PUTTING ASIDE THE EXTENSIVE MECHANICAL WORK of attending to the rudiments of spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc., the styling of prose is very much about listening. An attentive copy editor should become attuned to and immersed in a writer’s voice to the point where the copy editor has so thoroughly absorbed the writer’s intentions that the process turns into a sort of conversation-on-the-page.

Nowhere is this conversation more crucial than in the copyediting of fiction, where artistry, however you want to define that slippery concept, can outrank and outweigh notions of what might conventionally be deemed “correct”; where voice—eccentric, particular, peculiar as it may be—is paramount; and where a copy editor, however well-intentioned, who can’t hear what a writer is doing, or at least attempting to do, is apt to wreak havoc. Unfortunately, havoc is occasionally wreaked*1: I cringingly recall an instance in which one of the finest copy editors I know—so attentive, so sensitive, so adept that editors clamor for her services—crashed and burned on a job in which for some mysterious, unhappy reason she didn’t understand what the writer was doing generally and, specifically and perhaps worst of all, didn’t get his jokes, which she proceeded to flatten as if with a steamroller.^*2 Happily, this sort of calamity is exceptionally rare, and it was easy enough, in this case, to put the writer’s nose back in joint by having his manuscript recopyedited, tip to toe, by another copy editor.

Though I can’t here demonstrate in any practical fashion the elusive art of empathic listening, I can certainly let you in on some of the methodology—scrutinizing everything, taking nothing for granted, asking lots of questions, taking lots of notes, and performing scores of little tricks—a copy editor employs in the act of copyediting a work of fiction.^*3 I can, as well, point out to you some of the glitches that, since I’ve repeatedly come face-to-face with them over the years, you may well find in your own work.

THE REAL REALITY OF FICTION

Fiction may be fictional, but a work of fiction won’t work if it isn’t logical and consistent.

• Characters must age in accordance with the calendar—that is, someone asserted to have been born in May 1960 must then be twenty-five in May 1985, forty in May 2000, etc.—and at the same pace as other characters: Two characters who meet at the ages of thirty-five and eighteen cannot, in a later scene, be fifty and merely twenty-six. Grandparents and great-grandparents, I’ve occasionally noted, are often said to have lived decades out of whack, in either direction, with what is reproductively possible.

• Keep track of the passage of time, particularly in narratives whose plots play themselves out, crucially, in a matter of days or weeks. I’ve encountered many a Friday arriving two days after a Tuesday, and third graders in math class on what, once one adds up the various “the next day”s, turns out to be a Sunday.

• Height; weight; eye and hair color; nose, ear, and chin size; right- or left-handedness; etc., mandate consistency.

• Stage management and choreography: Watch out for people going up to the attic only to shortly and directly step out onto the driveway; removing their shoes and socks twice over the course of five minutes; drinking from glasses they quite definitively set down, a few paragraphs earlier, in another room;^*4 and reading newspapers that suddenly transform into magazines.

• While we’re here: I recall one manuscript in which fully half the characters had names beginning with the letter M. You may not be surprised to learn that the author’s given name also began with an M. This is not a good thing.^*5

• I don’t know why or how writers end up laboriously and lengthily describing restaurant meals as if they—the writers, that is—have never experienced one, but: Pay better attention.

• I don’t know why or how writers end up laboriously and lengthily counterfeiting newspaper articles as if they—the writers, that is—had never read one. At the least, remember to establish the whowhatwherewhywhen you were taught in high school, and terse it up a bit too.

Fun tip for counterfeiting newspaper articles with verisimilitude and panache: Yank out all the series commas.

Real-world details must also be honored. You may think that readers won’t notice such things. I assure you they will.

• If you’re going to set your story on, say, Sunday, September 24, 1865, make sure that September 24, 1865, was indeed a Sunday. There are any number of perpetual calendars online.^*6 (Also remember that if you’re rummaging through old newspaper archives to see what was going on on September 24, 1865, you’d do well to look at newspapers dated September 25, 1865.)

• I recall copyediting a novel in which the protagonist made a journey by, respectively, cab, train, subway, and a second cab in three hours that couldn’t, as I proceeded to plot it out with maps, timetables, and a healthy respect for speed limits, possibly have been completed in fewer than ten.

• If you’re going to set your story in, say, New York City, you’d better keep track of which avenues guide vehicles south to north and which north to south, and which streets aim east and which west.

• You’ve likely noticed that the sun rises and sets at different times over the course of a year. Make sure you remember to notice that when you’re writing.^*7

• Not all trees and flowers flourish everywhere on Earth.

• If you want to be terribly precise about characters’ moviegoing and TV-watching habits, as many writers seem intent on doing, make sure that, say, The Sound of Music was in theaters in the summer of 1965^*8 or that That Girl aired on Wednesdays.^*9 If you’re not up for that sort of thing, you always have the option of giving less rather than more detailed information, or you can just make up fictitious but plausible-sounding movies and TV series, which I think is a lot more fun anyway.

• Five-digit zip codes didn’t turn up till the 1960s (and the additional four digits didn’t arrive till the 1980s); neither did the two-letter periodless state abbreviations we’re all now used to. An envelope in the 1950s would not have been addressed to, say:

Boston, MA 02128

It would have been, using the postal zone system devised in the 1940s, addressed to:

Boston 28, Mass.

If your epistolary novel spanning decades requires this sort of stuff, you’d do well to get this sort of stuff right.^*10

• Period authenticity also mandates technical and societal plausibility, and this covers everything from the invention and obsolescence of phone answering machines (especially the sort on which people were always, to their plot-twisting embarrassment, overhearing messages intended for others as they were being left), to the iterations and capabilities of the iPhone, to pre- and post-9/11 levels of security in airports and office buildings, to the existence and popularity of particular pharmaceuticals.^*11

• Some historical novelist out there may well find this useful, so here’s a bit of trivia for you: Recordings at the dawn of that technology were often introduced, right on the wax cylinder, by a sort of emcee, thus: “ ‘All Going Out and Nothing Coming In,’ by Mr. Bert Williams, of Williams and Walker, Edison Records!”

• Period vocabulary is its own issue: A writer working on a novel set in eighteenth-century London certainly isn’t restricted to the extant words of that era (or its grammar, or its punctuation), but you do want to be careful not to insert glaring anachronisms. I once encountered the word “maverick” showing up a few centuries in advance of the birth of Samuel A. Maverick, on whom the word was founded, and a reference to a woman’s outfit as “matchy-matchy” in 1920s Manhattan, which: no.

Dictionaries are particularly helpful in providing the first known use of any given word, so avail yourself of one.

• If you’re dabbling in historical pastiche—that is, going out of your way to imitate the word conventions of the era in which your story is set—only you can decide how heavily you wish to dabble. A novel set in the early twentieth century might well feature not a lightbulb, as we’d now style that word, but a light bulb or a light-bulb, and you may or may not want to refer to a telephone as a ’phone, an omnibus as a ’bus, or influenza as the ’flu.

• Sometimes you just can’t win. Long ago, in the pre-Internet era, when it wasn’t quite so easy to know everything in a split second, I copyedited a novel set in the early 1960s that referred in passing to a Burger King. “AU,” I wrote in the margin, “PLS. CONFIRM THE EXISTENCE OF BURGER KINGS IN THE 1960S.” The author ultimately chose to change the Burger King to some sort of Grilled Sandwich Shack of his own devise, acknowledging to me that though he’d carefully researched the history of the food chain and was accurate in his citation, every single person who’d read the manuscript before I did had asked him the same question, and it wasn’t, he decided, worth the reader hiccup.^*12

THE BASICS OF GOOD STORYTELLING

Many writers rely more heavily on pronouns than I’d suggest is useful. For me this sort of thing comes under the heading Remember that Writing Is Not Speaking. When we talk, we can usually make ourselves understood even amid a flood of vague “he”s and “she”s. On the page, too many pronouns are apt to be confounding. I’d strongly suggest to the point of insistence that you avoid referring to two people by the same pronoun over the course of a single sentence; to be frank, I’d suggest that you avoid it over the course of a single paragraph. (I know a few authors of same-sex romance novels who are regularly driven to tears by this sort of thing.) The repetition of characters’ names is certainly one possible fallback, and though you as a writer may initially think that that third “Constance” over the course of seven sentences is overkill, I as your copy editor strongly believe that your readers will be happier not to have to puzzle over which “she” you’re talking about; I think of this as basic skeletal stuff and believe that it’s all but invisible to readers. On the other hand, if your paragraph is awash with names and pronouns and you think it’s all too much, hunker down and do the sort of revision that eliminates the need for an excess of either. It can be tricky, but it’s worth it, and it may well net you a leaner, stronger bit of prose.

• If your attempts to distinguish between unnamed characters of no particular importance lead to describing what “the first woman” then said or did to “the second woman,” you might want to step back and give these women, if not names, at least distinct physical characteristics that can be expressed in one or two words. The redhead. The older woman. Something.

• One writer of my beloved acquaintance possesses, it seems, only one way to denote an indeterminate number of things: “a couple.” And not even “a couple of.” No, it’s a couple hours, a couple days, a couple cookies, a couple guys. Over time I attempted to introduce her to concepts like “few,” “several,” and “some,” but she remained largely unpersuaded, and I largely stopped nagging her about it. I urge the rest of you to strive for variation.

• When you’ve come up with that piquantly on-the-nose, distinctive, wow-that’s-perfect adjective, you may—as I’ve noticed—be so pleased with it that you unwittingly summon it up again right away. If an idea is, say, benighted on p. 27, some other idea oughtn’t to be benighted on p. 31.^*13 Consider jotting down on a pad your favorite five-dollar words as you use them to ensure that none of them appear more than once per manuscript.

• Keep an eye on the repetition of even garden-variety nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs of only moderate distinction, which you might not want to repeat in proximity—unless you’re doing this with a purpose, in which case: Do it.

Here, for instance, is a marvelous example. I’ve always cherished it, and I like to haul it out whenever I can, as it celebrates the skill of a writer who’s not often complimented on his writing.

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.

It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose. Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly.

Gray, gray, gray. Nine of them over the course of four paragraphs. They don’t make a lot of noise—would you have noticed them had I not set you looking for them?—but they get the job done.^*14

Even a “he walked up the stairs and hung up his coat” might, if you’re so inclined, benefit from a tweak—easy in this case: Just change “walked up” to “climbed.”^*15 I’ll extend this advice even to the suggestion that you avoid echoing similar-sounding words: a “twilight” five words away from a “light,” for instance.^*16

• Also be wary of inadvertent rhymes, of the “Rob commuted to his job” or “make sure that tonight is all right” sort. By “be wary,” I mean: Don’t do them.

• Writers’ brains, I’ve noted, have a tendency to play tricks when the writer isn’t paying attention, and in copyediting I’ve occasionally run across weird little puns, echoes, and other bits of unconscious wordplay. Every time I read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” I’m stopped in my tracks by this:

She watched while Mr. Graves came around from the side of the box, greeted Mr. Summers gravely, and selected a slip of paper from the box.

Somehow I can’t imagine Jackson stooping on purpose to such a thudding little joke.

• With all the nodding and head shaking going on, I’m surprised that half the characters in modern fiction haven’t dislocated something. By the way, characters who nod needn’t nod their heads, as there’s really not much else available to nod. And the same goes for the shrugging of unnecessarily-alluded-to shoulders. What else are you going to shrug? Your elbows?

• If everyone in your world is forever pushing their eyeglasses up their collective noses, please send everyone and their eyeglasses to an optician’s shop.

• How often do you stare into the middle distance? Me neither.

• A brief, scarcely exhaustive list of other actions that wise writers might do well to put on permanent hiatus:

the angry flaring of nostrils

the thoughtful pursing of lips

the quizzical cocking of the head

the letting out of the breath you didn’t even know you were holding

the extended mirror stare, especially as a warm-up for a memory whose recollection is apt to go on for ten pages

Also overrated:

blinking

grimacing

huffing

pausing (especially for “a beat”)

smiling weakly

snorting

swallowing

doing anything wistfully

• “After a moment,” “in a moment,” “she paused a moment,” “after a long moment”…There are so many moments. So many.

• This may be a particular peeve of mine and no one else’s, but I note it, because it’s my book: Name-dropping, for no better reason than to show off, underappreciated novels, obscure foreign films, or cherished indie bands by having one’s characters irrelevantly reading or watching or listening to them is massively sore-thumbish. A novel is not a blog post about Your Favorite Things.^*17 If you must do this sort of thing—and, seriously, must you?—contextualize heavily.

• For fiction written in the past tense, here’s a technique for tackling flashbacks that I stumbled upon years ago, and writers I’ve shared it with have tended to get highly excited: Start off your flashback with, let’s say, two or three standard-issue “had”s (“Earlier that year, Jerome had visited his brother in Boston”), then clip one or two more “had”s to a discreet “ ’d” (“After an especially unpleasant dinner, he’d decided to return home right away”), then drop the past-perfecting altogether when no one’s apt to be paying attention and slip into the simple past (“He unlocked his front door, as he later recalled it, shortly after midnight”). Works like a charm.

• You writers are all far too keen on “And then,” which can usually be trimmed to “Then” or done away with entirely.

• You’re also overfond of “suddenly.”

 

Yet Another Shirley Jackson Reference

A few years ago^*18 I had the unforeseen-except-perhaps-in-work-related-dreams honor of copyediting my favorite author, Shirley Jackson, whom I’d not previously had the pleasure of working with because she died when I was in the first grade. Random House had contracted to publish a book of some of Jackson’s previously uncollected and/or entirely unseen stories and essays,^*19 and I happily nominated myself to attend to whatever dusting off and polishing up the material needed.

Unsurprisingly, the previously published stuff demanded little of my time: It had been well attended to by the magazines that had been a regular and lucrative source of income for Jackson—Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, and McCall’s, believe it or not, not to mention The New Yorker. Some minor fussings-about aside, those pieces were republished essentially as they had been seen in Jackson’s lifetime.

But much of the unpublished material had been presented to us in photocopies of Jackson’s characteristic all-lowercase first drafts—I imagine her clattering away at her typewriter in bursts of determined creativity, not bothering to reach for the SHIFT key—and no writer dead or alive deserves to have their material sent to press without at least some review.^*20 To say nothing of capital letters.

I assured the book’s editors, who happened to be two of Jackson’s grown children and literary executors, that being a lifelong devotee of their mother’s work and having read and reread her writing for decades, I knew Jackson’s voice as well as any copy editor could hope to know it. I promised them that the material was in safe hands and that I didn’t expect to do much more than correct the odd typo.

But: Once I got to work I realized that though the material was, throughout, first-rate—shockingly clean, I’d say, given that it seemed to have moved straight from Jackson’s brain to her fingers to the pages and never been touched again—it needed a bit, truly just a bit, of a helping hand.

Having no live author to query—though, to be sure, anything I wanted to do was going to be run past the heirs—I extricated myself from the horns of this dilemma by setting for myself respectful ground rules: I’d allow myself free rein with punctuation, turn the occasional unclear pronoun into a clearer noun (or, if a noun seemed uncalled for, do the reverse), and attempt otherwise never to delete or add more than two words—little words like the and that and which and and—at a time.

As it turned out, I was overwhelmingly able to stick to those strictures. Beyond that I found maybe a half dozen knotted-up sentences that were easily untangled—just as, I’m confident, Jackson herself would have untangled them on a second or third run-through. I also quickly discovered that Jackson went to the well of “suddenly” and “and then” rather frequently—there are quite a few fewer of both in the finished book—and occasionally put more pressure on the worthy semicolon than a semicolon can bear.

At one point I stared down a single paragraph for a good twenty minutes, willing its last sentence to be its first. Or was it the other way around? In the event, I eventually realized that the author was right and I was wrong and left the paragraph alone.

Once and only once did I venture to suggest that two substantive words needed to be added to fill out a sentence whose rhythm I couldn’t make peace with, and those two words^*21 made it into the book, and I like to flatter myself that I’d ventured so thoroughly into the Shirley Jackson Place by then that the words were not mine but hers. To date, I’ve experienced no alarmingly blown-open windows or inexplicably smashed crockery, so I like to think that Shirley Jackson is content.

 

• “He began to cry” = “He cried.” Dispose of all “began to”s.

• My nightmare sentence is “And then suddenly he began to cry.”

DIALOGUE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

• Fond as I am of semicolons, they’re ungainly in dialogue. Avoid them.

• In real-life conversation, how often do you say the name of the person to whom you’re speaking?

Not that much?

Then why do your characters do it so frequently?

• There’s an awful lot of murmuring in fiction nowadays. One writer I repeatedly worked with assured me after a few collaborations that, as he wrote, he let all his characters murmur as much as they wanted to because he knew I would call him out on it, and then he’d cut back on it. There’s also, I note, a great deal of whispering, quite a lot of it hoarse. Perhaps you might offer your hoarse whisperer a cup of tea or a lozenge.

• Italics for emphasis in dialogue can be helpful, but use them sparingly. For one thing, readers don’t always relish being told, in such a patently obvious fashion, how to read. For another, if the intended emphasis in any given line of dialogue can’t be detected without the use of italics, it’s possible that your given line of dialogue could use a bit of revision anyway. Among other solutions, try tossing the bit that needs emphasis to the end of a sentence rather than leaving it muddling in the middle.

Copyediting one masterly novel, I recall gingerly attempting, over the course of a few hundred pages, perhaps a dozen bits of italicization that I thought might be clarifying. The author politely declined, each and every time. (She was right. Authors often are. One of the dangers of copyediting really good writing is that you may find yourself looking to do something to earn your keep and making suggestions that don’t need to be suggested.)

• Go light on exclamation points in dialogue. No, even lighter than that. Are you down to none yet? Good.

• Owen Meany may have spoken in all capital letters, but I’ll wager your characters can make themselves heard without them. Use italics for shouting, if you must. And, yes, exclamation points—one at a time. No boldface, please, not ever.

• One especially well attended school of thought endorses setting off dialogue with nothing fancier than “he said” and “she said.” I’ve encountered enough characters importuning tearily and barking peevishly that I’m not unsympathetic to that suggestion of restraint, but there’s no reason to be quite so spartan should your characters occasionally feel the need to bellow, whine, or wheedle. Please, though: moderation. A lot of this:

he asked helplessly

she cried ecstatically

she added irrelevantly

he remarked decisively

objected Tom crossly

broke out Tom violently

is hard to take, and I suppose I should have a chat with F. Scott Fitzgerald, as all of these come from the first chapter of The Great Gatsby.

• If your seething, exasperated characters must hiss something—and, really, must they?—make sure they’re hissing something hissable.

“Take your hand off me, you brute!” she hissed.

—CHARLES GARVICE, Better Than Life (1891)

Um, no, she didn’t. You try it.

“Chestnuts, chestnuts,” he hissed. “Teeth! teeth! my preciousss; but we has only six!”

—J.R.R. TOLKIEN, The Hobbit (1937)

OK, now we’re cooking.^*22

I’ve seen the argument put forth that any sort of strained constricted whispering qualifies as hissing. To which I can only say that of the approximately 4.3 million ways in which one can characterize speech, “hissed” is not your best bet for s-less utterances. Pick another word. Snarled. Grumbled. Susurrated. Well, maybe not susurrated.

As far as I’m concerned:

No sibilants = no hissing.

• Inserting a “she said” into a speech after the character’s been rattling on for six sentences is pointless. If you’re not setting a speech tag before a speech, then at least set it early on, preferably at the first possible breathing point.

• Something, something, something, she thought to herself.

Unless she’s capable of thinking to someone else—and for all I know your character is a telepath—please dispose of that “to herself” instanter.

• In olden times, one often saw articulated thought—that is, dialogue that remains in a character’s brain, unspoken—set in quotation marks, like dialogue. Then, for a while, italics (and no quotation marks) were all the rage. Now, mostly such thoughts are simply set in roman, as, say:

I’ll never be happy again, Rupert mused.

As it’s perfectly comprehensible, and as no one likes to read a lot of italics, I endorse this.^*23

• Speaking of articulated thought, I’m not entirely persuaded that people, with any frequency, or at all, blurt out the thoughts they’re thinking.

And when they do, I doubt very much that they suddenly clap their hands over their mouths.

• “Hello,” he smiled.

“I don’t care,” he shrugged.

No.

Dialogue can be said, shouted, sputtered, barked, shrieked, or whispered—it can even be murmured—but it can’t be smiled or shrugged.

Occasionally one will even encounter the likes of

“That’s all I have to say,” he walked out of the room.

The easiest copyeditorial solutions to such things are:

“Hello,” he said with a smile.

“Hello,” he said, smiling.

or the blunter

“Hello.” He smiled.

The better writerly solution is not to employ these constructions in the first place.

 

“Hello,” He Smiled: The Richard Russo Story

It begins with this:

“Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.”

That’s an editorial maxim from The New Yorker’s^*24 Wolcott Gibbs dating back to the middish 1930s, and I’d happened upon it in the back pages of Genius in Disguise, Thomas Kunkel’s irresistible biography of Harold Ross, the magazine’s co-founder.^*25

I liked Gibbs’s remark so much that I typed it up, printed it out in a great big font, and taped it to my office door. The hallway side, for the record.

It’s 1995, I retrocalculate, and I was relatively green as a copy editor and relatively new to Random House as a production editor and possessed of the arrogance of relative if receding youth and of thinking I knew a lot more than I did. And somehow I read Wolcott Gibbs’s double-edged sword of an epigram far too often as a mandate not to preserve respectfully but to fix: to take the rules I’d learned and been taught and boned up on and impose them on writers not so blessed with my knowledge and expertise.

I must have been insufferable.

So here I am, with my motto on my door, supervising the production of, let’s say, a dozen or so books, including Straight Man, a novel by the excellent Richard Russo, who’d go on in the early 2000s to win a Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls. (Straight Man is not nearly as well known, I think, as it ought to be, and it’s riotously funny. Go find a copy.)

Early on in the process, as the manuscript had just been mailed off to the freelancer I’d contracted to copyedit it, Russo was for some reason or other in the building and, nicely enough, visited me in my office. I can’t say I recall what we chatted about, but he was genial and anticipatorily appreciative, and I presume I was deferential and respectful, and off we went.

It’s a few weeks later now, and the copyedited manuscript of Straight Man has been sent to its author for review and response, and thus it’s out of sight and out of mind—out of my mind, at least—as I’m working away on something else, when the phone rings.

“Benjamin, it’s Rick Russo.”

Pleasantries are exchanged.

“Benjamin, would you say that I’m an author?”

Absolute bafflement. “Well, of course.”

“And would you say that I have a style?”

The light begins to break forth, but it’s still shadowy inside my head. “Well, of course,” I repeat, definitively if warily.

It transpires that my copy editor—who, Rick immediately assures me, has done an exemplary job throughout—has also performed, repeatedly, a standard bit of copyeditorial tweakery, which was to, in encountering the likes of

“Hello,” he smiled.

alter it to something like

“Hello,” he said with a smile.

or perhaps

“Hello,” he said smilingly.

or even, perhaps and simply,

“Hello.” He smiled.

The point, as possibly you’ve inferred, being that one can say hello, and one can smile, but one can’t smile hello—or, for that matter, smile any other utterance. One must indeed say it. Copyediting 101.

“If I admit,” Rick goes on, “that I fully recognize that the copy editor is right and I am wrong, and that this helloing smiling thing is dreadful and insupportable and should never be allowed, might you see fit to allow me to leave it be for no better reason than that I prefer it that way?”

Well, what is one to say in response? He’s the author, he’s charming, and I’m a pushover in the face of a charm offensive, as any number of writers who’ve wrapped me around their little fingers have figured out over the years. And, after all and most important, it’s his book. At least I know which one of us is the dog and which the tail.

“Of course,” I smiled.

And thus Rick Russo had his way, and Straight Man was published, and no reviewers, so far as I recall, went out of their way to call out and condemn the helloing smiling construction, and I went right back to doing my best to ensure that the helloing smiling construction never again made its way into print—because, truly, I thought it was awful then and I think it’s awful now. But eternal gratitude to Rick Russo for having taught me an invaluable lesson:

The lesson being that notwithstanding all the commonly asserted rules of prose one has been taught in school or read about in stylebooks, authors do, as Wolcott Gibbs recognized and, now, so do I, have their preservable styles, and the role of a copy editor is, above all else, to assist and enhance and advise rather than to correct—indeed, not to try to transform a book into the copy editor’s notion of what a good book should be but, simply and with some measure of humility, to help fulfill an author’s vision and make each book into the ideal version of itself.

The other lesson being, I suppose, that Rick Russo is terribly observant of the things one posts on one’s office door even if he doesn’t mention it at the time.

 

A FEW POINTERS ON UNFINISHED SPEECH

• If one of your characters is speaking and is cut off in midsentence by the speech or action of another character, haul out a dash:

“I’m about to play Chopin’s Prelude in—”

Grace slammed the piano lid onto Horace’s fingers.

• When a line of dialogue is interrupted by an action, note that the dashes are placed not within the dialogue but on either side of the interrupting action.

“I can’t possibly”—she set the jam pot down furiously—“eat such overtoasted toast.”

Writers will often do this:

“I can’t possibly—” she set the jam pot down furiously “—eat such overtoasted toast.”

and that floating, unmoored narration is, I’m sure you’ll agree, spooky-looking.

• If one of your characters is speaking and drifts off dreamily in midsentence, indicate that not with a dash but with an ellipsis.

“It’s been such a spring for daffodils,” she crooned kittenishly.^*26 “I can’t recall the last time…” She drifted off dreamily in midsentence.

• When characters self-interrupt and immediately resume speaking with a pronounced change in thought, I suggest the em dash–space–capital letter combo pack, thus:

“Our lesson for today is— No, we can’t have class outside today, it’s raining.”^*27

• “Furthermore,” he noted, “if your characters are in the habit of nattering on for numerous uninterrupted paragraphs of dialogue, do remember that each paragraph of dialogue concludes without a closing quotation mark, until you get to the last one.

“Only then do you properly conclude the dialogue with a closing quotation mark.

“Like so.”

MISCELLANEOUSLY

• If you’re writing a novel in English that’s set, say, in France, all of whose characters are ostensibly speaking French, do not pepper their dialogue with actual French words and phrases—maman and oui and n’est-ce pas—you remember from the fourth grade. It’s silly, cheap, obvious, and any other adjectives you might like if they’ll stop you from doing this sort of thing. (Whenever I encounter these bits of would-be local color, I assume that the characters are suddenly speaking in English.)

• Conversely, real-life nonnative speakers of English, I find, rarely lapse into their native tongue simply to say yes, no, or thank you.

• And I implore you: Do not attempt, here in the twenty-first century, to convey the utterance of a character who may be speaking other than what, for the sake of convenience, I’ll call standard English with the use of tortured phonetic spellings, the relentless replacement of terminal g’s with apostrophes, or any of the other tricks that might have worked for Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, or William Faulkner but are, I assure you, not going to work for you. At best you’ll come off as classist and condescending; at worst, in some cases, you’ll tip over into racism.

A lot can be accomplished in the conveyance of eccentricity of speech with word choice and word order. Make good use of those.^*28

• You could certainly do worse than to follow the standard of Gore Vidal’s immortal Myra Breckinridge: “I am fortunate in having no gift at all for characterizing in prose the actual speech of others and so, for literary purposes, I prefer to make everyone sound like me.”

• I’ve mentioned this before, and it applies to all writing, but I think it applies especially to fiction, whether you’re writing it or copyediting it: Reading fiction aloud highlights strengths and exposes weaknesses. I heartily recommend it.

*1  I don’t know why some people insist that the past tense of “wreak” is “wrought”—that’s a lie, I do know why, but I don’t want to encourage them—but it is indeed “wreaked.”

*2  At least she did not, as cataclysmically happened on one job I have firsthand knowledge of, tell the writer repeatedly that her protagonist wouldn’t, because it was out of character, do the thing she’d just done. (Note to copy editors: Never do this.)

*3  Let’s please allow that I’m using the term “fiction” here to include as well the various flavors of narrative nonfiction that spring from a writer’s memory banks, rather than the kind of formal reportage that coalesces from years of archival research and sheaves of notes.

*4  As a rule, the consumption of beverages is not as interesting as many writers seem to think it is.

*5  It was a point of ongoing perturbation for me that two characters on the Downton Abbey series were both—pointlessly, so far as I could discern—named Thomas and that both their surnames began with a B.

*6  I’ve bookmarked timeanddate.com.

*7  Google “sunrise sunset” and you’ll be led not only to a number of useful sites but to Eddie Fisher’s plaintive rendition of the hit song from Fiddler on the Roof.

*8  It was. You can find your own way to IMDb.

*9  It didn’t. It aired on Thursdays. Wikipedia is great for this sort of thing.

*10  Having, I trust, made my point, I leave you to your own research on the history of phone numbers, exchanges, area codes, mandatory area codes, and the digit 1.

*11  It’s been said, and sometimes I believe it, that the worst things to happen to modern fiction are the invention of the cellphone and the availability of antidepressants. But that’s a subject for another book.

*12  My copy editor has queried my use above of the phrase “his own devise,” wondering whether it’s (a) too quaint for its own good, and (b) apt to be mistaken for a typo. It’s a good thing we have explanatory, clarifying footnotes, isn’t it.

*13  I was recently advised of a novel in which the word “spatulate”—I didn’t recognize it either; it’s an adjective that means “shaped like a spatula”—showed up twice in two pages, referring to two entirely unrelated nouns. Oh dear.

*14  Hoorah for L. Frank Baum and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, of which these paragraphs are (nearly) the opening.

*15  Beyond eliminating the “up” repetition, you’ve also replaced a prepositional phrase with a more precise single-word verb, which almost invariably declutters and improves a sentence.

*16  How bothersome are these wee repetitions to civilian readers? I can’t say, not having been a civilian reader in decades, but as a copy editor I’m highly aware of them and will always point them out. Beyond that it’s up to the writer.

*17  Though apparently this book is.

*18  Now that I look at my records I can tell you that “a few years ago” was, to be precise, 2014, which I mention only because this is a perfect opportunity for me to remind you that when it comes to information, less is often more. A: It’s not particularly interesting that this story occurred in 2014, is it. B: The more specific a writer gets in providing details down to the nuclear level, the more likely it is that at least some of those details are going to be incorrect. “A few” is inapt to be incorrect.

*19  The collection went through a couple of titles before it was finally named Let Me Tell You, and it is now, as they say, available wherever better books are sold.

*20  Just thought I’d test-drive a singular “they” to see how it felt. It felt…OK. Not great.

*21  Now it can be told: “garden-variety.”

*22  Alas, shortly thereafter, Gollum—because it’s he, who else?—hisses, “Not fair! not fair!” Which is ungreat, but he then goes for the gold with “It isn’t fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what it’s got in its nassty little pocketses?”

*23  Copy editor to me: “You said that before.” Me to copy editor: “I say it often.”

*24  Be careful not to italicize the apostrophe or the s in the possessive of a noun itself set in italics.

*25  The other co-founder? Jane Grant, Ross’s wife, who somehow, mysteriously, often goes unmentioned.

*26  I’d originally written “such a summer for daffodils.” My copy editor corrected me.

*27  The speaker just comma-spliced, and I feel fine about that. The odd comma splice isn’t going to kill anyone. You could, if you chose, break up that last bit into two sentences, but it’s not as effective, nor does it quite convey the intended sound of the utterance.

*28  Less direly, I’d urge you to avoid as well characterizing speech impediments phonetically. Something like “And if the truth hurtth you it ithn’t my fault, ith it, Biff?” (once again: Gypsy Rose Lee, The G-String Murders) may—or may not—be funny the first time, but it’s tasteless, to say nothing of tiresome.