Jacob Thomson Official Website

As is noted elsewhere on this site, I wrote the introduction for my publisher's eBook edition of Dracula, as well as editing the text for publication. I've edited some other material for them as well. Because my publisher is also a novelist, and feels he can't be objective about his own writing, he sends his manuscripts to me. This does, of course, put me in the rather odd situation of having to tell the man who decides whether my own works will see print if I think his books merit publication. I don't believe he would hold it against me if I told him something needed rewriting, but it certainly doesn't hurt that he happens to be a pretty good writer.

As an editor, I feel my chief responsibility is to insure that what the writer intends to portray actually gets across to the reader. This includes the obvious things, such as making sure the words are spelled correctly, that proper capitalization is used, and that the sentence structure conforms to the normal grammatical rules. It does not, however, include imposing my own style on the manuscript.

Style guides are useful for their intended purpose, but as I mostly edit fiction, that purpose isn't particularly applicable. Strunk and White, the Chicago Manual of Style, and others of their sort were never really intended as a guide to novelists and short story writers. Rather, they were intended to impose uniformity of style on scholarly works, such as term papers, theses, and dissertations. No one, not even their own authors, ever claimed that they presented the only way to write.

In fiction, style is an individual thing. No one would ever mistake Conan Doyle for Tom Clancy. Not only do they write about different subjects, but the way in which they present their stories is also completely different. A good editor doesn't rewrite. As a musician friend once said, after listening to a particularly bad "updating" of a Beethoven sonata, "If you want to be a composer, write your own music." An editor needs to work the same way. Allow the writer to create in his own way, but be there to fix his typos and provide guidance where needed.

There are innumerable high school and college courses, as well as the offerings of public night schools, that purport to teach writing. They do have value. They can teach you how to organize your thoughts and get them down on paper. Professors will happily remind their students that a sentence generally requires a subject, an object, and a verb. They will set down rules for good writing. And, as often as not, if you plan to write fiction you will end up ignoring many of these rules.

Some "writing" classes, such as those teaching journalism, may prove to be of little value in the real world. My publisher, a former newspaper editor, has mentioned a tendency among newspaper editors to prefer English majors over journalism majors when it comes to hiring. "It's usually easier to teach an English major how to write a good lead and use a proper inverted pyramid style than it is to teach a journalism major how to spell." Writing on computers has helped to eliminate many spelling errors, but spell checkers can't help a bit with correctly spelled words used incorrectly. A computer really can't tell the difference between "to," "too," and "two" and, I have often noted, neither can a lot of supposedly literate people these days.