This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Caroline Hogg has worked in publishing for almost ten years, at Little, Brown Book Group and more recently at Avon, HarperCollins. She's currently at Pan Macmillan as Senior Commissioning Editor for Commercial Women's Fiction. She knows her stuff!
Today's question comes from a Novelicious reader who asks:
Do you have any rituals
while editing?
Caroline says: I
like to use a green pen, for one. I don’t quite know why, but blue pen feels
too scruffy and red feels too shouty and negative. So I mark up in green pen on
the page and then I type those notes up later, for the author to see. I also
spend a rather long time typing up those notes, to make sure the tone is just
right. The author has just spent the best part of a year chained to their desk
(with only Tweets and the occasional game of Solitaire to help them through),
taking an idea from their head and putting it on the page. That’s not easy. The
last thing I want to do is give them vague, unhelpful or accidentally
hard-sounding notes. So I really obsess over them, to make sure they are
appreciative, encouraging and explain my suggestions for changes clearly.
My other ritual is to have plenty of red bush tea bags to hand, and some salted popcorn from Pret. Snack of champions.
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