“Communication Is a Two-Way Street” is a trite metaphor that, although useful at times, is an incomplete description of the reality of the process of communications.  Yes, there are senders and receivers in communications.  The senders can only control how they present messages.  They can’t control how messages are received. Only receivers can control their reception.

In intro psychology courses, many of us spent weeks trying to get a solid grasp of the subtle differences between sensation and perception.  Just as two people can experience (perceive) a temperature of 55° F as either warm or cool depending on their preconceptions and other environmental factors, two people can also hear or read my message and either decide that I am “right on” or that I am “not helping.”

I sincerely intend to attend someday a conference where all the cool kids congregate. If I had been at TAM8 in Vegas last weekend, I would have caught this speech that Phil Plait gave on being a dick when it comes to skepticism.  Stephanie was there and wrote about it.

That’s the closest thing I have to a conversion story I have. It’s also why I was a touch disappointed in Phil’s speech, although I appreciated most of it. He asked how many of us used to believe in woo, and he asked how many of us had been converted by people being angry and mean to us. He didn’t ask how many of us had been converted by someone being angry and mean on our behalf or on behalf of the ideals of skepticism.

I’d have raised my hand. High.

I have been wondering what has been learned lately in the blogosphere regarding the best methods to communicate skepticism and interest in science to the general public.  It still seems to me that with the You’re Not Helping self-immolation, the lesson learned was that people don’t like sock-puppets (and for good reason).  Or perhaps that Chris Mooney had better do a better job of checking on someone before vouching for him.

In most of the discussions related to accommodation of religion and science, most of the effort at discovery and focus has been placed on the methods of the message senders.  Who is right?  Who is wrong? Is it okay to be a jerk?  Are jerks making it more difficult for the non-jerks?  Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas even has a post that suggests that we can use science to determine the best way to get people to like science.  He even proposes a (lame) experiment:

Someone grounded in that body of research could develop some testable hypotheses about how folks might respond to NAs. Then you could do lab work, bringing in a large and representative sample of folks with views across the c/e spectrum. Do a pretest, then have some of them read a selection from Dawkins’ The God Delusion, others read from Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, and a control reading something unrelated to creationism and evolution and theism. Then do a post-test. Follow up a month later, and see how their views on science generally, evolution specifically, and on the relationship between science and religion have changed. Follow up a year later. What sticks, and what doesn’t? What do people remember? What do they convey to their friends? Then follow up the study with treatments that vary the extent of contact with New Atheist writings, to see whether people who read all of TGD, or watch a 2 hour talk by Dawkins, react differently than those with more fleeting contact with NA ideas.

The reason that I think that this idea is “lame” is because the concept doesn’t take into account the individual prejudices, the environments and the presuppositions that people bring into a reading of a book that looks at religion to determine that belief in God is the result of a delusion.  It’s a loaded experiment that I think would yield little.  A reading of either Miller’s book or Dawkins’ book is unlikely to find an audience of readers who were initially unbiased towards the concepts of religion and science.  Such an experiment wouldn’t be able to isolate the independent variables enough to create a sufficiently testable hypothesis.

More importantly, though, Josh makes the mistake of assuming that there is a “best” way to do all of this science communicating.  I don’t see how there can be one “best way” to turn an “Unscientific America” into a scientific America when there isn’t any single “America.”  There are 300 million Americans, and each of them have their own looking-glass selves. Communication doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  A message is by necessity interpreted by the receiver.  Communication is colored by the recipient’s background, history and environment.  Perception is a function of perspective.

Suppose the experiment were to be set up using the two books that Josh suggests; Finding Darwin’s God, by Kenneth Miller and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  Suppose a sizable portion of the Miller readers were anti-Catholic and decided that his book is pure papist nonsense.  Would their non-acceptance be skewed by his catholicism?  How would the experimenter control for such an extraneous variable?  That is just one possible objection, and I am sure that social scientists can find more problems with the idea.

Humans are not psychic.  There is no direct communication available from my brain to yours.  We are limited in communications by the usage of symbols whether visual or audio.  We talk, we write, we listen, we read and use other means to indirectly communicate.  The indirect means we have to communicate are filtered through our perspectives.  We can’t control how other people filter.

Let’s try looking at it this way.  Is there an experiment that can show the “best” temperature to take a shower?  Would Josh be able to come up with a statistically valid sample to prove that 140°F is the “best” temperature and then expect that everyone take their showers at that temperature in order to get a consensus on clean?

Communication is not a two-way street.  It is an intersection.  Sometimes there are four corners and sometimes there are seven corners, and I think it unreasonable to expect that a left turn is always the correct course of action.  People who receive your directions and your communications have varying needs.  Stephanie needed someone to be angry at flim-flammers on her behalf, and Randi was there for her. Some people don’t need to hear that; some people just want discussion.  Some people just want the facts.  The trouble is the communicators don’t know what the receivers need. Most of the time we just know what we want to give. That’s just fine as long as we recognize that the message may vary and still have a desired effect.

So, be a dick or don’t be a dick.  Just don’t pretend to tell me that you know which size fits all.

Tom Robbins, author of such books as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume, has a unique style of building books and storylines. He adds subplots that seem to be unrelated to the main story, or tangential to the theme as diversions and comic relief. Readers familiar with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues will recognize his absurdist chapter breaks, but those who aren’t fans of his work find it off-putting that he doesn’t keep his stories on track.

In Still Life With Woodpecker, he developed at least two subplots that seemed totally unrelated to the story. One subplot, the illustrations on a pack of filterless Camel cigarettes, found its way into the main plot towards the end of the book and gave the main character a revelation that was necessary for the plot’s resolution. The other subplot, that of his difficulties with using an electric typewriter while writing the book, he used to illustrate what I think is an important development in the evolution of modern English writing style.

English has become mechanistic. Various composition teachers have coached me that, in order for my readers to engage in my points, I must follow a trend towards simplification and reduce my use of flowery and poetic language. I remember discussing the work of William Styron in his books Sophie’s Choice and The Confession of Nat Turner and how I love the way that his language flows so that the reader is enveloped in the story. The person with whom I was discussing it complained that Styron has tendency to show off his vocabulary, to “use a fifty-cent word when a ten-cent word will do.”

I was puzzled by this response, frankly. My goal has always been to stretch my vocabulary when both reading and writing. I love the use of words and the play of sentence structure, and I find that my favorite writers have the ability to clarify complex concepts both fictional and factual by pulling in words and phrases that are not in the common vernacular of everyday English. Styron is one of those writers who drives me occasionally to the dictionary but more often teaches me new vocabulary using context.

This is where reading is fun for me, and writing for you is more challenging.

The tools of writing have changed rapidly since the middle of the 19th century and the development of keyboards to convey thoughts. We use a keyboard layout designed specifically to inhibit the speed of typing. Early typewriter designers found that skilled typists were typing faster than the strikers could handle, so keys frequently jammed. The layout that we have on the QWERTY keyboard places the most commonly used letters in English on the left, so that right-handed typists are slightly shackled.

Tickling a Writer's Muse

Prior to the development of typewriters, people wrote by hand. The process of writing was directly connected to the person and the paper. Yes, it was tedious. Yes, people with poor penmanship (I’m looking at you, Andrew Jackson!) were often handicapped in communicating. It seems to me, though, that because writers were more closely connecting their thoughts to the paper, they were more expressive. They had a “feel” for what they were writing, and it seems to me that quill pens had something to do with that.

Classical literature reads as though the words and language had been “tickled” from the writer by the feather of the quill. When I read “The Lady of Shalott,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, I imagine him at a writing desk with a goose quill pen in hand deliberating to come up with these two stanzas:

Only reapers, reaping early,
In among the bearded barley
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly;
Down to tower’d Camelot;
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers, ” ‘Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.”

There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.

In my observation, modern writing has lost that tickle and tease in the effort to push writing into a crammed little box of clarity for the most common reader.  In the mix of journalistic and business writing, we are taught to reduce our verbiage and to let the reader skim the works while still getting the full gist of our themes and plots.  Cut back! Clarify!  Stop with the flowery phrases!

I have found that this has had an effect on my own writing.  Not only in the essays and posts I write here, but in the poems I write.  I struggle to make them romantic, or to convey the depth of my meaning.  I write with a keyboard, and I have instant feedback and I can backspace as I need to but I am afraid that the “teasing” is remote and I am dragging the muse along pissing and moaning as I use Blunt Force English.

I have a hard time shifting writing styles between what is needed for work and what is needed for creating more interesting pieces, such as those I write for Quiche Moraine, or even the poetry I write.  My vocabulary has shrunk as I seek similes.  Perhaps I need to go back to writing by hand.

Towards the conclusion of Still Life With Woodpecker, Robbins the writer has added Robbins the writer as a character who has gotten fed up with using a fancy new electric typewriter because it doesn’t give him the language that he needs. He had already discarded his manual typewriter, and so he finishes the book with handwriting.  He is satisfied with the way he has become a writer again.

My birthday is a the end of August.  A quill pen is on my wishlist, as are writing tablets.

Generally, my take on the whole question is similar to my take on religion in general: Don’t we have something more interesting to talk about, and if not, can we at least refrain from misrepresenting each other’s points of view?

Now, having said that, I’ll admit up front that I haven’t read the book that’s raising so many hackles. However, in PZ Myers’ general review, he pulled a quote that I have to address:

Dawkins and some other scientists fail to grasp that in Hollywood, the story is paramount—that narrative, drama, and character development will trump mere factual accuracy every time, and by a very long shot.

I write science fiction. I read science fiction. I watch it on television and in the theater. I read and write and watch in other genres too. This statement is one of those gross oversimplifications that makes me cringe. Maybe it’s better in context, covered in caveats, but an awful lot of people aren’t seeing it in context right now.

There is some truth to the assertion, of course. You never see a “real-life drama” that hasn’t been trimmed to fit the length of a feature film. Locations stand in for one another. Behavior that would result in lockdowns or restraining orders is played for laughs or romance. Bad guys can’t shoot, but good guys have perfect aim. Explosions require far more fuel than would be available, and people still walk away from them.

Accuracy does get cast aside in moviemaking. However, the fact that decisions like these are made in the writing or the production doesn’t make them good decisions.

Marion Zimmer Bradley was an editor who was famous for having a standard rejection letter that gave the following reason for rejection (I paraphrase), “Willing suspension of disbelief does not mean hanging it by its neck until dead.” In addition to plot, pacing and character development, a story also requires a setting, a “world” in speculative fiction terms. That world–and plot and characters, for that matter–are made up of details.

Accuracy has an important role to play in building world, plot and character. Every time we flub or cheat a detail, we’re making our audience, at least part of which will catch any inaccuracy, do more work. In writerly terms, it’s called throwing our audience out of the story. It means that something has gone wrong enough to remind an audience that the story is only a story. In order to get back to the point where the story is a world that the audience is visiting, the process of suspending disbelief has to start all over again.

Every time another inaccuracy is noticed, the process starts once more, and upholding that disbelief gets harder and harder. Some readers or viewers will give up on us completely. They’ll give up on the story because it asks too much of them–not in thinking but in forgiveness.

Yes, there is a kind of movie that can get away with flubbing all the details. Details aren’t why people go to summer action extravaganzas, those movies in which everything explodes, even the water. They’re not looking for accuracy. On the other hand, they’re not going to these movies looking for story either.

Setting up story and accuracy as a dichotomy also ignores the richness that accuracy can add to a story. In fact, whole stories can be built from closely observed detail. Juno is one of those stories. It doesn’t have a suspenseful plot. The characters don’t change much from beginning to end, although a few of the relationships do. What we get instead is messy, accurate observations of the complexities of life, and that was enough to win Diablo Cody an Oscar to garner an impressive return for the movie.

To bring this back to science, one of the excellent parts of the new Star Trek movie (along with the opening and Simon Pegg) was the fact that the ships weren’t all oriented on a single plane. Nobody would have noticed if they had been. Pretending there’s an absolute up and down in space is the norm in movies. Instead, we were treated to unrestrained cameras and dizzying angles, which created the sensation in the viewer of truly escaping gravity in the way a more conventional film couldn’t.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

There is wonder in science, and solid, grounding reality. If Hollywood prefers to do another remake that no one was asking for instead of telling wondrous, solid stories…well, three things actually.

1. No one will be remotely surprised, as this is business as usual and not just in relation to science.
2. The blockbuster cinema of lowered expectations will continue to boom.
3. There’s very little Richard Dawkins or any other scientist will have to say about it, no matter accommodating they are.

Romeo and Juliet, of course. Or is this West Side Story? Sung in Shadow? Or Pyramus and Thisbe? Perhaps even Ha-Buah?

Earlier this week, Mike posted about feeling that his writing wasn’t original enough. Bah. I hate it when I see someone denigrating their own work this way. It’s silly and pointless and keeps people from contributing to the world. And may I point out, I’m hardly the first to say so.

TWO hundred years ago, Dr Johnson surmised that fiction was limited to a few plots “with very little variation”. Now a major study has worked out that there have been just seven since storytelling began.

In addition to hating to see writers going to waste, part of my passion about this topic comes from writing science fiction. I love science fiction, but I hate its obsession with not repeating itself. Science fiction is the only genre I know of in which someone will look at a story and say, “Oh. I saw XX do that in a short story in 1977. Never mind.”

What? Yes, science fiction the genre of ideas. Got that. But it’s the story that puts the idea across. That’s why you can’t copyright ideas. And frankly, the idea is not nearly as important as the characters and civilizations that interact with it. “What if?” is answered differently depending on who answers.

Telling the same story in multiple ways communicates the idea to different audiences: different generations, different cultural backgrounds, different stylistic preferences, different experiences reading in the genre. If we’re not willing to occasionally retell a story a bit differently, we run the risk of alienating all these different audiences, and we run the risk of running out of things to say.

For the record, Spider Robinson wrote that story. (Huh. I’d forgotten he used the same example. So much for originality.) So why am I bothering to write this post? Because while the story made quite an impression on me in my early teens, Mike hasn’t read it. Or maybe he has, but he forgot about it. The point, of course, being that some things are worth saying again.

All of this is true for nonfiction too. How many biographies of Shakespeare do we need? Well, how many audiences do we have? A biography written for children isn’t going to be the same as one written for poetry geeks isn’t going to be the same as one written for historians of the theater. One written a hundred years after his death is not going to be the same as one written today. It isn’t so much new historical information that makes a new book worthwhile as it is a new perspective on the underlying facts. The facts don’t change, but the people looking at them do.

Almost any writer out there will tell you that ideas are cheap and plentiful. It’s the execution that matters. It’s figuring out how your idea connects to your characters and to your readers. It’s finding the little details that resonate with you and bringing them to the forefront so they can’t be overlooked, or fixing the things that always bother you when you read. It’s taking your voice and your opinions and your observations and your obsessions and stamping the idea with them so that it becomes unmistakably yours, wherever it came from.

And for all our veneration of originality, a heavy dose isn’t what most of us want as readers. There’s a reason, aside from snobbery, that sophisticated readers sneer at so many best sellers as hackneyed. Yes, we want some surprises from what we read, but not too many. Very few people read James Joyce for pleasure; fewer still read Marx for fun. We want to read works that build directly off what we already know and understand. We’re much less comfortable with anything that upsets our views of how the world behaves. Rearranging one’s world view is a lot of work, and we get tired if we do too much of it at once.

How much work do you want your readers to have to do to read you? Enough, of course, that they don’t get bored. Enough that they walk away with something they didn’t have before, whether it be a deeper understanding, a fresh perspective or just a turn of phrase that will make them smile or be useful in an argument. But beyond that? If a subject is worth the work of writing, isn’t it worth the work to give your readers something familiar to which they can connect? And the stranger or more threatening the topic, the more the reader needs that comfort.

Despite our society’s romantic, individualistic notions, ideas don’t spring fully formed from the aether. There is no cosmic fountain of creativity. The muses, just like all the other gods, are relics of superstition. Ideas build on other ideas, both as we conceive our own and as we understand others’. Originality comes from combining ideas or approaching an idea from a different angle or presenting it in a way that makes your readers do more or less or different work than they have before.

Accepting that may not be very romantic, but it’s far better than thinking you can’t be creative unless you have access to some mystical source of original ideas. And that is a concept that always bears repeating.

As a fourth-grader, I was often praised and rewarded for the essays I turned in, and I started to get the grandiose idea that I would someday grow up to be a novelist or an essay writer.  I read constantly, not only to gather information, but to learn about style, phrasing and voice.

My teachers throughout grade school and high school were excellent guides in the process of my development.  Many took a personal interest in giving me extra assignments and resources.  I should probably add that these extra assignments were never given to me as punishments, but as rewards.  They were singling me out as someone who had a potential talent to write as a professional, and the extra assignments gave me the opportunity to use tools that they were giving me beyond those they presented in the classroom.

My own insecurities took effect as I became an adolescent, and I started wondering whether in fact I was not so much “special” in regards to writing as I was demonstrating to them that I was paying attention to what they were teaching on the basics of spelling and grammar.  As I read other writers, I became envious that they seemed to have original ideas while I was practicing regurgitation but within the bounds of the rules.

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. (Eccl 12:8)

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. (Eccl 1:9)

As I tried to write poetry and songs, most of what I wrote was derivative of my favorite songwriters.  I was taking their ideas and trying to make them my own.  Sure, I was able to occasionally sneak in some original turns of phrase.  Sure, there were times I came up with an original rhyme.  For the most part, I was unhappy with the results.  But because of those few originalities I created, I tried to save everything in notebooks in case I needed to return to them at some future date for reference or reuse.  I envisioned that at such time it would be in the context of an original thought.

I tried my hand at fiction but again ran into the sad fact that most of my plot lines were mere variations of what I had read from other writers.  I also had a problem writing dialogue because I lack the gift of gab.  In my own conversations, I am more frequently a listener than a talker.  This is okay, because I don’t like to run on, but it causes a problem when I try to write multiple characters and imagine their conversations.

I eventually decided none of these limitations should deter me from writing just to practice writing.  I decided to work on putting sentences together, to write poetry when it struck me.  So I did, and I wrote just to write.  I did it for me, and it became a sort of release.

Our culture is based on deception.  In the majority of our social situations, we are expected to put on a good front.  Our moods are not allowed to be honestly expressed; our doubts and fears are to be kept to ourselves.  This is true in the workplace, in our politics, in our casual social settings and in our interactions with all but those in whom we place our most intimate trust.  This expectation of dishonesty, of telling people we are doing well when we aren’t, causes us to suppress emotions.  We place walls with brightly painted murals between ourselves and our society.

Nobody is perfectly happy all of the time.  Without some sort of release from the pressure of having to pretend that we are always all right and that life couldn’t be better, I would never be able to make it through some days.

[Note: This segment has been removed. MH]

That’s me on fire.
My second wife one day decided that the poems were a problem for our relationship, and she made the assumption that I was hanging onto the pain of the first relationship through the poems.  After a particularly difficult relationship talk, she waited until I had gone to sleep and destroyed the poems.  All of them.  I woke up in the middle of the night, hoping for some makeup sex, only to find that she was gone. So were the poems.

Of course, I was angry and, when she returned, explained once again why I had been saving them.  She would have none of it.  As far as she was concerned, keeping those poems that I had written were equivalent to hanging on to old keepsakes and photographs of past lovers.

The poems were part of me, and I wish that I had access to them now.  They were me, exercising my voice and practicing the phrases that I needed to use to express my emotions towards one person.  Like pictures and keepsakes, they are more permanent than any relationships that I have had. I have a poor track record when it comes to lifelong commitments.  I wanted the poems for when I was older, so that I could occasionally pull them back out and look at them, to review my life.  Should I marry again, the internet is not so easily destroyed as a batch of notebook papers. (Hah. Even with that, Google’s cache has a long memory!)

The second wife asked me one day why I never wrote poems like that for her, and she was mostly right.  I rarely did. I didn’t want to tell her that she was such a critical reader I didn’t feel free to experiment and take risks with my poetry. More importantly, performing on demand for such a critical audience would have felt like a chore. I didn’t think that she would appreciate it if I didn’t have it “just right” and original. (Writing love poems as a metaphor for marital sex?)

I didn’t have an explanation for her, but I do for the readers  of Quiche Moraine.

When we were first dating, she was still good friends with one of her old boyfriends. She had reconciled to being “just friends” over a year before I had met her. Tim was a music snob and had made many mix tapes for her.  She was living in Monroe, Louisiana. I was living in Dallas, Texas and driving to Monroe to be with her on the weekends, but I had time to spare on the weeknights.  I was often bored, so I made many mix tapes for myself and decided that with all of the CDs and LPs that I had available, I could make a killer mix tape for her.  And I did.  I thought it was a great mix tape.

The next weekend we went to a party in Monroe, and her old boyfriend was there.  They started talking about music, and she mentioned that I had made a mix tape for her but that the music was lame and that she wanted him to make her another tape.  I didn’t show that it hurt in front of her ex.  Who knows, she may have been testing me.  I just didn’t want to give him any sort of satisfaction, because I didn’t like him.  I carried this hurt with me, hidden behind a “positive attitude” front.  I finished my beer rather quickly.

I realized that if she could dismiss my mix tape, I would be risking much greater hurt if I put myself into a poem for her, only to have her compare it to something that someone else had written for her.  I never was able to put my trust in her after that, and it hurt our relationship. It was a wall between us that I could never tear down.  She blamed it on the first wife, and she was partly right.  Number one had indeed betrayed me deeply, and I had let my guard down for her.  It is a guard that I’ve always had trouble releasing since then.  But the tape didn’t help.

So now, when I write for blogs or for myself, I still see it as a release.  It is in writing that I express my experiences in ways that never feel comfortable in casual conversation.  This process still helps me practice writing, even though I no longer harbor the illusion that I will ever be a famous writer.

(Today I was at a coffee shop, and one of the customers mentioned the name Michele Bachmann in a derogatory manner.  I told him he should take a look at the “Replace Michele Bachmann” carnival at Quiche Moraine.  The barista said “Quiche Moraine?  I’ve heard of that.  It’s kind of a collaboration, isn’t it?  I read about it somewhere.”  Hello, barista, if you are reading this.)

It is sometimes a chore, because I have a deadline here at Quiche Moraine. I agreed with Greg and Stephanie that I would have a post ready on Sundays for publishing on Mondays.  Every Frickin’ Week!  I had intended for today to reuse a post I had originally written for Tangled Up in Blue Guy.

I changed my mind because I needed some release from the pressures I have been feeling lately.  The post largely wrote itself, as I started with a title and let it flow from there. I hope that you have found something original in this.

Writing this helped me.

Instead of pre-publication filtering (editors) we now have post-publication filtering (some done by machines, some by humans). The High Priests who decided what could be published in the first place are now reduced to checking the spelling and grammar.

For someone with a finely nuanced understanding of science journalism and writing, Bora Z of A Blog Around the Clock demonstrates a remarkably narrow view of what an editor does. True, it may not all be his fault. The notion that editors are little more than gatekeepers with red and blue pencils is widespread.

The Image
Photo by Brenda Anderson

Of course, this point of view is most prevalent among people who have never worked with an editor. To find it in someone who has worked with academic editors and editors of the anthology he stewards is a bit surprising. I don’t know whether he’s never worked with a good editor (doubtful but sadly possible), hasn’t paid enough attention to the details of that interaction, or is glossing over the knowledge to make a point. Or, knowing Bora, maybe he’s just being provocative and waiting for someone to call him on it.

I’m calling him on it now, not just because I am an editor, but because I’ve had the privilege to work with some good ones.

The Basics

So, what does an editor do? Well, gatekeeping has certainly been part of the historical function of editors. There’s a lot of crap out there, enough that it’s been worth paying people to keep us from touching it by accident. Bora is right, however, that this is an activity that can be largely crowdsourced, at least to the point where it is unlikely to continue to be a paying job for all but a very few people. Enough of us love to point and say, “Ooh, look what I found,” to keep people who want just the good stuff occupied for years.

It is also true that editors attend to spelling and grammar. This tends to be the purview of a special kind of editor, though–a copyeditor. “Spelling and grammar” also doesn’t come close to scratching the surface of what a copyeditor does.

My next step is to begin my first editing pass, which is a painstakingly slow phase. During this pass, I will create a design memo, a manuscript table of contents, and a style sheet (a list of all names, terms, spellings, hyphenations, capitalizations, grammar styles, etc.); keymark items for design; verify all facts; flag for myself any items that I feel the author may have been inconsistent on; look up all spellings and word usage I’m even remotely unsure of; verify all foreign-language use to the extent that I can; apply consistent style guidelines (such as the use of a serial comma, if that has been requested); and query the author on any awkward or unclear phrasing, change of terms, inaccurate facts, inconsistencies, or numerous other things I may find.

This is the best, most comprehensive description of fiction copyediting I’ve seen. Seeing just an excerpt is totally insufficient. I strongly suggest you read all of Deanna Houk’s post. As you read it, consider the resources and work required to apply that same attention to detail to things like scientific reporting or stories about real places the copyeditor has never been.

The Writing

So much for “spelling and grammar.” What else does an editor do?

Editing requires the strange ability to stand in the place of the audience and the author simultaneously. As an editor reads a piece, whether it be a story or a journal article, they have to understand what the author intended to say without losing track of not just what one individual reader will take away, but how the piece will come across to readers with varying experiences and levels of understanding. The outsider’s perspective shows them the weaknesses in the piece, while the insider’s perspective allows them to make suggestions for improvement that are consistent with the author’s intent.

Writers are closer to their material than anyone else can be. They had better be, or there’s no point in them writing it. This means that they know intimately how topic X and topic Y, or action B and action C, are connected. That’s great for the writing, but it creates a problem when writers are trying to evaluate what they’ve written.

The phrase most commonly heard at my critique group, aside from, “Thank you,” and, “Nooo! I don’t want to go to bed!!!” (our host has small, very social children), is, “Didn’t I put that in there?” A writer can set a piece aside for a period of time to gain some perspective on it, but barring some strange amnesiac condition that still allows them to write, they’ll never have the perspective of a person who didn’t go through the process of writing it, even years later. And on the internet, who has years?

The average audience member, on the other hand, not only doesn’t know what the author was intending but doesn’t care. They’re just not that invested in the work. How much effort are they going to be willing to put in to help an author clarify their meaning when they can just move on and read something else? If they can be bothered to comment about a problem, they’ll generally pick the low-hanging fruit–grammar and spelling.

When an audience member does care, there’s no guarantee that their interest is in making an author’s intended meaning generally clear. Global warming deniers are almost certainly going to read the coverage of the new climate paper, but do they want it understood? No chance. They’re all too likely to look for real or perceived ambiguities that they can exploit to undermine the impact of the study. The same thing happens to fiction writers who cover difficult topics. They will run into readers who will interpret things in a way that furthers their own agendas. Ask anyone who’s ever written a rape scene then been confronted with inexplicable reviews.

The Reality
Photo by Sean M. Murphy

No, the author needs someone on their side with the proper distance from the writing to see it clearly. However, this isn’t enough, or any friend would be able to fill the role. An editor needs to go beyond wanting an author to succeed. They have to be able to set aside their own goals for a piece in favor of the author’s, let the author’s style overwhelm their own while they work. And they have to do this while still keeping the needs of the audience(s) in mind.

Do all editors achieve this ideal? Of course not. But the fact that some don’t, or that some don’t even try, is beside the point. This is the role of an editor. When it’s filled, it makes a difference and not just to the audience.

Sure, a writer with a good editor looks better than one without. Audiences can focus on content instead of surface distractions. There’s even more than that, though.

The Rest

An editor who truly is on the writer’s side and acts as an effective proxy for the audience creates a safe place in which a writer can learn and take risks. When an author is writing for immediate, unedited publication, it is much easier to rely on subjects and styles that are comfortable and have received a good response in the past. Knowing that someone else will see the work before the slavering crowds get a hold of it makes it easier for authors to try something new. It can be remarkably comforting to know one person is willing to tell you your work is crap–but only when it really is.

Handholding may be the part of an editor’s job that gets the least attention, but it’s still important. Editors are there even when the audience fluctuates. When writers get obsessive over the skills they’re trying to master, and they do, editors are there to remind them of all the things they’ve already got down pat. Editors are there to brainstorm when a writer feels blocked or stale. And editors are there to kick writers in the butt when they try to coast.

Editors can even be there to tell people that they are writers. Before we started Quiche Moraine, I would notice writers online. These were people who consistently had interesting things to say in comments or on social networking sites, and I thought they should be blogging. I rarely said so, though, because building a blog to the point where people pay enough attention to make the feedback rewarding takes a nontrivial commitment. Besides, why would they pay attention to me?

It’s different when I can offer them a chance to blog here. Their commitment is much less, for one thing, but more than that, being a gatekeeper offers me the chance to open gates. When I tell someone they can write, they listen. When I tell someone they should write for Quiche Moraine…well, I’ve been told, “Not right now,” and I’ve had people say, “Yes,” who haven’t followed through yet, but no one has said, “No.”

Someday my inbox will instantly fill with posts from all these people who have found that magic convergence of topic that motivates them, time to write and belief that people want to hear what they have to say. I will cower in the corner, drink heavily as I contemplate the work ahead of me, then rejoice, because I will be able to claim responsibility for a small part of that belief.

In the meantime, the writers I do work with are taking themselves and their writing more seriously, while still having fun. This is why I do this.

The Changes

What will change as content creation moves further online? Not a whole lot, really.

The biggest difference I see is that relationships between editors and authors will flatten out more. I can tell Mike that I want to see a post on the work he does toward increasing inclusiveness in local politics. I can try to persuade Greg that his job is to tell me stories all the time. If you look at the content here, you’ll see that neither of these happens. I give suggestions, not assignments. I get them too, since I’m also a writer.

Neither Greg nor Mike is very experienced as an editor (although Greg is starting to fully understand that his academic experience is applicable), but that doesn’t stop either of them from giving me valuable feedback. Just as critique groups sprang up everywhere as soon as fiction writers got online, I think we’re going to see more bloggers getting together and at least exchanging their weightier pieces for critique before posting them. Not the day-to-day stuff necessarily, but the posts in which they really want the content to come through.

It may seem confusing that I talk about critique as editing, but one of the other changes I think we’ll see is that editing will stop being an all-or-nothing proposition online. We’ll see group blogs where everything has to pass muster with the group but is otherwise as the author wrote it, and we’ll see the small networks of independent blogs I just spoke about. We’ll see some authors give up a degree of control in exchange for not having to worry about polishing or promoting their work and others who want every change tracked for their approval.

All of them will find editors to suit their desires, except the writers with whom no editor wants to work. The hard part will be figuring out what the editors get out of it. It’s not a job that pays well anyway, except for the high-prestige gatekeeping jobs, so that won’t be as much of a barrier to editor involvement as figuring out how to get editors the appropriate credit. Good editors are mostly invisible. It’s only when we screw up that readers notice we’re here. But a writer who has no income to share with an editor is going to have to share something.

So when Bora decides, some day in the future, that he wants his spelling and grammar checked because it’s working for all the cool kids, he’ll be able to get it. In return, however, he’s going to have to learn how to tell people just how valuable that editing is.

The American Medical Writers Association is the leading professional organization for medical communicators, with over 5,500 members from around the world. The ratio of female to male members is 4449:1227 (approx. 4:1), mirroring the trend observed with the Google search.

In short, medical writing is a predominately female profession.

Some may argue that women are simply better writers than men and therefore better able to communicate complex medical and scientific ideas. But what about renowned male writers like Carl Zimmer and Gary Taubes?

It is possible that different gender trends exist in different subgroups within the medical/science writing community based on expertise (for example, science vs. medical vs. technical writers), target audience (writing for physicians vs. scientists vs. the public) or kind of degree held by the writer (PhD vs. MD).

Another argument is that many women pursue science/medical writing because they drop out or are pushed out of academia. It is no secret that most scientists in the upper echelons of academia are male, and much has been written about the female plight in academia.

Some women, like Pat Shipman, an adjunct professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, have managed to remain in academia and have a successful science writing career. Other women have chosen one over the other.

Gunjan Sinha, an award-winning female medical writer based in Berlin, suggests that two main reasons why women scientists drop out of academia to pursue alternative careers (like medical writing) are:

1. They choose family over career; and
2. The proverbial glass ceiling—the institutional barriers that impede their advancement in academia.

I would be interested to know what others think are the reasons why more women choose to communicate about science and medicine (professionally) while more men seem to choose the practical aspects of science and medicine (professionally).

Karen Ventii, PhD is a medical writer based in Atlanta. She formerly blogged at Science to Life.

1. Inclusion criteria: individuals (not part of an agency) whose websites clearly define them as a “medical” writer.