This week, I’m joined by Chris Winkle and Oren Ashkenazi, the writers and editors in charge of Mythcreants. This online magazine serves up scifi and fantasy for storytellers, and I’ve been a happy copyeditor on their team since 2014. In this episode, we chat about the system they’ve set up for editing the blog, how they train their beta readers to provide good feedback, and what it’s like to have your partner editing your work.
Also be on the look out for the second part of our conversation in Episode 9, when we discuss the magic ingredient of good feedback!
Music: Harlequin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3858-harlequin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Show Notes:
Follow them on Twitter: @Mythcreants
Transcript:
Ariel: Hi there and welcome to Edit Your Darlings, a podcast that tries to take the sting out of editing by talking with darling authors about their experiences. This week is a very special episode because not only am I joined by two darling writers, but I have also had the pleasure of editing their work! Today I'm talking with Mythcreants writers and editors, Chris Winkle and Oren Ashkenazi. Mythcreants is an online magazine serving up fantasy and science fiction for storytellers with blog posts, podcasts, comics, and original stories. Thank you both so much for making time to talk with me.
Chris: Yeah, thanks for having us on.
Oren: Excuse me, you forgot the part where we are way off base and have an agenda, according to the comments section of various articles.
Ariel: Don't read the comments. So I've been working with Mythcreants since 2015. Each of the blog posts that they publish go through to copy editors and still somehow I find typos every now and then.
Chris: It’s impossible to get every one.
Ariel: Wes tells me every week that he picks something or other up after I've looked at it, and I'm like, Wes, are you a magician? Are you turning back time to go back and put typos in just so that you have something to do?
Oren: Well, just to be just be clear. So our editing process, Chris or I will do a first pass for content stuff. And then we send it to Ariel, and that's where the first copy editing starts, so it's not like it's already been copyedited. Chris will catch more typos than I will, but, you know, we're still both, we're doing a content edit. So, you know, that's why we have a Copy Edit Two, just to be clear. It's not like Ariel is missing stuff that we expected her to get and then we have a second one specifically because you're not ever going to catch all of the typos in one pass right?
Chris: The origins of us having to copy edits are from when we were using nonprofessional copy editors. At the very beginning, when we just had people who volunteered and that copywriting wasn't their job. And so having two people was just a way to help, you know, raise the quality when we were working with volunteers. Now, we have people like Ariel. And, you know, maybe it seems a little silly that we have two, but it actually works pretty well because again no editor catches every single thing it's just. I've come to realize there’s just no way it’s gonna happen.
Ariel: Quick Aside: I asked Wes to comment on what he finds each week, because I was really curious. Am I missing typos? Do I need to slow down and be more careful? Or are there just rules I need to revisit in the good ol’ style guide? I found his response, much like Wes himself, precise, lightly humorous, and very reassuring. He sent me 18 examples from the last 3 blog posts we’d edited. And he used some terms that I intuitively understand when I look at grammar but don’t necessarily memorize the names of, like “modal verbs.” I admit: I can’t argue with some of his examples. Typos happen, and that’s why we recommend as many sets of eyes as possible on your work.
But some of the examples were grammar rules that I often choose to ignore in these blog posts to maintain a conversational tone. For example, one of the sentence he sent was: “If a main character was a woman,” versus “If a main character were a woman.” Wes said, “Second conditionals for hypotheticals take “were” in the to-be form to differentiate them as hypothetical.”
Yep. This dude is smart! I would have called it the subjunctive case, and many authors choose to avoid subjunctive because it sounds weird to them, so I don’t enforce it. Two editors. Two grammar opinions. It reflects out backgrounds as much as it reflects the style guide. Just something to think about when you’re getting comments from your copyeditors. Okay, back to Chris!
Chris: And usually the second editor just has a fun time reading the post and changes a few things but doesn't have to do a lot of work and that's okay too, but they still are, you know, they're still a second person to catch those things.
Ariel: Or they have an opportunity to chime in on the geeky stuff that I'm not quite up on.
Chris: Yeah, we have discussions and sometimes we want another opinion and so having to copy editors is fantastic. Yeah.
Ariel: So that's the blog, which I love Mythcreants. Everybody should go and see what kind of cool, amazing writing advice they have on there. But what I really want to get at today is your writing, your fiction. I want to know about how you edit your own work and how you approach editing when it's not articles, it's not other people's work. It's your own stories from your own heads, close to your heart. Talk to me about, how did you build the team of editors that you trust to look at your work? Where did you find them? How did you establish those relationships? And how has that story editing process changed over the years as you've published more and grown as writers?
Oren: Well, I have a very simple process. I write my story, I send it to an editor, I look at their notes and say, frankly, how dare you. And then I never talk to them again.
Chris: Yeah, we have somewhat different processes. We have similar philosophies and similar processes, but not exactly the same. I got started because I had member of my family who did dev editing. And she acted as my mentor early on and kind of got me into storytelling and was one of the first people to teach me storytelling. And I worked with her for many years and the fantastic thing about working with somebody that is in your family is that you can go back to them for pretty much countless revisions. Cuz it's free and usually they're happy to do it for you. And she wasn't doing tons of dev editing work freelance, so it wasn't like this was just, “Oh, more of my day job.” So, you know, I would just go through tons of revisions with her.
You know, I learned a lot, but after a while, you know she had some issues where she just didn't have the energy to do a lot of editing anymore. And I had grown a lot as a storyteller. And so at that point, it was kind of time to move on and find another dev editor.
Not everybody does dev editing, and I think that's a shame, even as a dev editor who knows more about storytelling than most writers, I always like having dev editors. So these days I do also send my work to Oren, but he's like my mom, where he likes everything I wrote because I wrote it, which is great because my mom isn't like my mom in that respect. I send things to him and usually he'll tell me a few things but he just loves it all the time. So I had to go kind of out abroad and I had to test out a lot of editors to try to find one that I thought brought to the table what I wanted. So now I work with another editor and it's much more one maybe two rounds of feedback, and then I just roll with it. And I think if I had tried to do that when I was starting out that would have been much harder. And now because I'm a lot more confident, my stories are more polished to begin with, and I know what to do with her feedback more than when I started, I think that it’s okay.
Oren: Well for me. I had very little active mentorship in writing. I had some help in like my early high school years, from a friend of the family who had been a novelist and was retired. But she just kind of didn't have time later. So, basically, like late high school through college, I had essentially no editing. The closest I had was that I worked with a couple of theater professionals on some plays that I wrote and they helped a lot on the place, but this was very specific, we were doing very specific theater writing, and it didn't really translate super well to the page. And so Chris can probably attest that by the time we met in, I guess it was 2013...
Chris: Mhmm, I think so.
Oren: Sounds about right. You could probably tell that my writing had not had serious editors—or at least, content wise, not serious content editing—for many years, because it was a little bit of a mess. I ran into the wall of finding out that you know a lot less than you think you do about writing. When I started showing my stuff to Chris, and she was like these things, this doesn't make sense, this doesn't work, and like, this story doesn't have this story doesn't have conflict and like this character is unnecessary or like what is happening in this scene. And I’m like, I don’t know, does that not all makes sense?
So that went through that process. Then, you know, once I had once I had Chris who is an actual editor, I basically just run all of my stories past her, and some of them are like, this is too much work to fix, so I just trunk it because my ego is fragile and there's only so much revision I can handle. But if a story seems good, then Chris will help me work on it, usually over multiple drafts. With the novel that I'm working on, Chris doesn't have time to just go and edit my novel five times. So we worked out something that was more structured so that she would only have to do it. Like two times.
Ariel: Tell me more about that.
Chris: The first thing I want to say about this is that, when you have... you’re one partner editing the other partner, one thing that's important to think about is the aspirations of both partners, because a lot of times what I've seen it's usually when you have partners that are a man and a woman, it's usually the woman doing editing for the man. And if I spent endless time just editing Oren’s work, I might not have time to write my own. And that can become an issue and you want to help your partner, you know, reach their dreams and help their creative work be the best that it can be. At the same time it's also important that you think about what your own time is worth, so that you can also do your own work.
So in our case, rather than—I told you about that family member who had just been, you know, seven revisions she would, you know, do as many as it would take with me. And Oren’s short stories, we would also do a lot of back and forth as many times as it took, but then when you get to novel level, it's a lot of work and a lot of hours to do that much editing and so now we actually like treat it as though I'm an editor that is getting paid and set aside that cost, so that I can take time off of paid work and then do his work instead. I f you can't spend that money to give that person that time off, then maybe it's not worth it. So we actually do have kind of a financial arrangement that allows me to take time off, you know, to compensate for all of that work that I'm putting into his novel.
Oren: So those of you at home, pay attention. The solution to sexism is cash money. If you find yourself thinking like, “Maybe I, a man, am getting free labor from the women that I know,” consider paying them. There you go.
Chris: Anyway, that's an important thing that we had to work out. So I wanted to mention it. Other than that, what we do is, at this point in time we're very into having outlines edited. We're a huge fan of doing as much as you can at the outline level, because it reduces revisions so much. And so, I always edit Oren’s outlines first. At this point, it's always so we went through an outline and during the outline, we made changes and we sorted out what the main character’s character arc was, for instance, and helped him, you know, figure out what the opening would be and, you know, all sorts of work at the outline level. I've done, I think, two looks at the draft, is that correct?
Oren: Yeah. So, let's see. So you did one look at the whole draft, and then I think you did a... a little look where I changed some things and you looked specifically at those areas so that was a couple of scenes. And then I think you looked at it a second time in full after the first round of beta reading to help me sort out like what the beta readers were saying and what I needed to change in response to it.
Chris: Yeah, that's another important thing that usually doesn't happen with editing that I think a lot of writers could really use help with is, okay you've got this feedback. If you have beta readers, they're not like professionals in telling you what to do or giving advice, and a lot of times they have trouble telling you what bothered them. Right, or why they feel the way they do. You know, some of them have very random opinions that doesn't reflect.... And so a lot of writers get this feedback, and it's hard to tell people what do I do about this feedback. And so having a content editor, who can look at this feedback and help parse it and be like, “Okay, these are the opinions that are common, these two comments they seem different but they're actually about the same thing, I think they're getting at the same issue,” and then help the writer come up with here's the action items you should actually take away from this beta reading feedback. That’s something I do for Oren, I think it's enormously helpful, and I don't think very many writers have that and that's really too bad.
Oren: Certainly better than the crushing despair I was feeling before then.
Ariel: And how do you keep track of, here are all of the beta readers’ comments, here are the ones that I want to do something about, here are the ones that I've fixed or made changes for? Do you have a spreadsheet, do you have note cards?
Oren: Nothing so fancy. I mean, so I have my beta readers do the beta reading in Google Docs or occasionally Word if Google Docs is not workable for whatever reason. And in those cases I just have them leave comments, and we have a whole system for training our beta readers to leave the kind of comments that we find helpful.
In the case of the novel, which was the first time when like keeping track of these things was actually a problem because it was long enough for that, I created a new document where I just copied in everyone's comments on the same document, because Google Docs doesn’t let you merge documents that way. And I labeled who they who each of them was from. Chris looked at it, she left her comments, and then I made a revision plan.
Chris: Going back to valuing the editor’s time, especially when you're editing for your partner, is that before I look over beta reading feedback, he has to go through and compile it all in one document for me and like I just I cannot tell you how I would, how much I wish that Google Docs had a feature where you could share a document with multiple people but they all have like separate versions and they can't see each other's comments right and then you can just view all of their comments together. That would save so much time.
Ariel: And why don't you want them to be able to see each other's comments?
Chris: Because they will influence each other. It's like running an experiment, and you're trying to eliminate variables like—this is also something that to watch out for if you have a critique group—is that people will you know have a certain level of group think. But people don't usually like, you know, read a book together in a critique group, that's not their experience of reading it, right? So you want to have their opinions, their solo opinions because that's a better reflection of what their experience would be if you were to sell the book. But sometimes people will just kind of like build off of each other. Not that it's never helpful. I can also see situations where somebody is something bothers them, they don't know what, they figure it out after discussing, but I think that the amount of outside influence, you know, I think would lower the reliability of how accurate the feedback is.
Oren: Right. And it's also like if someone has a thing where they're like something's bothering me and I don't know what it is, they might just falsely attribute it because they heard someone confidently speak about something. So here's the thing with beta readers is that they are not experts. Hopefully not. If you're getting professional editors to beta read for you, that might be an issue. But they are probably not experts, and so they are not there to tell you how to fix the story, because they don't know. What they are there to do is tell you their reaction, because they don't need to be an expert to give you their reaction. They can tell you, I was bored here. I really liked this character, this character frustrated me. There's no expertise required there. That is just their honest reaction. They cannot be wrong about that unless they're actively lying to you.
Chris: If they’re actively lying to you, maybe get another beta reader.
Oren: That's why we don't want them talking to each other, because that contaminates the results and makes it less likely that we are getting there like live feedback as it goes, and so that's why we have like a whole primer that we put our beta readers through and why we tend to use the same ones over and over again. Because we have to teach them not to try to solve the problem. Because that isn't helpful. I don't need to know their idea for how I can fix something. What I need is for them to tell me how they're feeling as they read it.
Chris: I would say that I think the biggest problem with beta readers who tell you ideas for fixes, tell you how to change things, is usually they do it instead of telling you what actually bothered them. I can just ignore suggestions if I don't want to take them—I mean, don't get me wrong, it's really condescending when somebody does that, but you know it doesn't bother me too much. It is an issue because instead of saying, “hey, this bored me,” they'll say, “hey, you should add some action here,” right? And then you're left wondering why they said that and what they're actually responding to and how they were actually feeling.
Oren: You also have to train them in things like to use complete... to use words. A lot of times beta readers will go in thinking like, well I'm gonna, you know if I can get to this, I'm just gonna make like a laugh emote. And it's like, did you leave that because this was genuinely amusing to you or did you leave that because you were laughing at me for writing? Vagueness is the opposite of good feedback.
Ariel: Microsoft Word just added a feature where you could put gifs in the comments, and I’m
mortified.
Oren and Chris: Oh no!
Ariel: I'm so worried.
Oren: That sounds bad.
Chris: We teach beta readers as best we can and then we also just pay attention to whether we felt their feedback was helpful and then try to overtime, you know, invite more people to beta read and then if they were helpful, invite them back. Invite it's a weird word to use because they're donating their time. It’s not like we're doing them a favor by letting them beta read our stories. They're the ones doing us a favor, which you always try to keep in mind and just be grateful that they devoted their time to you, regardless of whether or not you think their feedback is constructive.
Oren: Right, yeah, like I have a whole article about this, but please please please respect your beta readers’ time. We talked about respecting your editors time also respect your beta readers, even if their feedback’s not great. If their feedback is really bad and not helpful, you can just not ask them again. Don't argue with your beta readers. I've had people do that they invite me to beta read something, I'm like okay, I start beta reading, and they argue with me. I'll leave a comment like, “Well, I like this character but this thing she does here doesn't seem to line up with her motivation earlier,” or something like that. They'll be like, “well it totally does for all these reasons” and it's like, well, okay, not only are you invalidating my feedback, which feels bad. You're also tainting my further data, because now I know things that you had to tell me that I couldn't get from reading the text.
Chris: Yeah. Again, we're treat this like an experiment right so we also try to make sure our beta readers don't know things that people would know by reading the story right because that can actually change the results so...
Oren: And you know, other things like, make sure it's easy to read. I've had people send me beta reading documents that didn't have paragraph breaks, you know, stuff like that. You know like try to format it properly. Do a pass for typos. No one expects you to catch them all but, you know, if you can eliminate the obvious ones ,that will save everyone time and frustration, you know, stuff like that, right. They are doing you a favor, make it as easy for them as you can.
Ariel: How do you keep in mind what you know, versus what your editor knows versus what your reader knows, to make sure that the story makes sense?
Oren: Hmm. Hmm. I have no idea. Chris, you take this one.
Chris: That’s a little tricky. I mean we have specific methods that we use, and some editors work differently. The big thing that is important to me from my experience being edited that now has influenced me and also Oren, as an editor, is making sure that you understand what the writer is trying to do before you give any suggestions. And it's not as big of a deal for me now, when I work with an outside content editor or dev editor. But when I wasn't as skilled at storytelling... Sometimes it's not clear what I was trying to accomplish with the story; it's not clear what message I was trying to send, wasn't clear what things I was trying to focus on. And then what happens is the editor makes assumptions about what you're trying to do that's wrong and then gives you advice based on those assumptions. I would explain to my editor no this is what I wanted to do. And then, everything changes.
Those kinds of miscommunications can be prevented. At the same time I also think it's really good for an editor to come into the story fresh to read the story not knowing, like, those insider details, because I do think those bias your first impression. Every editor does things differently, but our philosophy is very much, read the story without knowing any kind of intent the first time.
Oren: From an editor's perspective. Pretty much what Chris said, I always go in without knowing a lot about the story. I don't want the author to tell me lots about it. I want to be able to get what the impression of a reader would be. And then afterwards I will ask them all kinds of questions about what it is they're trying to do so that I can help them accomplish their goals, whatever that is.
As a writer, I try to keep in mind that nothing is as obvious to other people as it is to me. And I feel like there's a bit of an issue where some people are afraid of over expositing, which can be a thing that can happen. But in general, you always have to explain things more than you think you do, because it's so obvious to you if you've been staring at this page for years of planning the story, as you know it backwards and forwards. But like other people don't, and you need to bring up important things more than once. So, I try to imagine, like okay, whatever I would need to see in order to know what's happening, I'm going to increase that by 50 to 100%. And then, worst-case scenario, the editor is like, “You know you can take some of the stuff out.” And it's like, okay, done!” as opposed to like what the heck are you even doing?
Chris: Yeah, everything is more obvious if you already know the answer. Foreshadowing a reveal, it will always seem really obvious to me. But I always remember it's going to be less obvious to the reader and that's held out, and I do have the occasional beta reader who guesses the ending. But generally, that's okay. Usually it's a minority of the beta readers, and most of time they'll say that it didn't diminish their experience anyway. And that's definitely better than having a reveal that just doesn't click into place.
Oren: If you do your job right and foreshadow things, some people will get it, but in general as long as it doesn't feel like the characters should have seen it coming, that's usually okay, and sometimes people even like that they're like, ah yeah my, my clever deduction was validated by this story that I made this prediction and it turned out to be true.
Chris: Called it!
Oren: Exactly! I love in stories that feel like they're well put together, it doesn't bother me that I saw a thing coming. It makes me feel smart.
Ariel: So, the first time that you shared your work with each other, because that's a very vulnerable thing and Oren mentioned that he's got a bit of a fragile ego. How did you feel when you opened up that editorial letter or you opened up the document with comments in it and... Was it everything that you were hoping for? Was it heart crushing. Did you ever have disagreements about a story?
Oren: For me, it was all of bad things because I thought I knew way more than I did. When I first started sending stuff to Chris, this was like when Mythcreants was first starting and we were talking about publishing stories. And so I started sending some of my stuff to Chris, which I thought was basically ready, and uh-uh, turned out, not. You know, I wasn't ready for that I didn't, you know, there's... At some point, because there isn't a good system in place for teaching authors what they need to know, every author is eventual—is prob—maybe not all of them, but most of them are going to run into the wall of like, Wow, it turns out I know way less than I thought I did. And that can be pretty painful when it's on the subject of like stories that are very personal and important to you.
That was my first experience because Chris was rightfully pointing out problems. And I was just like, What? This is not what I was expecting. I was expecting to get like, “Oh, these are great, we'll put them on the website, on the internet.” And uh-uh, that’s not what happened. I ended up trunking most of those early stories because they were just not worth the pain—the emotional pain, probably not physical pain—the emotional pain of trying to fix them.
Chris: It's been so long it's almost hard to remember. But we have really progressed a lot when it comes to working together, particularly with me as Oren’s editor. And I remember vaguely those early days where I think I was. I don't know if I really started as an editor. I think I might have been a beta reader some of the times. I think I have improved, but I'm kind of an ego buster often. Like my storytelling expertise has also just vastly improved in that time, and I think in some other early stories I would just be like, “This should be like really emotional but I just don't feel anything and I don't know why.” Which is sad thing to say, but that's what you would expect from a beta reader, right? A lot of times I would—or as I learned more, I would be like yeah so the plot of this totally not constructed well. The plot just...doesn't really have a plot. Ending is like a foregone conclusion. And would you know send him my feedback and just hear nothing, as he fell into the pit of despair and trunked his stories.
And then as we got... went along and I got better at diagnosing what was wrong. And he also learned more about plotting and his stories improved as his knowledge improved, I would more proactively help him sort of fix his problems. He would sometimes start coming to me in the idea stage right so we could look at it and make sure his plot was sound before he started writing. But I have to say sometimes there were awkward points where I knew enough to help him in certain places but I also kind of led him astray, where it would be like, Okay, we got to the point and realize that we have to make the story about the character who has a problem. Whereas if you write a story about a character trying to fix other people's problems for them, that doesn't work so well. But then when you have a... give the character their own problem a lot of times what happens they're too flawed and they're no longer likeable.
I remember one story in particular where we got him like, okay, this is the character’s problem that he overcomes during the story. But then, there wasn't enough, you know with that flaw there was enough positive things about the character to get the beta readers to like this character, and we ended up trunking that story and it was really sad.
I've come a long way but it's also been really interesting to, again, all of these years since I started doing more in an editor function, I've also looked at the beta reading feedback on his work and that has given me like more data for how readers respond and what they react to. That was an important lesson. It was sad that we trunked that story, but it was an important lesson about likeability. And then that was something that we always looked for and checked in stories going forward. So it's been slow but it's like I’ve become a better editor and he's become a better writer, and we now have a rhythm and process for how we work together that's evolved over time.
Oren: I don't edit her work to the same degree that she edits mine, cuz you know, very often she’ll, like, tell me about what her actual editor is saying about a story that I've read. And I will have to be like, mrrr, resist the urge to say I think that's nonsense.
Chris: He’s more angry about what my editors say to me than I am. I'm usually like cool with all their feedback and considering it and he’s like, “No! You story’s perfect!”
Oren: Look I can't... I can't separate the personal feelings from the professional at that point. Okay, I have to admit, I can't. So I just try not to say anything.
Ariel: That is so endearing!
Oren: I don't want to be the reason that Chris decides not to listen to her editor, okay, but also her editor is wrong.
Ariel: Chris, did you ever consider pulling your punches so that your feedback wouldn't break Oren’s heart?
Chris: Well, I mean, it depends on what you qualify as pulling punches. I have learned how to try to word things better. I mean, there's only so much you can do. Definitely wording things better helps. Adding praise definitely helps. At a certain level, just the content itself, the message is what, what breaks people's hearts.
I do have a problem with not wanting... with letting a story just... Especially if it's something that we are going to post on our website, right, which was always the goal. You know, if it's like this, this story has a major plot problem, it just doesn't meet my standards for what I want to show to the world under the Mythcreants name. And so I have to enforce those sort of like, quality boundaries. Whereas if this was something that Oren was sending off to another publication... That said, though, I do think that there's only so much an editor can do when it comes to completely revolutionizing a story that's really rough. It's kind of amazing to me how much when you're working with something really rough, you focus on the really rough parts, and you might not even notice the parts that aren't as rough. And even if they take care of that, you'll see a whole new host of problems that you just didn't notice before. You know, it's not necessarily that I would take every story into its like, all of its components. But no, I don't think I would just tell him that a story that I didn't think the plot worked at all worked, because then he would wonder why we weren't putting out on the website.
Oren: Yeah, there'd be a pretty obvious giveaway on that one. And then I'd be like, Okay, I see what's happening here.
Ariel: That’s all the time we have this week. Be sure to listen to Part 2 of my discussion with Chris Winkle and Oren Ashkenazi next week, when we talk about the magic ingredient that makes editing comments useful, the differences between Chris and Oren’s approaches to feedback, plus the questions I ask every author I talk to, and our beloved Hot and Wholesome Gossip Corner.
If you loved this episode of Edit Your Darlings, why not share it with a friend? Remember to rate and review on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast fix. For show notes go to edityourdarlings. com, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @editpodcast, or I'm @arielcopyedits. Until next week, cheers!