Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.
Mindy: We are here with Marin McGinnis. Marin is here today to talk about a lot of different things, but one of the things that I wanna focus on specifically is that Marin is a copy editor. So, we're gonna talk a lot about the importance of copy editing and the different things that an individual can do... Maybe beforehand to catch those small mistakes, the most common mistakes. But first... Marin is my cousin, and we found each other because we both have an interest in genealogy, and we found each other through ancestries. How are we related specifically again?
Marin: We are fifth cousins once removed.
Mindy: Our last shared ancestor died in 1825, is that correct?
Marin: That is also correct. One day, maybe, we'll figure out who his parents were and where he came from.
Mindy: I shall never cease. Also, I just think it's really interesting that we are both individuals that are writers and we move in the publishing and the book industry. There could be an argument made that some of it is innate. We'll call it a gift or a talent that you definitely still have to learn some things in order to hone it, but I think it's interesting that we found each other and they we're both writers.
Marin: I think we have a lot of things in common like that, and it is very curious that even though we are five generations and about 12 years apart, we have a lot of similar characteristics. Thinking about that is kind of funny when you think about genetics.
Mindy: We will talk about writing soon. Genetics kind of blow my mind because the old nature versus nurture argument, of course, is always there, but I have friends who have children whose fathers are not present or vacated early on. These children have their mannerisms... Ways that they hold their fork when they eat, like very intimate things that they didn't learn by watching him 'cause he's gone. But they have these very specific little things in facial expressions that man, it's their dad. It's bizarre.
Marin: My kid has some of my father's mannerisms, and they didn't know each other very well at all. So, it is interesting.
Mindy: So, you are a writer, first of all. You are a full-time lawyer and you're really smart, and that's cool.
Marin: Thank you.
Mindy: I kind of introduce you that way to people in my mind, or whenever I'm thinking about you. It's like my cousin Marin, who's a lawyer, because I don't get to say that often. Also a writer, you are published in the romance category, and you are also a copy editor, which is one of the big reasons that I have you here today. So you do offer copy editing and editing services. So that's something that I wanna give you some room to talk about. But first of all, I would love to have you talk a little bit about copy editing, specifically. What it is, how it's different from broad editing, and why it's so important.
Marin: The services that I provide are proofreading, copy editing, and line editing. Proofreading is kind of obvious. You're looking at a finished edited work to just make sure that you catch the little errors that people make in spelling and punctuation and grammar. Copy editing is a step above that, and it is a more substantive review of a manuscript to correct the same kinds of errors, but also to look at syntax of your sentences, ensure consistency in spelling, how you hyphenate things, the fonts that you use, what words you capitalize, and then to note ambiguous or confusing words or sentences. Line editing is a step above that as well, and it's intended to flag issues of overuse words, unnecessary words, run-on sentences, passive voice - just stuff that needs to be tightened... Pacing, structure, use of filler words like "that," and words that can slow down the pacing of your writing to ensure consistency in language. Make sure you spell the character's name the same way every time.
Mindy: One of the things that I hear people getting confused about sometimes is the difference between copy editing and proofreading. Because proofreading, like you said, is a little more just like searching specifically for errors. Copy editing comes down to many different things. They are searching for those as well, and they catch them... Also grammar. 'Cause I do write small town rural areas, often the copy editor will go through and they will fix grammar in dialogue, and I will reject the fix. That is not true to how this character would speak. I am college educated, and I've written 12 books. And I cannot tell you the difference between lay and lie. I've never said whom in my life. So those are things that copy editing will catch, and if it doesn't fit the voice of your character, those are things that you can reject and say, "No. I don't want this character to be speaking with proper grammar." Or even their internal dialogue, at times. To keep the voice correct, grammar may not be your highest priority.
But one of the things that my copy editors catch the most often - continuity. Continuity is something that we don't always think about - even a timeline. That's my big problem is time. My timelines are always a mess. One of the ways that I specifically get away from it is that I'm not specific ever. So, my characters will say, "Hey, do you wanna go to movie sometime?" They don't say when. They don't say where. They don't say anything specific. I usually, if you're paying attention, won't say anything about time in terms of what month it is. Typically, I will mention a season or an upcoming holiday, if there's like Halloween or Christmas, but I'm not gonna say it's Tuesday, October 27th. I'm not gonna do that because I will mess it up. If I have an anchor somewhere, I won't be consistent. Along those lines, what are some continuity errors that you see occurring really often?
Marin: Time is definitely one of them. Geography is something that I pay attention to. Somebody's writing about somebody who is driving in a car from one place to another, and it takes 15 minutes. I'll actually look at a map. It does not take you 15 minutes. It takes you 45 minutes. If you're gonna use that kind of really specific detail, you have to make sure that it's right. So that's another one that I notice. Somebody has their eyes closed, and they never open them and all of a sudden they're looking at somebody. Point of view kinds of errors, I also note. So somebody is talking to somebody else, and the writer mentions the eyes of the person who's speaking. Well, you can't see your own eyes unless you are looking in a mirror. So those kinds of things are fairly common.
Mindy: Absolutely, in my very first book, Not A Drop To Drink, it was my first experience having a professional copywriter go through my stuff and it was amazing. The things that you don't think about as a writer. There was a scene where the two main characters, they're in a basement. This is a world that doesn't have electricity. It's night. They're underground. There is no light source, and they're having a conversation. And one of them smiles, and the other character sees it. And my copy editor's like, "No. They didn't. Because it's pitch black, and you've said that multiple times. So no. You might be able to hear a smile in their voice, but they didn't see it."
Marin: Those are the kinds of things that you just don't always think about when you're writing the book, and it takes an outsider looking in to say, "Hey, you might wanna think about this."
Mindy: You were talking about level of detail on your end. Looking at a map and deciding how long it would take someone to drive from this place to the next. I had, in one instance... I had said Tuesday, October 27, and my copy editor was like, "Well, Tuesday, October 27th only occurred in the year 2012 or the year 2044." So you have to pick which year this is set in. I'll mention there's a full moon, and they will check the lunar schedule.
Marin: Copy editors are a funky breed. We really get into those weird nitty-gritty details that most people probably don't care about, but if you keep them in there, there will be at least one reader who will say "What?" and throw the book across the room. So you don't want that. You want to be as accurate as possible. If your book is set in the real world on some level, then you need to be precise.
Mindy: That's the kind of stuff that just, as a writer, I get hung up on. And like I said, timelines are my biggest thing. I'm never specific about what my characters look like either. I actually was interviewing Laurell K. Hamilton, she writes the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, and she told me that she has a character whose eye color changes. The series is like 30 books long. So, it's bound to happen. His eye color changes across the course of this series because she just forgot. She forgot what color his eyes were.
Marin: That's what I tend to do the same with my own writing, is that I don't go into too much detail about what the characters look like. Partly because I want readers to be able to imagine the character however they picture them.
Mindy: I also do not physically describe my characters in very much depth at all, if I can avoid it. Partially because, yes, I wanna be consistent, and I know that I won't. But mostly because, like you said, I want the reader to be able to envision this person however they want. I know that when I was younger, junior high, I was reading Lord of the Rings, and for whatever reason, I had the hugest crush on Faramir. Like Faramir was my dude, and I was into him. And at some point, Tolkien says he has a beard, and I was just like "ugh." I was like 12. So I was just like, "That's gross." But I immediately was like, "No, he doesn't. He doesn't have a beard. No, he doesn't." It pulled me out of the story because I had a picture of what Faramir looked like. It was probably Cary Elwes, let's be honest.
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Mindy: Something that I have come across in my own editorial business, and I just actually yesterday was working on a first 10 pages. And the book was written in first person, and I read all 10 pages and they were pretty good. And I gave him some notes, and then I said, "So here's the thing. I don't know your main character's name." Because when you're writing in first person, it's all I and me. They never said her name. What are some other common mistakes that you run into that are either POV or sometimes tense. Tense is the other thing I run into that people have made mistakes.
Marin: I do see tense issues sometimes, although that's rarer. When you start out writing a book in first person, you do generally stay there. You don't tend to switch. I have noticed that if somebody starts a book in one tense and then switches and goes back and re-writes in a different tense, then you can find errors that way. But other errors I see are they have some statement about how one character is feeling or thinking about something, and your POV character cannot possibly know that. There needs to be a little bit of explanation using body language, for example, or expressions or some other indication explained in the narrative about how the POV character can tell how the other character is feeling.
Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. They can infer how they might be feeling, but they cannot say with absolute definity what that character is feeling on the inside because they are not that person.
Marin: Right.
Mindy: So, as someone that moves in both the traditional and the indie world... HarperCollins copy edits. They also then have a proofreader go through them as well. That's all taken care of for me. On the indie side, I do hire out that work, as you know, because I hire you. It is an expense, but it is also a needed one. I can send you something that I think is pretty damn clean and you send it back and it's red marker city. And you just don't see them yourself. So if you can talk a little bit about the importance of a copy editor, if you don't have one built in, in the traditional publishing world.
Marin: A lot of people who are self-publishing probably think... I'm a little guilty of this too. I'm pretty good, and I have beta readers. And they catch a lot of stuff, so I don't really need an editor. Let me give you an example of a book that I edited very recently. It's a romance, and the hero in the book is unwilling to find love, experience love, and tie himself to another person because his mother has a terrible disease that he will pass on to his children. The disease itself, if you yourself don't have the disease... So if your mother has it, but you don't have it and you don't have the gene to pass on the disease, you can't pass it to your children. And no one had caught that. The author didn't know. That kind of thing can really cause a serious issue with your book and readers who know about that disease, unless you make it up, would be like, "This is ridiculous. Totally unbelievable," and will give you terrible reviews. So that's just one kind of extreme example of why you need a copy editor - why you really should spend the money to have someone else do it for you. Because it will catch those kinds of issues in addition to all the nitty-gritty, how you use a comma, how you use a colon.
Mindy: I am super curious. How did that client then fix that book if the entire premise was faulty?
Marin: She hasn't fixed it yet. Afterwards, we were brainstorming ways that she could fix it without rewriting the entire book. She could give the hero the gene for the disease, so he knows that he's gonna get the disease eventually. But that's not really great for a romance when you want them to be a happily ever after, but you know the hero's gonna die of a horrible disease. Another one was finding a different disease. And then another one was not specifying which disease, and I thought, "Well, yeah, you could do that, but the heroine is a nurse. So she's gonna ask."
Mindy: Oh man. She really wrote herself into a corner.
Marin: Yeah, and I feel really bad that I pointed it out, but it's better to point it out before you publish the book and have a reader point it out to you.
Mindy: Oh, absolutely. You want that stuff to get caught ahead of time. And speaking of things getting caught or not caught, what's amazing is that things still get through. One of the reasons I think why you definitely need a copy editor and a proofreader is because the brain is fantastic at auto-filling. The brain will fix things automatically, even though your eye is relaying the visual that is incorrect of the text. Your brain fixes it and doesn't recognize it as an error. So, I don't know if you've seen this before, but your brain actually only processes about every third word that you read, and everything else is auto-filled... That you're not individually processing each word. I thought that was ridiculous, but I remember years ago finding an example of a paragraph that someone had written where they took out every third word, and of course, if the third word is endometriosis, then maybe not. But it was amazing because my brain... I read it and I knew what it said. Even though it was specifically purposely missing words. It is amazing, especially when you as a writer already know things. So your brain auto-fills things or assumes things that isn't actually on the page for the reader. In my first book, Not A Drop To Drink, in the hard cover editions, there is a line of dialogue that is attributed to a character that is dead. There's a mother-daughter duo and the daughter passes away, and they have similar names. When the mother is talking about the daughter who has passed away, she doesn't say her name, but she's speaking about her in the dialogue tag, "dead daughter said." That made it to print. Nobody caught it. The brain was like, "Yeah, we're talking about this person. That's the person that's talking."
Marin: That is actually a common error. When you are using dialogue tags and say that so and so said something, it is very often the wrong character. I do notice that a fair amount. You see it at least once in just about every book.
Mindy: That's amazing. So is that something like... Let's say I'm thinking about my friend Amanda, and I need to call the dentist and make a dentist appointment. And I call my friend Amanda. Is that what's at work there? That the brain is just making free associations?
Marin: I think so actually, and I actually came across this in my day job as a lawyer the other day. One of my paralegals had written "Hi Ashley" in an email that she was drafting, and I said, "Her name is not Ashley. It's Angela." "Oh yeah. I was thinking about Ashley so and so, who is a different client." So I think that what you said makes a lot of sense. That you are... You're thinking about something else, and so your brain puts the two of them together.
Mindy: I did something similar myself just this week. I had a publicist reach out about their author. They wanted to get them on the show. And I emailed them back, and I was like, "Yes. I would love to speak to April in April." Cause April can also be a name. And I was looking at the calendar, and I was like, "This is when I could schedule it in April." And I emailed the publicist, and I said, "Yes. I would love to speak to April in April." I immediately like... Listen, uhh, I know her name. 'Cause she's a pretty famous person... So I was like, "Hey, so... I'm dumb." And she was like, "No. It's okay. It's no big deal." But yeah.
Marin: That's funny.
Mindy: The brain is a funny little thing. We're recording this on March 15th, and my 12th book just came out yesterday. A friend that is a writer, who sent me a text, and she was like, "Hey, congrats. Happy release day. There's a typo in your Goodreads write up. The blurb for the book is wrong." And I was like, "Oh, okay. Cool. Let me know what it is. I'll go fix it." One of the things that happens in the book is there is a flash flood, and on the Goodreads write up it said "flash food." Alright, flash food's not a real thing. I go into the metadata on Goodreads. I fix it to flash flood, and I'm going about my day. I'm trying to do social media. Doing all the stuff you do on release day, and then I was like, Hey, I better check my own site because when it comes to the blurb, but you just copy paste things everywhere. I wonder if I picked that up and used it on my own site. I better make sure that on Mindy McGinnis dot com it's correct. So I go to Mindy McGinnis dot com and sure enough, on the blurb for Long Stretch of Bad Days, it says flash food. I'm like, okay. I go in and I fix it.
And then all of a sudden, this little red flag goes up in my brain, and it's like, "Hey man. I'm pretty sure that you copy pasted that information from the official flap copy from your publisher. You need to go to make sure that that's right on Amazon." And I was like, "Yeah, that's a good point Self." I go over to Amazon, and I look and in the Amazon description it says flash food. Total stomach drop. I was like, "Oh shit." Because that's the catalog copy that gets loaded on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all of the online stores. That's the official material. And I get up, and I go to my book closet where I have my books. And I pull out A Long Stretch of Bad Days, and I open up the dust jacket. I look at the flap copy on my hard covers. It says flash food. Well, shit. There's nothing we can do. Every single hard cover that was printed has a mistake on the jacket. It happened. There's nothing we can do about it. It's actually kind of funny, and my publisher was like, "Oh my gosh. We are so sorry. We cannot believe this happened." And I'm like, "You know what? That's okay. I didn't catch it either, right?" Like this passes through me and I approve things, but flash food translated in the brains of probably 20 to 30 different professionals in the publishing world as flash flood and nobody caught it.
Marin: I follow a bunch of authors on Facebook and every once in a while, one of them will have a new release and will say, "Oh my God. There's a typo in my book. 25 people looked at it." It happens all the time, and even if you have the world's most careful editors, you're gonna miss something.
Mindy: That's absolutely true. I was reading a book just last night. I was reading a hard cover, traditionally published, pretty big name author, and I found two mistakes in the first 100 pages. I'm pretty sure that's wrong. And I went back, and I read it again. Yep, that's wrong. That's how things are, and nothing is perfect, and this is life.
Marin: Correct.
Mindy: Speaking of having the best possible copy editor in the world... Why don't you, last thing, go ahead and let listeners know where they can find you if they would like to make their own work a little stronger by using your services.
Marin: Absolutely. You can find me at Marin McGinnis dot com. There is a page there which talks about all about my editing services.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.
