Red Line/Blue Line: Essays from the Editor's Corner

By Shawn MacKenzie

Any book about editing is, necessarily, a book about writing. For the casual scribbler or earnest author, "Red Line/Blue Line" is a collection of 36 essays - informative, occasionally digressive, and frequently irreverent - on writing, editing, and the essential interplay between the two.
Every day, a writer weaves passionately through a forest of choices both large and small. For, beyond the spark of an idea and the ensuing blood, sweat, and tears, writing is all about choices. This is the heart of editing - the subjective, at times eccentric art of sprucing up our prose and making it fir for public viewing.
Even a lone scribe struggling in the literary wilderness should respect her creation enough to make it as good as it can possibly be before sending it out into the world. After all, we may write in our teddy-bear slippers and pjs, but our work should go forth in crisp Ascot and morning coat.
"Red Line/Blue Line" is an invitation to read well and write better. At day’s end, I hope it inspires you to look at your work differently, to see the big picture and the small, spin your craft on its head, and have fun doing it. Come along for the ride and enjoy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawn MacKenzie
• Release date: Mar 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311999627

Shawn MacKenzie

Shawn MacKENZIE has been a free-lance editor for over twenty years and a writer far longer. She is the author of two scholarly works on the science, myth, and lore of Dragons around the world, The Dragon Keeper’s Handbook and Dragons for Beginners (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2011-2012, respectively). Her short stories have been anthologized in Southshire Pepper-Pot, Skyline Review, and as a winner of the Shires Press Award for Short Stories, to name a few. She is currently working on a short-story collection and a novel about myth, magic, and chinchillas in the high Andes.

Book preview

Overture from an Editing Dragon

Artistry is important.

Skill, hard work, rewriting, editing, and careful,

careful craft: All of these are necessary.

These are what separate the beginners from experienced artists.

—Sarah Kay

When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you

can get too involved with the story to detect errors.

You can see words in your head that aren't actually there on the page,

sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow

plot threads and see only the images in your skull.

—Neal Asher

Any book about editing is, necessarily, a book about writing.

Every day, a writer weaves passionately through a forest of choices both large and small. For, beyond the spark of an idea and the ensuing blood, sweat, and tears, writing is all about choices. This is the heart of editing. In the end, of course, even the most experienced scribe can benefit from outside insight and expertise. We don't need someone to simply gush and insist every word is a gem plucked from the mouths of the divine literati. Grandma Esther does that. She's family; it's her job.

An editor's job is to be supportively ruthless as she brings fresh eyes to a manuscript, looks for awkward passages, incongruities, weaknesses, even disasters waiting to happen. She discerns not only what we say, but also what we mean to say. She helps us tighten our prose, hone our voice, and sing. In short, an editor helps make our work better.

A good editor is priceless.

Of course, whether just starting out or after years in the trenches, there are times when the services of a professional editor are beyond our means. Do not despair! And do not let this be an excuse for laziness. Even a lone scribe struggling in the literary wilderness should respect her creation enough to make it as good as it can possibly be before sending it out into the world. After all, we may write in our teddy-bear slippers and pjs, but our work should go forth in crisp Ascot and morning coat.

This was my thinking when a publisher approached me about doing a series of weekly essays: words of wisdom about editing, writing, and inevitable Venn intersection of the two.

Of course, then I took a breath, and second, more circumspect, thoughts began gnawing at the edges of my mind. I realized that, beyond the basics of grammar and punctuation, editing is more subjective art than objective science. When I pick up my red pen – even at the behest of others – the result is internalized, personal, quite often eccentric. Just as with my writing, it is an extension of my being. Yes, editors are people, too. We have our idiosyncrasies and foibles, strengths, weaknesses, even blind spots. And if you prick us, we will surely bleed.

To translate all that into pieces both practical and enticing was a daunting challenge, but, ultimately, one that intrigued more than intimidated. My original Why not? instincts won out, and the Editor’s Corner was born. March to December, the weeks spun out, and it grew into a wildly informative, occasionally digressive, and frequently irreverent journey to the belly of the editing beast you see before you.

Friends, scribes, both casual and earnest, I offer these pages, my invitation to read well and write better. At day’s end, I hope to inspire you to look at your work differently, to see the big picture and the small, spin your craft on its head, and have fun doing it.

Come along for the ride and enjoy.

I. From the Outside Looking In: Read

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines

what you will be when you can’t help it.

—Oscar Wilde

As an activity and a passion, editing, like writing, runs the gamut from macro to micro, from broad strokes on plot and character to the minutia of comma v. semi-colon.

Personally, I think it’s best to start big – so big that you’re not even dealing with your own work. To that end, my advice for today: Read.

Read everything and anything. The classics, the paper, your favorite graphic novel and guilty genre pleasure. Read Chekhov for dialogue, Christie for plot, dictionaries for joy, and Shakespeare because…Shakespeare! Whatever strikes your fancy. And don’t be afraid to step out of your literary comfort zone: if you write romance, pick up Robert Bloch or Tanith Lee; mysteries, try Pratchett or Azimov. Become a sponge, absorbing what works and wringing out what doesn’t. Internalize the basics of tense agreement, point of view, and active v. passive voice. I assure you, it is a hell of a lot more fun this way than sitting through grammar class (which may teach you the rules, but not necessarily how to use them, let alone break them).

When you’re read-out, treat yourself to a clear, inspired mind: go to a museum or cafe or wildlife park; listen to music, play games, all sorts. They are good for the spirit and return you to your words with invigorated eyes. Look at art and animals and people, how they shimmer and move and connect. For it is all connected, be it words on a page or life in the world. That is the heart of our storytelling.

And then, at the end of the day, if you’re not too weary (or too wired), thumb through Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for good measure.

But more on that next time.

II. Elements of Style: A Guide to Wowing on the Literary Runway

Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason.

―William Strunk Jr.

The Elements of Style

Let us now praise little books.

Well, one particular little book.

I don’t remember when I got my first copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. The fluid fiction of memory tells me it was in my distant tweeny past, around the time I decided to be a writer. That original volume, spine-cracked and finger-stained, has been swallowed by the years, replaced, and swallowed again. And, no matter how many pages I’ve written myself or edited for others, time after time, I still take EofS’s current, dog-eared incarnation from the shelf and go back to basics.

For, like all art, writing begins as a craft, and any craft takes time and work to learn well. Before we graduate to the swish-and-swirl aspects of literary style, to voice and hue, meter and pitch, we need to know our ABCs. Professor William Strunk Jr. was a master at teaching them, first to his charges at Cornell, and then – thanks to a savvy editor at Macmillan and a former student, E.B. White – to the rest of us.

With economic prose and extensive examples, Strunk lays out simple rules of usage, composition, and, yes, style. These are the elements we should all know inside and out; the foundation upon which we can build our literary/editorial bona fides. Granted, no rules or grammar books - even the best – are a substitute for original storytelling and compelling voice (we'll get to them in good time), and inspiration, I’m afraid, is in the hands of the gods. Elements of Style will not make you a great writer. However, it can make you a competent writer, a clean writer, someone who knows how to structure a sentence, to have subjects and objects harmonize, tenses agree, and pronouns cooperate with their antecedents. Someone who recognizes the difference between passive and active voice and knows that using ten-dollar words when fifty-cent ones will do just makes you sound pretentious as hell and pisses people off.

In short, studying EofS is essential homework for our craft. Do it well. Become a precise writer who can juggle words, sentences, whole paragraphs, certain that, when they land on the page, they say exactly what you mean. Show the world that you take pride in your work, and, when you split your next infinitive, do it as conscious choice, not simply because you don’t know better.

So, run to your bookshelf – or favorite bookstore – take down that copy of The Elements of Style and dig in. (It is now available in e-book; you can even get a free version from Project Gutenberg or Kindle Classics, sans E.B.’s lovely addendum.) There are far worse classrooms, I assure you.

Next time, going beyond the elements for a closer look at style.

III. You Gotta Have Style

Fashion fades, but style endures.

—Coco Chanel

Now, I assume that everyone has done their homework and brushed up on their grammar, punctuation, and all the other pesky elements of our craft.

Which brings me to the second part of William Strunk’s