Don't engage the copy editor

by Sara J. Henry
Author of the Troy Chance suspense novels

Leave a comment this weekend and you'll be entered in a drawing for a copy of A COLD AND LONELY PLACE.

The best piece of advice I ever got – pretty much bar none – came from my writer friend Jamie Ford.

I’d just received the copy edits on my first novel, on a Saturday, and had to fly out on a busy trip that Wednesday. I’ve worked as a copy editor and when I was with Rodale Books I worked with them (and learned a lot from them), but this was something entirely different.

This person had made changes that seemed completely unnecessary (I know my way around the Chicago Manual of Style), questioned actions and motivations of the characters, and in places penciled in snide comments and erased them… but left them legible.

And this was all on paper, which to me seemed antediluvian – back when Windows were something you used Windex on, I’d been working with on-screen copy editing, using a word processing program called XyWrite where you had to type in codes to designate italics (little did I realize I was learning the basics of HTML).

I had no idea what to do. So I called Jamie, whose novel had come out the year before. Here's what he told me (besides just to write STET beside every change I didn't want):  “Don’t engage the copy editor.”

It was excellent advice. Not just for that manuscript – I found myself repeating it, over and over, as I went through it – but for many things in life. I say it often to myself: “Don’t engage the (fill in the blank).”

Someone sends an email suggesting he should get his money back because of a typo in your novel? Don’t engage the irate reader. A relative sends emails aimed at provoking you? Don’t engage the evil mother-in-law. You’re doing five miles over the speed limit in the fast lane, passing someone, and an idiot in a gas-guzzler looms up on your bumper, clearly not understanding the laws of physics and gravely overestimating the stopping power of his brakes? Don’t engage the Neanderthal driver.

No good can come of it – and you will have let the bad guys win, a little.

And in these days of Internet trolls, and places where anyone can trash you or your novel, it’s an unfortunate fact of publishing life that most of us cannot afford to piss anyone off. One author friend cheered on her fans to vote for her book in an online contest – and fans of the other, better-known, novelist attacked her with vicious comments. It was ugly.

At times I’ve engaged, gently. When someone gave Learning to Swim a half-hearted blog review and complained about the Canadian parts not being convincing, I posted a comment thanking her for reading my book and asking what parts she had trouble with (I’d lived in Ontario several years, and had that novel vetted by four Canadian readers, and was curious what we could have missed). It turned out that she lived in western Canada, where the RCMP is basically the only police force, and had assumed the same was true in the rest of Canada. Another time a German reader complained about something, and I responded on her blog – she was so pleased by my response that she ended up doing an engaging Q&A interview with me.

One of my first Amazon reviews complained at length about the main character’s name (and I can quote, because this was my first scathing review: “No one is named Troy Chance. No one. Not even porn stars. Not even gay porn stars.” (Note: my novel has no porn stars, gay or straight.)

A bookstore friend wrote me that he had done some research and that reader was right: There are no porn stars named Troy Chance! There are, however, people with that name.

So there, anonymous reviewer.

To round this out, here are the opening paragraphs of my newest novel, A Cold and Lonely Place:

We could feel the reverberation of the ice-cutting machine through the frozen lake beneath our feet. Matt Boudoin was telling me this would be the best ice palace ever, and I was nodding, because of course every year the palace seems better than the one the year before. At the same moment he stopped talking and I stopped nodding, because the machine had halted and the crew of men was staring down at the ice. Then, in unison, like marionettes with their strings being pulled, they turned their heads to look at Matt. Their faces were blank, but we knew something was wrong, very wrong.

We started moving forward. Because this is an Adirondack mountain town and Matt has an ingrained sense of chivalry, he held his arm out in that protective gesture you make toward a passenger in your car when you have to slam on the brakes. But it didn’t stop me.

Later, I would wish it had.

************************
Leave a comment this weekend and you'll be entered in a drawing for a copy of A COLD AND LONELY PLACE.
Sara J. Henry’s Learning to Swim won the Anthony and Agatha awards for best first novel and the Mary Higgins Clark Award. Its sequel, A Cold and Lonely Place, will be published February 5. Sara hails from Tennessee but has lived all over the U.S. (and in Canada) and now calls Vermont home. You can find her website at www.SaraJHenry.com – not to be confused with the nutrition writer Sarah Henry, as they are indeed two different people.