I read quite a bit of Shirley Jackson’s fiction in middle and high school—lots of her short stories, and the “fictionalized memoirs” Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Since the former begins with a family that has “two children and about five thousand books,” I immediately identified with them. (Our family had three children and at least as many books.) Also, of course, they were edgy and hilarious.
I’ve lost touch with Shirl over the years, but Random House copyedit chief Benjamin Dreyer has not. He has some great analysis of her work, her words, her punctuation, even, in this fabulous article, “Shirley Jackson and Me”—but there’s so much more here, including this description of what a copyeditor* does:
I’m not sure that anyone, perhaps not even its author, ever reads a manuscript as closely as the person whose job it is to help polish it to the best possible version of itself it can be, who not only corrects typing glitches and misspellings but searches out and queries (or simply helpfully repairs) inadvertent rhymes, antecedentless pronouns, subject-verb dissonance, plot continuity problems, overuse of pet words and gestures (you’d be astonished at the amount of murmuring, head shaking, and nodding that goes on in the garden-variety precopyedited novel). A colleague once described copyediting as the action of burrowing into an author’s brain and doing to a manuscript what the author might have done had he or she had just a few more minutes to spend with every sentence—and hadn’t already read every sentence five hundred times. One author, I recall, compared getting copyedited to getting one’s teeth thoroughly cleaned. Myself, I’ve come to think of copyediting as something akin to a dance or a conversation, except that the partners meet only on the page. In the dance, a good copy editor remembers that it’s the author who leads; in the conversation, the wise copy editor knows when to shut up and listen.
The best writers I’ve worked with love to get copyedited—it’s the less best writers, I’ve found, who see copyediting as a provocation, an impertinent questioning of their skill …
But I want you to read this article for Dreyer’s account of his copyediting Let Me Tell You, a volume of previously uncollected and/or unpublished stories and essays by Shirley Jackson. It’s a difficult job to edit the dead but Dreyer knew what to do. This article is special, it’s funny, it’s respectful. You’ll enjoy it.
* You might also like this alphabet of editorial peeves by Dreyer.
Tweet: To Shirl With Love: Random House copyedit chief analyzes Shirley Jackson.
Tweet: A legendary editor on copyediting a legendary author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”