style vs. the copy editor: fight!

I wanted to write something brilliant about Actual Rules You Should Follow In Writing like my co-bloggers have done this week, but I can’t think of anything else right now that they haven’t covered, so I’m going to write about Personal Style Vs. The Copy Editor.

I’ve just finished up the copy edits for THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, book two of the Inheritors’ Cycle and sequel to THE QUEEN’S BASTARD. They went just fine, although I had assumed they’d refer to the stylesheet they created for the first book when copy editing the second, which turned out to be a mistake. I could have saved everybody a whole bunch of time if I’d known they weren’t going to do that, because, for example, I chose to use the British spelling of words (for flavour, as it were) in those books. The poor copy editor corrected all of my spelling back to the American spelling, which also happened with the first book, but when I said “Gee, I did this on purpose,” they apparently went “oh okay” and let me have my spellings. 95% of the CEs on TPC could have been avoided if I’d known they wouldn’t check the TQB copy edits and could’ve warned them in advance. I felt sort of bad.

But that’s not where the Style Vs CE: FIGHT! comes in, really. In this case it was mostly a matter of semi-colons, which I use *liberally* in these books. Peculiarly, the CE turned many of my semi-colons into commas.

Now, I’m not afraid of commas; my stylesheet that *they* prepared in fact says ‘uses serial commas’. And the purpose of a semi-colon is *different* from the purpose of a comma; it joins together two related but independent clauses, or is a transitional punctuation mark, and, very importantly to me, it denotes a longer *pause* than a mere comma does. This is a rhythmic thing as much as anything else, and I am, in writing these books, *fully aware* of the choice I’m making there. My feeling is that the last copy editor ‘got it’ more clearly than this one did, because my semi-colons were rarely corrected in QUEEN’S BASTARD.

Also: this particular CE didn’t like it when I used colons as I’ve just used one in this sentence. They were also turned into commas. As a writer, I can’t help feeling that the difference between “No, she didn’t” and “No: she didn’t” (and “No she didn’t”, for that matter) is quite enormous.

Similarly–and this has been every CE I’ve worked with–it seems that copy editors in general do not approve of beginning sentences with ellipses. I personally think there’s a significant difference between someone answering a question with “No.” vs. “…no.” Completely different connotations.

And this one was fun: I have in many many places in this manuscript chosen to hyphenate compound words which we would be unlikely to hyphenate today. This is a terribly stylistic thing, but for a story set four hundred years ago, it feels appropriate to me. The CE, of course, corrected them all, and I corrected most of them back. (And the one we couldn’t agree on was “goodbye”, which I spell that way, though I’m willing to admit that for this book it should be “good-bye”, but I hate how that looks, and she changed the few instances where it appears to the hyphenated version. I thought that was funny. )

Then there are the cases (and this has happened in more than one book with more than one copy editor) where my grammar is corrected–incorrectly. I am, mind you, *good* at grammar. I do not mis-use “affect” and “effect”. Ever. But when a CE corrects me on something like that, I suddenly doubt myself (and then go to my mother and say “here is the sentence, should it be affect or effect?” and she invariably tells me it should be the one I used in the first place.) Similarly with complex verb-noun agreements: “The words stripped Belinda bare and left her ready for shaping, as though she was once more a child.” Copy editor changed that “was” to “were”, which is wrong, and yet my brain runs up against it and goes “wait wait what? did I make a mistake here?” It’s disconcerting.

Really, none of this is a complaint: this was not at all a bad set of copy edits, and I really do feel kind of badly that I could’ve potentially saved the poor CE an easy 95% of the work by mentioning the spelling and the hyphens previous to her attacking a 700 page manuscript. But it’s interesting (at least to me), particularly with my awareness of what I’m *doing*, as a writer, with these books, and how the author’s stylistic ideas can run smack up against more conventional writing, er, conventions. (I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home. )