their plots as “ripped from the headlines,” it took a few months before they updated the boilerplate disclaimer at the end of each program. I suppose that eventually NNC/Universal’s lawyers probably advised them that it was a bad look to keep the (now admittedly false) claim about similarities to real events being “purely coincidental.” So they switched to a truer disclaimer, stating that while they stories may have been inspired by actual events,* they were “work[s] of fiction.”
* Being “inspired” by actual events is a pretty weak claim. My favorite example of how divorced a story inspired by actual events can be from the reality is Who Framed Roger Rabbit. To be fair, that was never marketed as “inspired by…,” although there some sly nods to the real-world analogue of Judge Doom’s evil plan.
There’s another version of the disclaimer that goes like this: “This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.” The phrase “used fictitiously” is meant to straddle the difference between what is real and what isn’t. It lets you write a novel about Joe Biden as a vampire-slayer, for example.
Of course, there is also this: “Imagine a fearsomely comprehensive disclaimer of author liability. Now fear, comprehensively.”
I do not know if I have quoted from the foreword of Hans Fallada’s “Damals bei uns daheim” in another thread, but I think it is relevant here:
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Wenn du findest, daß ich eine Geschichte von Tante Gustchen der Tante Wieke in die Schuhe geschoben habe – wenn du eine ganz neue Anekdote vom Vater hörst, und sie ist bestimmt erlogen! – und wenn der Schluß meines Berichtes von Großmutter nicht der familienkundigen Wahrheit entspricht – wie werde ich da vor dir bestehen?! Werdet ihr mich nicht einen Erzlügner schelten, einen gewissenlosen Verfälscher heiliger Familienüberlieferung?… Ich denke doch nicht! Denn wenn ich im Kleinen sündigte, so bin ich doch im Großen getreu gewesen. Wenn ich bei den Taten erfand, so habe ich doch den Geist, so gut ich es vermochte, geschildert. Ja, ich glaube sogar, daß meine Freiheiten im Kleinen mir erst die Treue im Großen möglich gemacht haben. So habe ich die Eltern gesehen, so die Geschwister, so die gesamte Verwandt- und Bekanntschaft! Ihr seht sie anders? Geschwind, schreibet euer Buch!
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So roughly, “when you find I have substituted one aunt for another in a story, or you hear a new and false anecdote about dad, and when the ending of my story about granny does not correspond to the official family version, how would you feel about me then? Would you call me an inveterate liar, a shameless counterfeiter of holy family tradition?… I don’t think so. For if I have sinned in the detail, I have remained true to the big picture. If I have invented actions, I have nonetheless [doch] portrayed the soul/spirit [Geist] as truly as I was able to. I even believe that freedom in detail has made possible a greater fidelity to the big picture. This is the way I saw Mom and Dad, this is the way I saw my brothers and sisters, this is the way I saw the whole kit and caboodle of relatives and aquaintances. If you see them differently, hurry up and write your own book!”
Unfortunately the author (not me, Fallada) followed his philosophy not only in his fiction, but also when working as an investigative journalist and a bookkeeper on a large farm. This caused him to face legal action and to spend time in gaol (not for defending truth, but for stealing from his employer). His father, a career lawyer and judge, was not impressed.
Like Noetica, for me the editing categories are all fuzzy. In my former job editing all imaginable types of documents for a government agency in Taiwan (which often was asked to edit documents for other agencies), all of the categories were potentially involved, and often translation, too.
I agree that novels, depending on their nature, may need fact checking. I read a novel set in 1970s Taiwan which had many factual errors, including pedicabs in Taipei several years after they had been banned and had disappeared (while still used in other cities; I rode in pedicabs in Chiayi in 1975); people automatically putting on their seat belts when getting in a car, at a time when virtually no one used seat belts here; and two people meeting for the first time discussing high-level politics, a rather dangerous undertaking at that time.
And in my experience proofreading is not a “mere mechanical trade.” Nor copyediting. But a well-done index is truly a wonderful thing.
For if I have sinned in the detail, I have remained true to the big picture. If I have invented actions, I have nonetheless [doch] portrayed the soul/spirit [Geist] as truly as I was able to. I even believe that freedom in detail has made possible a greater fidelity to the big picture.
This is exactly it. That is how novelists think. Anyone who applies the same standards to novels as they would to reporting or history does not understand what fiction is.
Unfortunately the author (not me, Fallada) followed his philosophy not only in his fiction, but also when working as an investigative journalist and a bookkeeper on a large farm.
And this is why you should not hire novelists to do jobs that require fidelity to fact!
I’m writing a series of stories set in a post-global-warming world and am presently undertaking a global tweaking with regard to plausible biomes etc.
And this is why you should not hire novelists to do jobs that require fidelity to fact!
Reminds me of that old adage that creativity is a good thing in general, but not in accounting.
Hat:
Anyone who applies the same standards to novels as they would to reporting or history does not understand what fiction is.
No problem with that as a general statement. But where the author’s intent is to incorporate portions of history accurately and without creative alteration, then the editor – or translator-editor – has a duty to assist with corrections. In collaboration.
This could involve simply putting right a date, an expansion of a misunderstood abbreviation, or a geographical location. Or it could be something more intricate, like the doctrinal details in some religious conflict that the author had not grasped well. We couldn’t do that without consultation; but for deceased authors, if notes are to be provided the reader may be helped by adding observations to those. Or a preface may give the opportunity.
No problem with that as a general statement. But where the author’s intent is to incorporate portions of history accurately and without creative alteration, then the editor – or translator-editor – has a duty to assist with corrections. In collaboration.
Sure. I just don’t think it should be posited as a general rule.
And this is why you should not hire novelists to do jobs that require fidelity to fact!
Some novelists, of course (Asimov, e.g.) are perfectly good with facts.
@hat, jc
A novelist or newspaper can “be good” with facts. The art (or bias) is then more in the selection (e.g., which facts are ignored) and presentation (e.g., which facts are coupled). Let me also apologise for writing “counterfeiter of holy family tradition” when Fallada used the word “Verfälscher”, meaning of course “falsifier”, not “counterfeiter”.
most academic papers arrived in a shocking state: amateurish, ungrammatical, and illogical, and that the editors had to rewrite them completely to render them publishable
Must be the field. I’m on the editorial board for the flagship journal in my (non-STEM) field, and the writing in the submissions is generally pretty good. (Despite that, most aren’t publishable for substantive reasons.)
I’m told newer scholars tend to produce better copy than the more established types. I’m guessing those never really made the transition when their secretaries were retired and not replaced.
Some novelists, of course (Asimov, e.g.) are perfectly good with facts.
By which you mean “Some novelists can write non-fiction that gets facts right.” I strongly suspect Asimov’s novels are as full of discordances with the Baedeker world as anybody else’s, even setting aside the stefnal elements.
Some novelists, of course (Asimov, e.g.) are perfectly good with facts.
Of course facts can always change on them, as had infamously happened with The Dying Night…
(And I’d be surprised if any novel, ever, was 100% true to appropriate facts even as known at the time, excepting possibly the case of being set in such a different place that none of our facts were appropriate anyway. 99%, maybe, and even that would be a stretch.)
By which you mean “Some novelists can write non-fiction that gets facts right.”
Of course I do. But when you write “you should not hire novelists to do jobs that require fidelity to fact!” you are slandering at least a subset of novelists; that was my point.