A friend recently emailed me a colorful remark about her copy editor and it reminded me of my worst-ever experience . . .
It started pleasantly enough. The copy editor for my nineteenth book, a memoir titled My Germany. He emailed me that he wanted me to get a feel for his work on the book, so he attached the three-page prologue with his changes. To see what I thought.
That sentence you just read was a fragment. Deliberately. For emphasis.
In the marked-up pages I opened, he hadn’t just eliminated any fragment, he rewrote whole sentences, and the diction was altered to be more formal. There was hardly a paragraph that didn’t sound different from the original. It was as if someone had run a word processing grammar and style check, and anything nonstandard was gone. The rhythm of my prose was completely changed and the effect was a complete distortion of my voice in that book.
I was not pleased.
I’m not like the over-territorial writer I heard about who wrote across the front page of his manuscript STET THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING. I know there are lots of problems even the most careful readings can miss, especially repetition, and that it’s annoying for readers to find errors in a published book, so I’ve always welcomed careful copy editing. But this was something very different.
I’m the son of Holocaust survivors and My Germany charts Germany haunted our family, affected my life and my writing. It also describes what happened when I was surprisingly invited to travel to Germany on two book tours after a German publisher bought three of my books for translation.
The prologue focuses on a reading I gave in Magdeburg (in former East Germany), a city where my mother had been a slave laborer in a munitions factory. Looking at my entrance into the city vs. hers, I reflect there on the general fear and loathing of Germany that I had grown up with. It was a country that had not just murdered millions of Jews but had plundered everything they possessed down to common personal goods and household items like wallets, combs, mattresses.
I wrote that one thing I had always dreaded about the possibility of being in Germany myself was that "Anywhere I stayed in that country, I might turn and face something that had belonged to a murdered relative." How horrible to be in the presence of a trace of my lost family—candlesticks, a painting, books—and not know it, given that all that survives of dozens of my relatives is only their names and a handful of photos.
The copy editor changed the line to "Anywhere I traveled in that country, I might encounter something that had belonged to a murdered relative." At first glance, these changes might seem superficial, but they’re not: "turn and face" offers you the immediacy, the physicality of a dreadful moment, which his change eliminates. But worse than that is the diction: "traveled” and “encounter" are more formal, more distanced, and the entire prologue read that way. As The Talking Heads might have sung in a similar situation, "This was not my beautiful book."
I emailed him that he was doing much more than copy editing: he was rewriting the book and that was unacceptable. I asked him to confine himself to obvious questions of grammar, punctuation and clarity, and to leave my voice alone. He agreed and I thought the hassle was over.
Then a month later, the full manuscript came by mail and while I welcomed all the places where he’d caught repetitions or problems with punctuation, once again, I started to seethe. His touch was somewhat less intrusive, but he was still rewriting the book, making my diction more formal and more clichéd. He also made substitutions I didn’t understand. If I said people "retreated" why would he suggest "withdrew"? If I chose "polite" why nudge me with "proper"? And if I described someone at a reading who asked me a question "softly," how could he come up with "hesitantly"? I had been there, the question wasn’t hesitant, it was softy spoken. Those aren’t the same things.
And not only that, he was wrong on one point after another. Our family had always avoided German products but I had come to enjoy Jacobs Krönung coffee. He claimed that Google said there was no umlaut over the “o.” Well, I knew he was wrong, not least because I had a bag of those beans in my freezer. Of course there’s an umlaut: that's the German spelling. Had he bothered to click on one of his Google links, he might have seen an actual photo of a bag of Krönung beans. Is this petty? Yes. And that’s what can happen with copy editing: you find yourself in an argument over way too many small points with a total stranger who you’ll never meet. It can be a weird mix of intimacy, hostility, and distance.
Mr. Google, as I started thinking of him, was also sloppy. I spoke in Heidelberg at a German American cultural institution housed in a mansion called Palais Eskeles (the Americans don’t have an equivalent but the English might call it Eskeles House). He wanted to know "why the French spelling?" for Palais. The answer was simple: because it’s the German spelling for that word, too.
The problems extended beyond spelling to questions of fact. My father was a horribly abused slave laborer under the Hungarians and survived the 1943 Battle of Voronezh in which a Hungarian army was destroyed. My doughty copy editor once again claimed Google as his source and said the Battle of Voronezh was in 1942. But there were two battles of Voronezh, the second in 1943, hence my careful dating of it. This sort of thing went on page after page and I broke the point of my red pencil over and over writing STET or NO to his questions and suggestions.
He was truly working my last nerve.
I know that for many people, being legacy published might be a dream that might never come true and they would love to have the problems I’ve been describing–-or so they think. But going over a copy-edited manuscript is always difficult. It requires breaking down something large and organic into the smallest constituent parts. A work that was imbued with excitement and enjoyment, something you loved, can start to feel mechanical and prosaic. The book you treasured working on becomes a site of contention, something to wrangle over. It leaves you feeling sour and cranky, eager to be done with the project and get the offending manuscript off your desk and out of your house as soon as possible.
I suspect that may be one reason why so many errors still appear in finished books and readers complain, "Why didn’t somebody edit this?" The answer might be paradoxical: somebody did. Too much. And the author was exhausted.
Image by Istvan Brecz-Gruber from Pixabay
Lev Raphael is most recently the author of “The Music of Me,” one of over eighty online or print essay publications since the height of the pandemic. Before that, he authored 27 books in a wide array of genres plus hundreds of short stories, essays, book reviews and blogs. He lives in mid-Michigan.
Many years ago, I had a discussion on this very issue with my good friend and wonderful writer Sharyn McCrumb. She told me she got so mad at one copy editor that she had two rubber stamps made. One read: "STET"
And the other read: "STET, DAMMIT!"
What a shame. It sounds as though the copyeditor didn't know what he was doing.