Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

Picking your battles

My dad wasn’t a man of many words. When he did have something important to say it often seemed to come out in what many would consider a cliché. But knowing the man he was—a man who believed and lived in the idioms he tended to use—they never seemed clichéd to me.

Growing up he would often tell me, “Menace, if it’s something worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” The perfectionist in me was drawn to this phrase even as a child. Then, as I grew older and began to deal with the world and the people in it, I took another of my dad’s sayings to heart, “You need to pick your battles.”

This is something the adult perfectionist in me uses to stay sane because seriously, if you put your everything into everything you’ll end up burning out with nothing done right.

So why am I going on about my dad and old phrases? I have a point that I’ll get to eventually and this does even have a little something to do with editing, I swear…

For every book I’ve edited, I’ve had to remind myself of the phrase “Pick your battles” at least a few times. Sometimes words/phrases/images in the books I edit will act as a little speed bump and I have to think about whether it’s something that needs to be revised or whether it’s just me.

For example, the word “twitch”. To me, bunny noses twitch, recently severed appendages lie twitching in bloody pools on the floor, and my 11th grade biology teacher’s left eye twitched. So when a certain part of a man’s anatomy “twitches”, a part of me goes “hmmm”.

While my authors will testify to the fact that I might mention a bunny nose if any of their hero’s manly parts starts twitching, it’s not something I feel has to be revised. Having it in or out of the manuscript is not a battle I would choose to engage in (and by “battle” I don’t mean anything combative. I’m using the word because it comes with the idiom— I’ve thankfully never had a round of edits end in pistols at dawn.)

So, when I do throw one of my gauntlets down on the ground, what do I expect from the author I’m working with? Well, if I’m asking for a revision of something that breaks the rules of grammar, gravity, logic or our house style, I expect a change.

But as for the other issues I might question or comment on—the stuff more concerned with voice and style—I expect authors to pick their own battles. And if they decide a requested change is worth them going to battle over, I expect them to come prepared—prepared to explain, to listen, to possibly compromise and to work with their editor to make their book as ready as possible for readers to enjoy. Because after all, that’s what we’re all in this for.