Fiction Editing versus Nonfiction Editing
Susan Gable said:
And as Lola pointed out, if we're talking about fiction, a college professor might be able to edit it for some stuff, but not everything that a quality fiction edit entails.
Yup. Fiction editing is a completely different bird. (Uhm, tweet?)
Warning: This post mentions R*ck*ds, so don't read if that subject raises your blood pressure...
I never truly understood how different until I encountered a thread on the SF/fantasy writing newsgroup, rec.arts.sf.composition. The gist of it was that a guy who self-published the SF novel he and his teen-aged son wrote together got into the mutha of all flamewars. He had plenty of experience in writing nonfiction and actually had published some books on using the Mac (similar to the stuff I was working on at that time). But it didn't translate into fiction writing. His novel didn't flow and had problems in logic, overuse of "was," etc., etc. Oh, as far as I remember, the spelling and the grammar were great. Clearly this was someone who could write nonfiction. But he couldn't accept that writing and editing fiction were different than writing and editing a computer book. (Been there, done that, got the coffee mugs of a now defunct company...)
The related flamewar was so notorious that people refer to the author who posted as G*ne St*nb*rg and to the book as R*ck*ds, just in case he's searching... The thread starts off slowly enough but really takes off when he gets snarky with Patricia Wrede.
He also got on the bad case of, among others, James Macdonald and Theresa Nielsen Hadyen. And Mary Gentle. And Lawrence Watt-Evans. And Ann Crispin. And Brenda Clough.
And while the arguments from he-who-must-not-be-named were annoying, the thread itself proved to be truly informative. I learned a lot about line editing and critiques and publishing. OK, sometimes it was simply... interesting to watch. Like a trainwreck or an Ed Wood movie...
If you dare learn more, here is the Google Groups version of the thread from hell. Warning: This makes this thread look like a novella.
http://tinyurl.com/4sunq
The monster version of the URL is:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.composition/browse_frm/thread/40e887df8b2f20ea/98ce3c74dad8227a?tvc=1&q=group:rec.arts.sf.composition+insubject:Great+insubject:new+insubject:sci-fi+insubject:novel#98ce3c74dad8227a