Hello, fellow writers!
What do you think of when you imagine the writer’s life? Do you have a stereotypical image in your head of solitary figures suffering for their craft?
You do have to put in sustained individual effort to get words on the page. But for me, when it’s time to hand over the work, the fun really begins.
The teamwork of editing balances a writer’s autonomy. People offer to help strengthen your claims, to make sure you tell a compelling tale, to find your mistakes.
These people have your back.
All writers, even highly gifted and accomplished ones, can use some support. If I’d ever harbored any doubts about that, my participation in a special workshop convinced me.
The benefits of collaboration
In 2013, my dissertation advisor, Louise Meintjes, had the good fortune to convene a Carnegie Mellon-funded faculty book manuscript workshop. A generous mentor, she invited me and another junior scholar to participate—along with no fewer than nine seasoned colleagues—to critique the first full draft of her second book.
Her first book had done well. Check out its website at Duke University Press to find some of the praise it garnered. To this day, I meet people who tell me how much they loved it.
And still Louise wanted some help with the new manuscript.
As she remembers in her acknowledgments for the book—ultimately published as Dust of the Zulu in 2017—the panel “collectively distilled the book’s argument” (xii) through conversations about its themes and bits of evidence, helping her decide what to emphasize and how to order everything into a compelling whole.
The result was a book that wowed readers, earning her both the Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association and the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2018.
DIY collaborations
Would that we could all have book workshops like that! But there are other options.
In fact, I was lucky to have a similar experience while defending my dissertation. My lovely committee members used part of the defense to advise me on reshaping my thesis into a book. (Heads up, grad student advisors everywhere!) Throughout my grad school years, I had also been part of wonderful writing groups, partnerships, and workshops.
But finding writing partners became much harder after graduation.
Fortunately, there’s a growing awareness of how writing groups benefit faculty writers. Some institutions have memberships in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity and can direct you to that helpful organization for support of various kinds. There may also be some assistance in facilitating writing groups on your campus.
More broadly, there’s a large body of advice for writers of all kinds about whether and how to form writing groups—and even how to leave them nicely if they’re not a good fit.
Writing groups should establish community, networks of people who can commiserate or offer help. Some groups simply provide accountability, creating spaces for co-writing or sharing goals. Others are more like workshops where people read each other’s drafts.
Despite my participation in all these kinds of collaborations over the years, there are still a few pieces of information that I wish I’d encountered sooner in my book-writing process.
The different levels of editing
As I pivoted increasingly towards professional editing work, I was surprised to find that there are names for the different kinds of editing I’d done with colleagues and friends.
Developmental editing encompasses changes to a text’s large-scale structure and organization. Line editing deals more specifically with language, including interventions to increase its flow. At the next level of specificity, copyediting engages the technical aspects of a manuscript, including its grammar, punctuation, citation format, and the like.
Proofreading isn’t really editing in the same sense. Proofreaders come in after a text has been fully completed and formatted, using special markings to indicate errors in layout and design.
Often, in-house academic editors have limited time for developmental or line editing, but they may provide you with a professional copyeditor. In contrast, peer writing groups usually focus on substantive interventions like developmental editing work.
It helps to know these terms to articulate what kind of feedback you want.
A colleague in Mexico City once asked me to edit her article. Because I had participated in writing groups where developmental editing was the norm, that’s what I did.
She was outraged!
As a Spanish speaker writing in English, she wanted someone to assess her grammar, and was offended by the substantive feedback I offered. We might have avoided the whole misunderstanding if only we’d been equipped with editing terminology.
Want to know more? Take a quiz on what type of editing your project may need.
Professional help
When it came to my book, I worked with wonderful colleague-friends in informal writing exchanges—mostly one-on-one partnerships carried out via email rather than the larger, in-person writing groups of my grad school years.
Then the pandemic happened! Thankfully, my first-draft manuscript was in fairly good shape, and I didn’t panic too much over my submission deadline of May 1, 2020.
But it was all downhill from there. As everyone everywhere got progressively more shell-shocked and burned out, everything started to slow down. The peer review process lagged, publication dates were pushed back, strained supply chains delayed printing, and it was harder than ever to feel justified in asking for anyone’s time.
In this climate of isolation and exhaustion, I struggled with revisions, especially for the book’s conclusion.
Ironically, as time went on and I entered into full career transition mode, I learned about professional freelance editing. Looking back, I marvel at how it never occurred to me that I could have hired someone to help me with my revisions until it was too late. I wish I had known.
Now, you do.
Tell me! What have your experiences with writing groups been like? Does your institution do a good job of supporting faculty and grad student writing? Would you like to know more about working with professional editors? Feel free to send along your stories and suggestions for future posts!