These is my words

THESE IS MY WORDS is the title of a wonderful fictionalized account of a young woman’s life in 1880s Arizona by Nancy Turner.

It’s also what I said to myself when an editor changed the words in my book. As in: “But these is my words, dammit!”

I was over at Murder She Writes and we were talking about what makes a good editor. Which brought up a bad memory of when I had to deal with a truly piss-poor editor. So piss-poor, I thought this person was an ambitious copy editor rewriting my words for me. (Disclaimer: Most copy editors wouldn’t do that.) Thing was, I couldn’t imagine a regular editor doing such a thing, so I blamed the nameless, faceless copy editor. Not my finest hour.

What I didn’t know: I’d been orphaned; given to another editor mid-book. Nobody bothered to tell me.

I know how to write words. I know how to write paragraphs, and I know how to write a whole book. Put enough words together, and you have a voice. As Karin at Murder She Writes wondered, was this editor messing with my voice?

Yup.

This was a long time ago. It has nothing to do with the publishing house I am with now. It was, however, a legitimate publishing house, which surprises me. Rewriting someone’s words is not an editor’s job. Or am I naïve?

A good editor says, “I don’t think this scene is necessary”, or “Could you bring out this character thread a little more?”, or “I have a problem with this section of the book”. The good editor expects me to go away and fix it, but she wants me to do it my own way.

I had never met the other kind.

Now there’s a book out there with somebody else’s words masquerading as mine, and I wish I had withdrawn it. But, craven as authors often are, I’d already spent the advance.

I got out of there fast, though.

Has anybody else encountered this problem? I’ve had this done on a smaller scale when I wrote magazine articles, but usually these changes were minimal, due to time and space constraints, and I understood that (kind of). But we’re talking about a whole book here.