Clashing with Copyeditors

(They can work your last nerve)

Years ago a novelist friend told me that the only thing worse than not being published was being published.

I liked his phrase so much that I later made it the epigram of my second mystery, The Edith Wharton Murders (the book that got me a NYTBR rave). But at the time he shared his rueful wisdom, I had no idea what he could mean. Once you got published, what could you possibly have to worry about? Wouldn’t life be perfect?

That was before I had my first collision with a copyeditor.

In my debut fiction collection, there were a number of stories about Holocaust survivors, and I was careful about having the dialogue reflect that English wasn’t their native language. Like many immigrants, they “translated” from the language they knew best, giving their English a Yiddish-inflected twist.

The copyeditor didn’t get it and relentlessly standardized every line of their dialogue in one story after another. An author friend I shared this with said that a writer friend of his was once so enraged by a copyeditor’s rampant lack of imagination that he just wrote across the title page of his manuscript, “STET the whole goddamned thing.” I could never do that, because copyeditors do catch real problems, but I’ve come to understand the sentiment.

On one book, I found the publisher’s copyeditor aggressively changing everything—my style, my syntax, my vocabulary—to some imagined idea of good prose. The effect was to make it sound as if it had been written by a computer program slavishly conforming to grammar and style rules without any room for originality.

This person even had the nerve to commend a word I used as “a good word”--as if I were in elementary school and was going to get a gold star. That was before telling me I wasn’t using it strictly correctly. But after having won some writing awards; published nineteen books at that point; also published hundreds of reviews, essays, and articles, I had my own ideas about what was correct for my book, and I said so.

The project wasn’t spoiled, but I had to put far more work into restoring my prose, excavating the dull ruin it had been turned into. I was pissed off to have encountered such tone-deaf copyediting.

And yes, I mean pissed off--not annoyed, irritated, steamed, put out, or vexed.

Lev Raphael is the author of Writer’s Block is Bunk and 26 other books in genres from memoir to mystery. Born in New York, he lives in Michigan.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay