editing

Lazy writers who produce shit because they just don’t care about getting it right first time

GUEST BLOG BY MICHAEL LAROCCA, http://www.editormichael.com/

I was editing a company’s bid on a project, and they were inconsistent in how they spelled the potential customer’s name and their own company name. I am not making this up.

I’ve said this before. If I’m reading or editing something, and I get the urge to ask the author “Do you even care?”, that’s bad. Very bad.

If you’re writing a letter or bid, I suppose you can get away with slapping any damn thing on the paper and saying, “My editor can fix it. That’s his job.” But really, why would you do that? If you don’t care about the damn thing, don’t write the damn thing.

In this case, I suppose someone (not me) could approach the owner of the company and say, “Your bid writer just doesn’t give a shit. Fire his ass.” But since this bid was written by the company owner, kicking her onto the unemployment line probably isn’t an option. I’ll just fix the damn thing.

If you’re an aspiring novelist, you don’t have this luxury. You’d damn well better care.

Seriously. Many would-be authors send me half-ass shit, and they send major publishers half-ass shit, as if they’ve done enough and are entitled to be lazy about making it readable because it’s just soooooo fucking great and they are ARTISTS.

Nope. Not on this planet, son.

Do you know what happens to people who write shit, but care enough to make it the best shit they can write? The shit gets better, one day it isn’t shit, and one day it’s published, and one day it’s even read.

Do you know what happens to gifted artists who are too lazy to improve? They get rejected, they get mocked on Slush Pile Hell and/or my blog, they pay to self-publish or fall for a Publish America scam, and they wonder why nobody reads their shit. Shit they couldn’t be bothered to read themselves after they slapped it onto the paper any old way.

I can’t believe I’m even writing this shit. How can you NOT care about your own damn writing?

People are crazy.

P.S. The customer in the first paragraph is also too damn lazy to run a spell checker. I’m gonna raise my prices on her ass.

Michael LaRocca is an American book writer and editor and blogger who currently lives in Thailand. He has written nine published books and edited more than 300. 

Why a writer should never be her own sub-editor: going crazy over a conflict of interest

It’s unusual, to say the least, for one person to be both contributor and editor, at the same time, on the same publication.

But I once found myself in the situation where I was both editing an industry yearbook (in my capacity as an editor for one company) and writing a submission for publication in that booklet (in my capacity as public relations consultant for another company).

It was a situation fraught with interest. There was the obvious issue of whether there was a conflict of interest. I consulted with the other parties involved and we eventually decided that there probably was, but that it didn’t really matter, since no-one else could be bothered doing any of the work involved. The job had to be done, so I – and I – might as well be the one/s to do it.

So I was left to baffle myself with the resulting dilemmas, such as having to convince myself that I should carry in full the article without editing it too much, and having to rebuke myself if the article was not up to scratch, or not in on time.

The article I wrote was rather over-long, coming in at some 2,200 words against a limit of 1,800 stated in the brief that I’d written and sent to myself. But I was rather pleased with the end result and felt it couldn’t possibly be bettered or shortened – every syllable was good stuff and surely the editor could squeeze in the extra 400 words, perhaps by using fewer images? Those word counts that editors give you are only guidelines anyway, and I didn’t really have time to go through it trimming out bits here and there – that would only have spoiled a perfectly good article.

You can imagine how annoyed I was when I received that article from myself. What is it with these hack journalists that they can’t stick to the word count? I’d specified 1,800 words as a limit for a reason, and here was this person merrily sending in 2,200 despite what she’d been told. Use fewer images, she suggested – well sorry, lovey, but as editor I have to strike the right balance between text and images and I can’t just ‘squeeze’ in an extra 400 words without the finished page looking unattractively text-heavy. I was sorely tempted to send the piece back to myself with instructions to cut it to the word count specified, but time was getting on, so it looked like it would be down to me to do the job – golly how I fumed!

It was the same with the deadline. I couldn’t get the article to myself exactly on time but it’s well known that deadlines are moveable feasts, not set in stone as it were. After all, the booklet wasn’t due to go to press for weeks, I had loads of other stuff on – and I had a bit of a drinking sesh on at the weekend so couldn’t do it then.

Well, when I eventually received the piece from myself three days after the deadline I’d stated, I was a bit miffed to say the least. There’s this assumption that when you set a deadline you don’t really mean it – I swear that contributors look at the deadline and deliberately add on a few days just to annoy, as though to show how much in demand they are elsewhere. They forget that a publication date of May means everything’s got to be in the design studio at the start of April to take its place in the queue for the overworked designer, and then wait its turn at the printer and then the mailing house. When stuff comes in three days late, it’s no skin off the writer’s nose – bloody woman was probably down the pub when she could have been working on the piece! – but it means three days less for me to turn the whole shebang around.

But I’m sure you’ll appreciate my pique when I saw, on seeing the finished page, that some of my best sentences had been chopped out by the editor. What is it with these red-pen merchants that they can’t tell good literature from a sprig of parsley, and go blithely hacking their way mercilessly through someone else’s hard-written work?

In the end I went quietly out of my mind and, meeting myself in the bathroom mirror one afternoon, exchanged unforgivable words with myself. We weren’t on speaking terms for ages afterwards.