Editor's Notes: Changes

Hi all! For those who follow me, it's been a while since I've posted a new story. Last year was a tough year for me, and I haven't had the time and focus I need to finish stories. But I have intentions!

In the meantime my friends Omenainen and AwkwardMD, who collaborate as AwkwardApple415, asked me to help edit their new story, "This Is How We Change The World". I thought there might be a few folk out there who would be interested in seeing what that editing relationship looks like for us.

"For us" is important here. "Editing" can cover anything from basic SPAG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar) to in-depth story editing, depending on the needs of the author and the skillset of the editor. It's important that everybody's on the same page about what kind of editing is involved, and that the editor's style is compatible with the author's. As an editor, my job isn't to put my own voice into the author's mouth, but rather to help them tell the story they wanted to tell. The way I edit for another author might look different, and the way somebody else edits would be different again.

I've worked with Omen and Awkward several times before, and they've also edited/beta-read for me, so I have a good idea of the kinds of stories they like to tell and the things that matter to them. I also know that I can tell them when something doesn't work for me, without having to worry about bruised egos.

From here on, I'll be giving out lots of spoilers for the story. If you want to form your own impressions of it before seeing my commentary, go read it first!

The Brief

Omen and Awkward mention that they're still editing it, and I don't need to bother with the low-level stuff. Their interest is more on how it flows and whether there are plot holes/etc. that they can't see.

This is really useful, because my default editing mode includes fussing over minor details of punctuation/etc. but that can distract from broader story issues. Also, this is a long work, so I can edit faster if I'm not fussing over every little thing. I still do stop for the little things here and there, because it's an ingrained habit, but I'm not trying to be thorough about it.

AwkwardMD: "We have a German-speaking character, and we were hoping you could help us make sure the few lines she speaks in German are in the right neighborhood."

I speak a little bit of German. Nowhere near fluently, and for anything complicated I'd need to refer to a native speaker. But "how would this character talk?" is something I fuss over a lot, and her background might also affect how she speaks in English, so I want to know a little bit more about her. (As it turns out later, I'm going to end up giving more input on that "how she speaks in English" than those few lines in German.)

AMD goes on to tell me that Gertrude lived in East Germany up until German reunification, then moved to NYC in the early 90s. This may be relevant -- for somebody who grew up in the modern German education system I'd expect them to speak pretty good English, but for somebody with Gertrude's background it's plausible that her English might not be so fluent. There's also a risk of dialect differences -- East German isn't going to be quite the same as the Hochdeutsch that I'm learning -- but there's not a lot I can do about that. If her German is wrong, it's probably because I missed something.

Me: "how is her English? Is she fluent after 30 years in NYC or does she still have Germanic traces? I might be able to help a little with those."

Awkward: "I think we gave her an abbreviated sentence structure. I don't know if its cohesive or consistent."

Omen: "I think she could speak fluent English if she wanted to, but she's using German as a deterrent for people she doesn't really want to communicate with."

So now I have a better grasp of who Gertrude is and how she should talk.

The Story

We're collaborating via Google Docs. There's an outline along with the story chapters, but I haven't read that outline -- I want to read the story cold, so I'm reacting to what's in it and not to what the authors intended to put in it.

But for those who are reading this without having read the story first, it might be useful to have a short summary of the story as I read it to help understand my comments below.

Lyric is a young transgender woman who works at a coffee shop and does sex work on the side (mostly handjobs) to supplement her meagre income. Maddy is an older co-worker who lives in a long-standing polyamorous relationship with Amy and Frank. Lyric is prickly and cautious, but gradually she and Maddy become friends.

When Maddy/Amy/Frank's home needs repairs, Maddy ends up staying with Lyric. She starts to recognise problems in her relationship with Amy and Frank, and her relationship with Lyric becomes sexual and emotional. They discuss making porn together, with the idea that once they get people watching for the sex they can start showing a bit more of Lyric's life to humanise her and change the way viewers think of trans people.

Maddy hasn't let go of things with Amy and Frank, and that plus Lyric's insecurity leads to a blowup between the two of them and Lyric pushing Maddy away. Maddy finally finds the will to stand up to Amy and end their relationship, moving out to stay with her and Lyric's co-worker Gertrude, and eventually the two of them reconcile.

The Edits

Early in the story, Lyric is attending a support group for trans people. The facilitator, Benjamin, is reading the ground rules:

Lyric let her mind wander when she listened to the familiar list. She looked at other participants when she thought they weren't looking her way, and wondered who would be in the same group with her today. She noticed that Sam wasn't present, and wondered about it. She was sure they had said they'd come today, and was hoping to commiserate about the indifference to a petition she'd tried to get signed at her work. She made a mental note to reach out later.

Even as going through the principles every time felt tedious, it also made Lyric feel more at home. Confidentiality, she thought to herself. Discrimination free zone. Self-determination and in-determination right. Good will. Respect. Such good principles. Why couldn't everyone just always be cool? She furrowed her brow slightly and tried to concentrate. Bringing up things. Giving space. Not greeting others outside the group without specific consent.

One of my pet obsessions in writing and editing is flow. If a story is a journey for the reader, then flow is about whether that journey feels like a roller-coaster ride, a scenic drive, or stop-go commuter traffic.

As a reader, I want to get lost in a story, concentrating on what's happening within that story and forgetting that the author even exists. If I have to stop and ask myself "what did the author mean here?" that breaks my flow, and if it breaks mine it's probably going to break somebody else's.

In this passage, the first sentence tells me that Lyric is "listening" to the list, but the rest of that paragraph is her thinking about anything but the list. When I get to the following paragraph, it becomes clearer that she is also thinking about the list of principles, but by then I've already had to stop and wonder if I misread "listen" or something. For good flow, it's not enough that I figure it out eventually; it all needs to make sense as I read it.

Once I've figured out that she's actually thinking about both, I consider how this could be conveyed without that "wait, what?" moment.

My first thought is to reword that first sentence to something like "...as Benjamin went through the familiar list", but eventually I decide a better option would just be to swap the rest of that first paragraph with the next one, without changing any of the words. That way we're establishing that Lyric is listening to that list, before we get into the other stuff she's thinking about. I mark that as a suggestion.

* * * * *

Maddy has been feeling unappreciated in her relationship, and then we get to a scene in the coffee shop where she comes in practically in shock. I'd been expecting that relationship to fall apart eventually, but at this point it feels kind of abrupt, like we've skipped a scene in the breakdown of that relationship (assuming it even is about the relationship -- I don't know yet!)

It's entirely possible that this is intentional, that this scene is meant to surprise the reader, and that there's something going on that will be revealed shortly. I make a note to myself to revisit this section after I've read a bit further, so I can decide then whether there's an issue.

* * * * *

Lyric has brought Maddy back to her apartment, and is now worried Maddy might learn too much about her. She's not wearing the breast form she usually wears, and is trying to hide this with a cushion:

Maddy just looked down at herself and blushed. "Yeah, sorry. I sweat through my clothes at one point. I haven't slept with clothes on in... I don't even know how long. I just put something on so I wasn't walking around with my tits out."

Lyric snorted, and then tried to cover her mouth in horror, but Maddy was staring at her in smirking amusement.

"You don't need to do that," Maddy said, gesturing with her mug toward the pillow. "It's okay. I know."

A while later, Lyric's hiding her meds and getting Maddy some Ambien:

"You know I know, right?"

Lyric had made it almost halfway back across the bedroom, toward the bathroom, when she stopped in her tracks. "What do you mean?"

Maddy, still out in the kitchen, made a little grunting noise. Not irritated, but... something. "That you're trans."

Cold shivers. "Oh?"

"Yeah, I don't wanna..." It sounded like she might have sighed, but she wasn't coming any closer. "I mean, this is your apartment. You shouldn't be... you don't have to... You should just be able to be yourself."

I add a note:

It sort of feels like we've had this dialogue already, up above with the breast forms - I know it's not quite the same moment, but it feels like repeating the beat. Suggest reworking to combine these two bits, which might mean moving the meds-hiding to earlier on.

When I've edited a story, there's always a temptation to go read the final published version and see what the author did with my comments and suggestions. But I try to avoid this, because I need to remember that it's not my story and they're not obliged to do anything I recommend. If I do read the published version, usually it'll be after enough time has gone by that I can get back into "reader" mode rather than "editor" mode.

For this piece, though, I have looked at the published version to see what ended up happening here. They haven't followed my suggestion of combining those two sections. Instead, I think they've added a little bit of conversation to clarify why those two parts feel different to Lyric, so it's not just the same conversation twice. That works too.

* * * * *

I get to the end of this scene, and I still haven't hit any "and this is why Maddy was so emotionally wrecked" reveal. Reading a bit further on, it seems like this is just a progression from the stuff we already saw. So I go back and add a note at the point where she comes into the coffee shop.

I feel like we're missing a scene in Maddy's arc - the transition from where she is emotionally in her previous scene to this just feels a bit too abrupt. I spent a lot of this scene wondering if that was intentional and you were setting up to reveal something we hadn't yet been told about, maybe a fight with her partners, but apparently not.

Doesn't need a lot, maybe just a couple of lines to fill out the arc between there and here.

This is something that ends up being a recurring issue, and when it comes up again later in the story I ping the authors in chat:

Thread running through several of my comments on parts 3 and 4: this story has two relationship arcs, Maddy/Lyric and Maddy/Amy/Frank. M/L is at the heart of the story, so we follow it closely. M/A/F is secondary to that, and we mostly see it at the points where it impinges on M/L (including when it's being used as a contrast for how Lyric treats Maddy). What that means for me as a reader is that in those gaps, I don't have a good sense for where MAF is going, and when it pops up again I'm like "wait, it's over THERE? I thought it was somewhere around HERE.

We talk this over. AwkwardMD explains that some of this abruptness is intentional: Maddy doesn't get much input into that relationship, Amy and Frank just make decisions and then expect her to go along with them.

This is one of the challenges of fiction. The nature of life is that it's often confusing and we don't always understand what's going on, and representing that in fiction can be very powerful for establishing empathy with the poor schmucks in the story who are also struggling to figure out what's going on. But the reader, not knowing the author's mind, can be left wondering: is this meant to be confusing and chaotic? Am I meant to be looking for some in-universe explanation? Or is it just that the author screwed up and there's no in-universe reason for this to happen?

I'm not sure if we ever came to perfect agreement about how much of that Amy-Maddy-Frank arc should be signalled vs. how much should be allowed to remain abrupt. But that's okay -- at the end of the day it's not my story, and as long as the authors understand that the abruptness could be an issue for some readers, they can make up their own minds how far they want to go with it and think about whether there are ways to mitigate it without losing the effect they're trying to create.

* * * * *

Maddy is flooded out and needs somewhere to stay again:

She sighed and went to the underwear drawer. She couldn't stay at a hotel unless it was sure the insurance would cover it, she didn't have the money, and even when Amy and Frank did she was uncomfortable asking. She couldn't stay at Megan's. She always offered, but she lived with roommates and both them and their landlady were quick to ask if she was there permanently and if she would pay rent. Plus Megan's room wasn't that big, and it was in Yonkers. Frigging Yonkers. At that point, she might as well just go live in Connecticut.

Comment added:

This leaves me wondering why Maddy's family aren't an option - I gather she doesn't like her aunt, but I'd usually expect somebody her age to have at least one parent, not to mention other relatives. I can think of all sorts of reasons why that might not be an option, but mightn't hurt to establish that somewhere.

I'm also not clear on why Connecticut, unless there's something else I've missed. Or is that where her parents live? If so, could do with clarification.

Several scenes later, I go back and update this note:

edit: okay, later on we find out that her parents are dead. That comes long enough after that I wonder if it's worth adding something like "she didn't have any family she'd consider asking" here.

* * * * *

She turned her head more fully, and when she did Lyric looked back. They didn't say anything. She furrowed her brow, and Lyric looked helpless. She tilted her head slightly toward Lyric's waist, a meaningful dart of her eyes, and Lyric looked surprised. She nodded, and Lyric hesitantly nodded back.

Me: Four out of five sentences in this paragraph are structured like "She [did thing] and Lyric [did thing]". Recommend mixing it up a bit more to break the repetition.

Why does that matter?

People are pretty good at spotting patterns (often even when they don't exist!) and patterns can be distracting. Once I notice that repetitive structure, I'm no longer immersed in what's happening between Maddie and Lyric in this scene; I'm sidetracked into thoughts about why all these sentences have that structure, whether the authors realise they're doing it. That's undesirable.

(It's possible that the repetition was intentional. Occasionally I will use this kind of structural repetition deliberately, as a way of emphasising and drawing out a particular sequence. If it is intentional, though, it's not working for me, so it's still worth flagging it and letting the authors re-evaluate whether they want to modify it. One option that sometimes works here is to make the did-they-mean-it thing more blatant so that it's clear to the reader that yes, the author knows they're doing it.)

In this particular case, there's another reason to think about that structure. Human conversation has its rhythms, and those rhythms signify state of mind: someone who's excited might speak quickly and talk over the other person, someone who's feeling intimidated might keep quiet until they're asked a question, and so on. Often there's a kind of ebb and flow between the participants, especially if the conversation itself is affecting how they feel.

This paragraph is a conversation, for all that it's in body language rather than verbalised. As written, it has the rhythm of a very gentle tennis lesson: Maddie serves a ball, Lyric hits it back, Maddie serves, Lyric returns, repeat.

That's a weird dynamic for a conversation, almost artificially regular. It's the sort of dynamic that happens when people are in a formal setting with specific ground rules, or when technology imposes it (email exchanges, for instance), or perhaps in something like a dom-sub scenario where one person is letting the other take the lead in everything. I don't think it fits this scene though. Maddie and Lyric are both nervous, getting more intimate than they've been with one another before, and they're also under the influence of recreational pharmaceuticals. Those things would normally point to a more chaotic conversation, and the dialogue in this scene has been appropriately chaotic. The body language, being an extension of the dialogue, should match.

I didn't consciously think all of that through before I flagged it, and normally I wouldn't think it through to this level of detail; all I need to know is that the regularity of this paragraph feels off, and flag it for the authors to decide what they want to do with it. For the sake of this piece, though, I've taken the time to think more closely about just why it feels like a problem in that scene.

* * * * *

Me: Noticing some inconsistencies with "Françoise" vs. "Francoise". I'm not going to flag them all individually but I'd suggest doing a search-and-replace at some point to catch them all.

As per my brief, I'm not fussing too much about minor proofreading issues because my understanding is that they're planning another proofing pass after taking in my edits, but I flag this one because it's something that would be very easy to miss.

It takes me a couple more weeks to realise that I've caught the minor issue but missed the major one: "Francoise"/"Françoise" is a feminine form of the name, and Frank is decidedly male. Whoops. We got it in time though.

* * * * *

She wanted to trap all the heat and the warmth (which were two separate things)

Flagged: I really like this.

I'm not a great praise-giver (not really even a good one, if I'm honest), and especially not when I'm editing, since that requires me to focus on finding fault. But it's good to let authors know what worked.

* * * * *

She continued, "But it is, and especially for trans women, and... and no amount of me being a crazy hippie feminist isn't going to keep you any safer, and... and I think that's why I want us to really get somewhere with the videos. You know?"