Chicago Manual of Style Applied to Fiction

The Chicago Manual of Style is industry standard for North American publishing, but it was designed for academic texts, not fiction. So, that's always been problematic when coming up with questions about style while editing (writing) fiction. I was this many days old when another editor pointed out that Chicago Manual has a BLOG for fiction to answer those questions:

https://cmosshoptalk.com/fiction-plus/

Well duh! Great resource!

Why I Am Not a (Total) Prescriptivist

From Ryan Starkley of Starkley comics:

If you love language, be a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist!

Remember:

• Just because a word isn’t in your dictionary, doesn’t mean it isn’t a word.
• Just because a dialect is different from the standard language, doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.
• Just because someone uses a word in a way you aren’t familiar with, doesn’t mean they are wrong.
• And, however you feel about it, language evolution is inevitable, so you might as well enjoy it!

Editing Podcast: Different Levels of Editing

Click: The Editing Podcast

Short Story Submissions

The elements that we consider make up a "well written" story tend to be those we've observed in stories we like. When we consider stories for Neo-opsis, the first thing we consider is, "did we like the story?" not "would my English teachers have approved of all the elements of the story?" One story didn't have what some would consider the best writing techniques, but when I read the story, I felt like I was in the story watching it, rather than looking at words on a page. That to me is far more important than whether their grammar was perfect, if their tenses always matched, etc.

It's easier to fix the grammar in an interesting story than it is to make a well-written boring story less boring.

—Karl Johanson
Editor, Neo-opsis Magazine

Editing Canadian English

Editing Canadian English by Editors' Association of Canada
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I mostly use Chicago Manual of Style and/or American Psychological Association style guides in my role as book editor, but it's nice to have this resource on my desk for Canadian content that doesn't require strict adherence to either APA or CMOS. The book contains intelligent discussions of the Editors Association of Canada (Editors Canada) take on a whole range of issues--dealing with racism, sexism, ableism in writing, for example--that move the reader from a simple prescriptivist perspective found in most style guides to a much more sophisticated understanding that is closer to the way professional editors think.

Highly recommended for all Canadian editors, and for Canadian writers interested in self-editing.

View all my reviews

Editing Standards

Here is an anecdote from Greg Ioannou a professional and influential Canadian editor:

In its early days, the Editors' Association of Canada (then the "Freelance Editors' Association of Canada") sent its members a series of sentences to edit, to see which were the most common approaches to fixing some kinds of problems. We were in the very very early days of thinking about standards. One sentence, memorably, was edited by 101 editors. Only one pair of editors made the same corrections to it. So there were literally 100 different edits trying to fix a two-line sentence. And almost all of those edits worked perfectly well.

In response, Sharon Stewart mentioned that

a linguistics prof wrote an algorithm to create a sentence describing a cartoon of a phone booth out in the middle of nowhere in which a bear was making a phone call. The algorithm came up with 22 million grammatically correct ways to describe the cartoon. I used to mention that story to editors-in-training to show them that there's more than one way to say something.

The general public believes that editors are rule-bound prescriptivists dictating 'correct' English, but the truth is editing is more an art than a science, and professional editors (as opposed to your annoying cousin and some improperly trained Language Arts teachers) understand there are many ways of saying the same thing well, and that there is no one correct way that all must adopt. Indeed, the joy of English is the many different nuances of meaning and emphasis available by subtle changes in word choice, word order, punctuation, and so on. A professional editor strives for clarity while working to maintain the authors' intent and voice. Professional editors know that one frequently breaks 'the rules' to convey meaning, purpose, tone, voice, and so on--what the public has learned to call poetic license. Well, everybody has license to write as they wish, not just poets, and the purpose of editing is to up one's language game, not restrict it with arbitrary rules. Of course, there are many common errors where an author may word something that could be more precise, concise, or clearer if slightly altered, and an editor might make that suggestion. But it's always up to the client to say yea or nay.

"The Luck of Charles Harcourt" and "Sermon on the Mount"

My 1989 short story, "The Luck of Charles Harcourt", has been reprinted in the current issue (#5) of Polar Borealis (above left). The timing pleases me greatly because the story originally appeared in the very first issue of On Spec magazine (pictured above right), and my second story in On Spec, "Sermon on the Mount" came out just last month (January, 2018) in #106 Vol. 28 (3), pp. 88-105 (pictured below). So there is an opportunity to compare first and last, as it were.

Note that although Polar Borealis is a paying market showcasing new and established Canadian authors, it is available free to subscribers: Download Now

I must confess that reading my story from nearly thirty years ago makes me wince a little bit at the now obvious sexism, and it seems strange to read about people lining up at the bank tellers instead of using the ATM, and that there were no cell phones yet. I was tempted to update the story, but editor Graeme Cameron argued that "every story is a time capsule, capturing the context of the time it was written. Which is why I don't believe fiction should ever be reprinted with alterations designed to appease changing tastes and views. Let the past speak with the authentic voice of the past, I say."

It's an intriguing issue. Lorina and I left Hargreaves' stories as they were when Five Rivers reprinted North by 2000+ because they were authentically awesome, though the future he predicted for 2000 was not quite the one we got. In my preface, I told readers to just read the stories as if they took place in a parallel universe where American and Canada had merged (to take just one example of what hadn't gone the ways Hargreaves had predicted in the 1960s) but some readers did indeed complain about the anachronisms. Though it should be noted how many things Hargreaves got right, and therefore went unnoticed.... On the other hand, we updated Leslie Gadallah's books to take out the long explanations of the Internet, because we actually had the Internet by the time we reprinted her books. Perhaps the most interesting issue I've had as an editor with anachronisms is an author who wanted to disguise that the story was based on their own life by setting it in modern day, but then the action didn't make any sense, because much of the storyline depended on the confusion arising from characters not being able to reach each other, which just can't happen that way in an era of smartphones.

The story in the current issue of On Spec is "Sermon on the Mount", a time travel story. I always thought the time travel genre was kind of mined out, but then the idea for this one popped into my head, so there you go. Though now Krista Ball mentions it, I should probably have had a few more female characters in there....But, you know, reflects the times...

Anyway, pleased with to have the two stories out at once. Waiting to see if any of the five currently under consideration get picked up.