A Blessing or a Curse?

[puppetmaker]

I had been told that this might happen. After you have been editing for a couple of years, you can’t seem to read anything without the mental editing pencil coming out. Some over come this and can turn it on and off. I, apparently, am not one of them. I have been reading a variety of books for fun. Some are by authors I have been reading for years. One was a collaboration between two authors, who individually I love, that was a conglomeration of mush. I wanted to pull out my red pencil and edit the heck out of it. I am even looking at the structure of the nonfiction books I have been reading and thinking how it could be restructured. I find that some authors, which I loved their early works, newer books are sloppy. Sloppy plotting. Sloppy dialogue. Information dumps all through out the book. It seems like they can no longer write or their editors, of one reason or another, can’t edit them. I know how hard it can be to get an author who is known to really look at their work and see where it can be improved. But it can be done. I have a note from one of my authors telling me that I was refreshing to work with because I tried to help the work as a whole and I had a good critical eye. I just can’t seem to close the darn thing.

Comments

[wide_worlds_joy]

Yeah, I know. Seen that too many times to count. Don't read the book by Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey, it's horrendous.

As for the rest of it, I call that the "Stephen King Syndrome". They write for quality in the beginning, and the longer they go on, the worse their writing gets till they are simply writing for word count. I mean, when you can completely cut 500 pages out of a 2100 page book, and NO ONE notices, that's glut.

I noticed this with Tom Clancy. He's a favorite author, but in Executive Orders, there is a whole sub plot with these mountain men, that goes NO PLACE. The entire 50 or 80 pages of dialogue could be cut and the story not affected at all. That pisses me off when it happens.