Tag Archives: fiction

What Editors do. . .

“What do editors do?” I asked my first literary agent, having established that it was not, as I had first thought, copy editing. I was very young.

She was an editor by training, temperament and still, occasionally, practice. “Teach you to write,” she snapped.

Over time I came to see that she was right, in one way. They intend to teach you to write what their employer desires to publish and/or knows he can sell. And they want an end product that will do just that.

This is how I think modern editing evolved.

Editors Keep You Legal

Back in the day when printer Samuel Richardson was writing Pamela to keep his presses busy, nobody edited fiction. Printers could be prosecuted for content, so such editing as they did of their clients’ work aimed to keep them out of the law courts. Fiction? Not a risk.

Dickens was his own editor. This could not happen:Dickens-and-his-editor

Editors Keep You Decent – and may have a go at saleable

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The Importance of Readers (reposted from RNA Blog)

This post on The Importance of Readers was originally a guest piece on the Romantic Novelists’ Association blog. Many thanks to the RNA for letting us repost it here, complete with thoughts on our progress, nearly a year on…

Sophie Weston AuthorBack in December 2015, Sophie Weston wrote . . .

Every author understands the importance of readers.They nurture our visions, buy our books, keep us creating. You might say, they’re our raison d’être.

But how much do we know about how or why or even what they do, when they read? Especially when they read fiction.

When I say they, of course I mean we.

All authors were readers before we started to write. Most of us stay readers — some, voracious — throughout our lives. Sometimes though, we don’t read the way we used to, need to, if we’re to fulfil the purist job description. Continue reading