932. Have you ever thought it would be fun to be a fiction editor? "The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction" by Amy Schneider gives you the inside scoop on what that job actually entails. Join us to learn about the specific challenges (and joys) of editing fiction.
932. When I saw Amy Schneider's new book, The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction, I realized that I have never seen a book that specializes in editing just for fiction, and immediately saw that it fills a need. And upon reading it, I realized how well it filled that need, and I knew I had to talk with her. If you've ever thought it would be fun to be a fiction editor, you'll love this interview.
Amy Schneider is a copy editor who specializes in fiction, has been copy editing for twenty-eight years, has edited more than five hundred books and anthologies, and now has published this fabulous book.
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MIGNON FOGARTY:
Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide
to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. And today
we are talking about cool stuff and rules because I have Amy Schneider with me, the
author of a fabulous new book called The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction. Amy is a copy editor, obviously, who specializes in fiction, has been copy editing for twenty-eight years, has edited more than five hundred books and anthologies, and now she has this fabulous book. Amy, welcome to the podcast.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah, you know, when I think it was your publisher sent me the book, and I realized for the first time that I have never seen a book like this that specializes just in editing for fiction. Can you talk a little bit about sort of what … just let people know what it is and how it came to be.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
The seed for me, at least, was actually born from when I started giving conference presentations and webinars and things about copy editing fiction. And in the process of looking for resources to refer people to, I discovered that there was not a single book or resource on specifically copy editing fiction.
There's all kinds of books about the big-picture stuff, the world-building and characterization and point of view, and all those kinds of things geared toward both editors and writers. And there are, of course, the general guides to copy editing fiction
like style manuals and the copy editors handbook and things like that. But there
was nothing geared specifically to copy editing fiction. And I mentioned that in
one of my sessions and of course someone said, “Well you should write it.” And I was
like, well maybe I will.
It took a little while to get started because I'm not naturally a writer, but eventually, everything aligned and I connected with University of Chicago Press and that was just really a fabulous thing, and that it got me going and so here's the book. And they were also surprised that how come no one, none of the University Presses, you know, California or Chicago had never come up with a book like this before and obviously people are going crazy for it, you know, they really needed it.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah, I'm not surprised at all. When I saw it, I thought, I have to talk to her about this. And it's just a resource that anyone who edits fiction or who is, you know … I talk to a lot of people who are interested in getting into editing fiction, and I'm going to tell them now you have to get this book because it explains what the job is and how you do it. What do you think would be most surprising to people about fiction editing?
AMY SCHNEIDER:
I thought about this question and there are two things really. One is that a lot of the rules kind of go out the window because it's not a matter of putting a certain style manual stamp on the manuscript and making it completely consistent with some sort of external rules because each manuscript is really its own style guide and have to follow that and work with that. So it's really hard I think for, especially for newer editors or people who have been working with nonfiction and really strict rules like working with journals and things, to realize the style manual is really just a guide, and you really need to look at the author's individual voice the character voices and things like that to to make the book internally consistent rather than conforming to any particular set of rules. And the other one is I think people aren't really aware of how much fiction fact-checking needs to be done because anything that's mentioned in a
novel it could be something related to the real world, it could be a fictionalized version of the real world, it could be completely made up, it might there might be things that you can't look up anywhere else, and so you have to kind of create your own reference by making note of all those place names and and people's names and organizations and cultures and societal creations and just fictional languages. You have to notate all of that stuff because there's no external reference. So that's a lot of the work that goes into fiction copy editing.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Right. As I was reading through it, I mean, it starts to feel overwhelming as you go through all the different things that even though it's fiction and the author has, you know, completely made it up, it still has to be consistent. And you have wonderful templates to help people get their heads around how this might work.
Just thinking about, you know, maybe science fiction where the weeks aren't seven days long, and you have to keep track of timelines and things like that. Yeah, I was just … it really surprised me how much internal fact-checking was required. And then of course there's real-life fact-checking if it's set in the real world. I know I've seen authors criticized for getting the wrong intersection in some city or something like that.
What are some of the really big problems or funny or surprising problems that you've uncovered in a manuscript in all your years of editing?
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Well, timelines just in general are a big one. I think authors really struggle with timelines because I think a lot of times when they're writing they'll say, “Well, the characters are going along, and it's a beautiful Wednesday morning”. They don't really make a note of that — that day is Wednesday, and then some other stuff happens and three or four days go by and now it's Friday because it has to be Friday night but they forgot about that Wednesday in the background even because it was just a throwaway line.
Note that actually, people are going to notice that, and they might get it in their head that, oh, that's Wednesday and then another day and another day and another day or
things like people going to school on the weekends or things like that you just really need to pay attention to all those little itty-bitty references that actually mean something.
Some of the funnier things … I had one author, this was years ago, one of the first series authors that I did, and he had said in interviews that he was very bad at plotting and no one knew that better than his copy editor. I helped him a lot. I had a lot of queries. And my favorite catch from one of his books was that he had … someone was looking out of a kitchen window at night. It was brightly lit in the kitchen and it was dark outside and they saw something outside that was very important for them to see. It was a big plot point.
Now if you think about it, when you're in a brightly lit room at night and you look outside into the dark, you see yourself because the window acts as a mirror with that darkness behind it. So I told him, "This doesn't work in the real world. You need to turn on a light outside, or you need to turn off the lights in the kitchen, or you need to open the window or something, because this physics does not work that way." And people who are picturing the scene will notice that, and it'll pull them out of the story.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
That's an element of horror, actually. Sometimes you're in the house and there's someone right outside the window, and you can't see them because of the lighting issues. And then what else? Was it dangling modifiers?
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Dangling modifiers, yeah. There was one, I won't go into the particulars, it's a little adult-themed, but there was was one in a romance novel where our hero was meant to be doing something very tender to the lady, and what he was actually doing because of the dangler was something that would be actually quite painful. So it was early on in my career, and I had a tough time trying to word that query to say, "Um, this is what's really happening. You need to change this."
MIGNON FOGARTY:
And that's something you emphasize, too, is being really kind to authors and just the …
talk about, like, wording your queries.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's just always been really important, but especially I think with fiction, because it really is, I think fiction authors especially really pour their heart and soul into, and to me, it's like some kind of sorcery that they can create these worlds just out of whole cloth, you know?
They just make up these characters and these situations, and they really hit our emotions and get us excited and angry and sad and make us fall in love. To do that with words on a page is just amazing. So we don't really want to tromp on that.
We want to tread with caution and more ask rather than dictate and make sure that we're helping them tell the story the way they meant to tell it.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah, and it's a very different skill set than copy editing. You think of writers and the big general category of people who work with words, but creating stories is so different from the detail-oriented work of copy editing and keeping track of those timelines and character names.
You talked in the book about sometimes a character name will change halfway through the book. Maybe the author changed their mind or something like that. And then you had what I thought was a great suggestion as a reader. Occasionally, I've entered a book where some names were confusing. Maybe there was a Susan and a Sarah and a Savannah all in the same book. And you talked about maybe suggesting to writers that they change those.
How do writers generally feel about that?
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Well, I don't generally get to see the feedback because I work for publishers, and so I do my edit, I write my queries, I send it off, and I never see it again. I do, for a few clients, I get the cleanup so that I can see the author's responses to queries, or sometimes if I've had a book that I know had a lot of edits I'll you know pick up a copy and go through the note my notes and see okay what did they change what didn't they and the ones that I found that had that issue I think they're generally fine with it's just a throwaway character, you know, if it's one who's mentioned only a few times that's the one I'll recommend to change you know that characters name maybe wasn't chose as carefully as a more prominent character and they'll go, “Oh yeah you know, we've got 17 people in this book whose names start with M, let's change a few so that it doesn't get too confusing.” And I think they're pretty receptive to that, especially if you, again, if you frame your query as saying it's going to distract readers, it's going to get confusing, they're going to get lost, so you can help the reader along by making this edit.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah, that's great. And you talked about editing books in a series a minute ago,
and I imagine that has extra complexities. Do you want to talk about the challenges there?
AMY SCHNEIDER:
It does. I just finished editing a book in a series and it's like the third or fourth one.
And when I get in on the ground floor when I start with the first book in the series,
I'm always happy to take … this is the first book in a new series. Yay! Because then if I get the first book, I'm pretty assured of getting the second book and the third book and so on. So I can keep that continuity myself throughout. But for a series, I keep a cumulative style sheet so that I have all the information there altogether. I don't distinguish between major and minor characters because a minor character in book one might become a major character in book two. And then maybe in book four, someone from book two will show up again. So I always keep any small characters,
they stay on the style sheet. I might rearrange it a little bit, just so that they're maybe a little less prominent, they're further down the list, but they're still there so that I can do a search see, okay, did I get this information right? And so that I don't say I don't remember a character from a previous book. I don't go adding them as a new one and leaving off information that was provided before. So yeah, there's a lot of cross-checking and double-checking and making sure that we carry over all that information, that we don't change anything that shouldn't be.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Mm-hmm, yeah, and I thought it was very helpful and interesting. You talked about the different ways of, you know, as you're taking notes, creating your style sheet about the characters. Some people do it alphabetically, but you talked about possibly doing it in family groups or regions in the book or something like that because these are characters you might be seeing together more often than other times. I thought
that was super interesting, and I wouldn't have thought of that.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Yeah, it's been really helpful to catch some of those, you know, if someone's name changed, if you don't have a place to look and see, well, is that what that person's name is? Or things like, well, there are supposed to be five brothers, but there are six who are named. You're not going to catch that if you have just an alphabetical list. You know, last name first, first name last, or, you know, however, you've got it organized. So, I've always just done it that way from day one, is to group them by what their most prominent relationships are.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense when you think about it. One thing that popped into my head when we were talking about timelines is events like birthdays and holidays.
You mentioned some things about Christmas where you might need to address it or not address it in particular books. And it's often been surprising to me, like, I feel like we don't see a lot of birthday parties in fiction. And I've talked to authors about it, and they talk about the pros and cons of noting someone's birthday. And I just wonder if you have thoughts about that.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Yeah, it's definitely, it can be good and bad, like, especially things like even when they have specific date lines, you know, like Thursday, November 4th, 3 p.m.
Okay, well, then that's a hard piece of information that you definitely need to make sure it lines up whereas if you don't have those at all, if it just says Wednesday or you know whatever it is, there's a little more fluidity involved, and it's not quite so so tight or so critical, so it's good and bad when I see those specific date lines or specific dates mentioned. If the author has kept it all in line, it's great because then I just check it off as I go along and say, "Okay, that lines up, that lines up, that lines up." But if it doesn't, then it can be a bit of a tangle to try and figure out what's going on and either if I can fix it myself with a minor edit or if I have to try and explain to the author, "Well, this is messed up and here's why, and I'm not sure how to fix it because you've got all these important plot points that are intertwined and have to happen on this day or that.”
You know, sometimes there's a fudge factor and sometimes there isn't. So it just all depends on what you're looking at.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
And like, you know, I think a lot of people think of copy editors as checking the commas and the capitalization, but you might point out that I think, you know, this character would actually do something special on Christmas, or Kwanzaa, or something like that. And that you might point out that, like, oh, you know, we're talking about a school break and it's winter break ,and these characters might actually be doing something important or having feelings about it that the author may have forgotten to mention or something like that. And that's sort of a deeper level of fact-checking that was, you know, covered in the book that I thought was really, wonderful and helpful and not something that a lot of people would think of when they think of copy editing.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Yeah. I mean, it depends on the genre too. Like when I mention those kinds of things, I'm mostly thinking about the homey, warm, and fuzzy, you know, like some women's fiction or the cozy mysteries and things like that. Those are going to be more holiday-oriented and personal holidays, birthdays, and things like that. Not so much like a gritty thriller or an urban fantasy or something like that. Again, it's all based on context, you know? So you might consider it in one book but not in another.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Right, like a cozy mystery set in a bakery, you know, it's gonna be different than a starship.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Right. Yep, a little bit.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
It's just a little … you can have a bakery on a starship, though. I think that's a good idea.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
There you go.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
And another thing I've talked to a number of authors in the last couple years, and they've mentioned that they're thinking a lot more about audiobooks and how their books are going to sound when they're read aloud. Is that something that comes up for you in copy editing too as you're thinking about how things are put together?
AMY SCHNEIDER:
I had this exact question at the Red Pencil conference last week, something like that.
Someone asked about audiobooks, and I do edit for traditional publishers who most certainly put their books out on Kindle or audiobooks and things like that, but I've never really been asked to edit for that specifically. I do try to keep in mind sound issues, like if there's a lot of alliteration or an unintentional seeming rhyme or echo or things like that. But yeah, the question was about dialogue tags. And the other thing is, I don't listen to audiobooks, so I had to ask. I said, "Do the narrators do different types of voices for different characters? Do they actually say the 'he said, she said'?"
I don't know if that's something that they maybe have permission to maybe edit that out a little bit sometimes or if it's a separate edit that's done. That I do not know, but it's definitely something that I want to maybe start keeping in mind and maybe ask some of my clients what do they do with that. That's a very good thing to bring up.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
My understanding is that they're required to read every word, so they have to say all the” he said”s and “she said”s, and so that people are sometimes putting in fewer dialogue tags because they feel like it's maybe more distracting in the audiobooks, which are becoming such a big part of the industry.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Yeah. I mean, I think too many dialogue tags can be distracting even in print.
And if you write your dialogue, you know, in a certain way, you don't need as many of them. So that could definitely be a good thing for all versions of books that come out. Maybe get away with a few more of those dialogue tags, if they're … so they're not quite so distracting.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah, I liked how you emphasized the difference between dialogue tags and action beats. Do you want to talk about that a little bit for the listeners?
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Yeah, I think that's the number one thing that confuses both writers and editors is understanding when we are, when it's a complete sentence and you're saying, you know,” blah, blah, blah, blah, comma, he said,” that's a complete sentence … a dialogue tag because the verb is describing the act of speech or producing language.
They could even be signing, they could be asking, they could be even thinking sometimes, as opposed to an action beat because you can't shrug words or grimace them. So you can't have "he frowned" where you don't frown words. You can frown as you say words, but that's not the act of producing speech. So that's a separate sentence. Have the speech, and then “he frowned.” And it just seemed really necessary to lay that all out. Here's how it works. Here's how you can fix it. And hopefully that'll be helpful for both writers and editors.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Right, so a dialogue tag has to be something that you can make a sound, like “whispered,” “yelled,” ideally “said,” or “asked.”
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Right. But then again, it can depend. I've edited books where I had specific instructions that anything can be a dialogue tag. So we might have "he grimaced" and then there are kind of the elliptical dialogue tags. Things like "he managed" where the "to say" is implied or "she tried" or "agreed" things like that.
They're not necessarily verbs of utterance, but it's an idiom. It's idiomatic that that's what we say when we are describing what how someone said something. So again, are there a lot of those kind of, you know, iffy dialogue tags? Then maybe leave them. We're not going to go through and change them all. But if the author has been pretty consistent about using, sticking to “said” and “asked” and all the other verb producing, you know, word-producing verbs, then maybe if we have a couple of those oddball ones, then go ahead and change them or query them.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah, I guess that falls under the kind of “anything goes in fiction” concept that there are rules, but we can break almost all of them in some situations. I'm really curious if you know, how does it come about that you'll get a message, you'll get instructions from a publisher that says, "This author can get away with this specific thing that normally you would change." Like, how does that happen?
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Well, I do work on a lot of bestsellers, so I think they tend to get more of their way. And also, I think it's sort of a rule that the better a writer is, the better they are at breaking the rules. So I think they get a lot more leeway, too. If you really know what you're doing, you know when you can go astray. Because you're doing it deliberately for effect and not just because you think it's some sort of implied voice or to be trying to be creative and it doesn't quite work. I find that the authors who have a better grasp of sentence structure and pacing and things like that, they tend to get more leeway.
Yeah.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Cool. I think another thing people would really enjoy hearing about is the semicolons.
And when to use them, when not to use them. I know people have such strong feelings about whether they like or hate semicolons, and you had a section on that in your book that I thought was interesting, too.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
I really don't get, I mean, semicolons is just one facet of a whole philosophy of editing and writing where people get these, they get these rules that they think they have to apply across the board. Don't use the word "that." Don't use the word "very." Don't use passive voice. Don't use "is, was, were" verbs. Don't use semicolons. I think when we hear those kinds of rules we need to stop and think is that really the case or is it just someone looking for a way to something that they can rely on so they can say well this is good writing because I did this or this or that. And semicolons I get it I mean it I don't get hate against punctuation it's just a dot on a page you know I we I mean we don't we don't speak in one rule people say is well we don't speak in semicolons, but we don't speak in parentheses or periods or commas either it's just they're just markers for the reader and to help us understand the structure of a sentence and I don't think we want to pepper fiction with semicolons it is a little bit more formal and a lot of people don't know how to use them so that's you know but that goes right along with the rule in fiction that it's okay to have comma splices it's okay to have fragments if that's what we need for pacing. I will occasionally put in a semicolon if I think it will help the reader make it through that sentence and if a period is going to be too much of a break then I'll use that semicolon.
That said, just this afternoon I started the first read on one of my series authors who says do not add semicolons. She doesn't want them, so I'm not going to insert any, and I always do an extra pass for semicolons when I'm done to make sure there aren't any in there. Because that's what the author wants, so that's what the author gets.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Excellent. Excellent. And I know it's different in different genres, too. Like, literary fiction is much more likely to have semicolons than, you know, a military fiction.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
YA or something, yeah. - Or something like that.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah! Yeah, YA is really different. Do you want to talk — what makes YA different?
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Oh, I think it's going to have a more casual tone. It's going to have a lot more, you know, slang and electronic communication type things. It's a lot more flexible, I think. I haven't done a lot of it, but whenever I've done it, it's always been a lot of fun and a nice break from some of the more serious adult stuff that I do.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah, I like YA too, and I always notice it's more first-person too in YA.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Oh yeah, yeah, you're right about that.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Sometimes, not always. You know, going back a little bit to the dialogue tags, another section you had that I thought was just especially good, and I've never seen it covered like this before, and it was just, once you laid it out, it was so clear — like, imagined thoughts, describing. ... So we know when someone says something, you put it in quotation marks, and, you know, “he said,” “she said,” whatever. But what about telepathy? What about thoughts that someone is just thinking? Or what about, this is a mouthed dialogue? Like if someone mouths "help" at you, but doesn't actually say it, like, how do you format that? Talk about your thinking about how that gets formatted.
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Yeah, you know, there again, I mean, if given — and I think I put this in the book — so if I have no rules given to me, or the author hasn't really been consistent, I will pretty much just do quotation marks for spoken or signed speech, and italic for everything well except for indirect thought, you know “I thought she looked a little angry,” you know, obviously, that's just going to be like narration, but yeah direct thought, mouth dialogue, imagined, all that sort of stuff, I just I prefer to reserve the quotation marks for things that are actually spoken or said or signed. But that's just me.
Now some authors will say they want mouth dialogue in quotation marks. They might want telepathic dialogue in quotation marks. I try to encourage editors not to let the manuscript look too much like a ransom note by trying to choose an absolutely different method for each type of dialogue because then it just gets kind of bonkers and kind of difficult to read. I do a series of books for a particular publisher that I'm fairly new working with them, and they have a lot of telepathic and, like, internal type dialogue that they use different kinds of brackets depending on what type of communication it is. And so I just and they actually they use word styles also, so I stick a word style on those, apply the brackets, and go on my merry way because that's their style. That's what they want, so there's so much flexibility. I mean, I don't prescribe specifically anything across the board, but mostly I just want people to be aware that these are different things that you're going to need to pay attention to and decide how they are treated already, or if there's nothing already applied, what are you going to do with them?
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah, and that's why the specific style sheets for each project are so important which I hadn't really realized as much before I read your book. Again the book is the Chicago Guide to Copy Editing Fiction. I think every fiction editor should get this, every aspiring fiction editor should get this. It is such a useful, practical, thorough guide. I'm just so happy I was able to talk with you about it, Amy. Where's the best place for people to find you online?
AMY SCHNEIDER:
Well, there's my website. It has all my social links on it. So that's just www.featherschneider.com. I try to hang out on social media. Obviously, it's been a little bit hectic lately. I haven't been on as much as I would like. I actually had to hire a virtual assistant to help me keep up with everything. And she's been great. So yeah, hopefully, after all the hubbub of this year, I can do a little bit more of my social media activity, get back active in there. I'm here.
MIGNON FOGARTY:
Yeah, that's super. Well, I love seeing you online. And thank you so much for being here today. All right. Well, thank you so much. I was so excited to talk to you.