Copy-editing - how hard can it be?

 Late last August, my 24-year old son showed me something he’d written. ‘I don’t know if it’s the start of a short story, or something longer,’ he said. It was in the fantasy genre, and the main character was a young man, the heir to the lord of the manor, who was running scared from his responsibilities. He was more interested in the pixie-infested forest outside the village.

I read it and liked it, and told my son what he had there was the start of a novel. ‘And fantasy novels,’ I told him, ‘need to be somewhere around 90-100,000 words.’ He’d written about 3000.

He gulped, went away, and carried on writing. Over the next couple of months he sent me a chapter or two most days for me to read and comment on. We had many long discussions about his plot and characters and ideas, and I found myself really getting into his story and looking forward to each instalment.

When it was complete I promised him I’d do a copy-edit on it, once he’d pulled it into shape. Over the last couple of weeks that’s what I’ve been doing.

Well, let me tell you, I have a new-found respect for the work of a copy-editor! It’s a lot harder when it’s not your own novel. I tend to type quite accurately – there aren’t many typos or grammatical errors in my first drafts. (I suspect this is the result of years of working as a computer programmer, when typos would mean the program simply wouldn’t compile.) My son… less so. Ahem.

It took me much longer than I’d expected to edit my son’s novel, reading it slowly and carefully, removing repeated words, altering the occasional bit I felt was overwritten, correcting grammar and punctuation. But all through I was loving the story even more reading it the second time.

OK, so I do understand that as his mother I may be just the teensiest bit biased, but he’s a good writer, he can tell a story and develop his characters, he made me laugh and gasp and I enjoyed every word of the book. Great start, intriguing middle and satisfying ending.

So once he’s finished checking through my edits and making a few other changes, he needs to write a synopsis. And then research potential agents and publishers. As we writers know all too well, very often writing the novel is the easy part – getting published is the difficult bit.

But he’s done well to get this far. And copy-editing the novel was a great experience for me. I learned a lot doing it!