DEVELOP MENTAL

Trying to Get My Head Around Why I'm a Developmental Editor and Not a Copy Editor...


Who vs. Whom? Was vs. Were? Passive vs. Active? We were the ones who slept through most of that alien nomenclature in high school. But we sure knew how to spin a tale. We were, in fact, the future developmental editors.

Why would you call in one of these people? Seriously, wouldn't you feel more secure knowing your Ts are dotted and your eyes are crossed without ever having to look back? Copy editors will see to that. And what they miss, surely a professional Proofreader will catch during one of those romps through your text that redefines the boundaries of 'anal retentive.' (Imagine a male Proofreader with an Oedipal Complex. Yikes! He'd never get the opportunity to possess his mother; he'd be too hung up on which possessive to select...for himself. Now that's something to reflexive on.)

To be sure, the future developmentals were the kids who played hooky. Only we didn't go out back behind the gym to thin out a pack of Camels. When the coast was clearer than the waters of a Frostian stream, we ducked out to...the picture show. Somewhere in between popcorn and ending credits, we found ourselves captivated by structure, characters, dialog, setting, tension, and tone, and a whole lot of other stuff that somehow made grammar, usage, syntax, spelling, and punctuation pale in comparison. Trying to identify pages 30, 60 and 90 of the script, as it played out on the screen, (because everyone knows ‘If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage’) gave us as much thrill as the moment Count Dracula flew through the window as a gliding gerbil and landed as a creepy man who looked terrific in a tux, and then leaned in to the fruitful neck of a young maiden about to give an unscheduled donation. Even our hero, Bela Lugosi, hated grammar. What was it that he said while playing the vampire in 1933? Oh yes, "It's the little things that drive a man crazy." No wonder he bailed out of 5th grade sentence diagramming and put his talents toward a future in flying phlebotomy. Smart man. And we understood him.

Haunting, you say? Perhaps you're referring to our alter ego, the ghostwriter. Inside of every developmental editor there's a writer waiting to be excerpted. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree...and the quill doesn't drift too far from the inkwell either. Yes, while we’re working the stories of others, taking them to the level of submission-ready, we're all basically closeted aspiring authors waiting for our agents to make that timely call, the call that will deliver us six-figure advances and give us something to do creatively in addition to delving into and enhancing the characters, settings, and storylines of our clients. But until then, we also secretly know that we have the best job in the world. True. Consider: In one day, this developmental editor is on a Whitehall, a small single mast sailboat, with three brothers on San Francisco Bay, in 1908. We're watching Roosevelt's Great White Fleet enter the Gate after circumnavigating the globe on a goodwill mission to show off American muscle. And we’re having the summer adventure of a lifetime. An hour later, I'm a wide-eyed midwestern girl landing in Maui with the man of my dreams and about to encounter -- and try to make sense of and likewise escape from -- the honeymoon from hell. (Turns out he's nuts.) Two hours later, I'm enjoying the rubber wall motif in the West Wing of an East Bay mental ward. I'm bipolar and this is my memoir. And by 5 p.m., I'm snowed in at a log cabin in upstate New York with 11 other stockbrokers. Only one of them wants to sell our lives short. He's the killer. And by 8 o'clock that night, I'm a mom online with a club of virtual moms. We've been friends practically since the dawn of the Net, and now, for the first time in a decade, one of us wants to bring in a new member. Sounds intriguing. Time for a change. (You can say that again.) Too bad 'Pat' later turns out to be a guy.


This is the domain of the developmental editor. Our lives are fiction and nonfiction and feature and sometimes query. Of course, every true developmental editor knows there’s really no such thing as ‘fiction.’ At some point, every novel is rooted in fact. Even science fiction, to work, must adhere to certain laws of the universe. And those are probably the only rules we live by. We prefer dramas to commas.