Quote:
Originally Posted by EileenG
Writing rules are not arbitary, any more than traffic rules are. There may be times when you need to break them, but ignoring them for the sake of "holding the reader's interest" is like driving carelessly because the road is supposed to be interesting.
If this editor is someone you have hired, you are free to reject her edits. But if it's an editor from a publishing house and you reject the edits, you'll find the publisher rejects your book. Publishers are interested in books with a certain standard of English, and won't accept "rules get in the way" as an excuse for why you haven't made the edits that were marked.
I've never had anyone come up and tell me that I have grammer or word use issues, unless I asked them directly. But you'd better believe that when my publisher's editor was through with it, my MS was buried under a bloodbath of red tracker comments of things she expected to be fixed.
Theren is no point having an editor if you don't allow her to edit.
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Perhaps we should start a new thread on this, it's a bit off-topic and somewhat philosophical in nature. But...
I beg to differ, writing rules are general conventions that have become imbedded over time, changing and evolving as they go. Today's rules will not be tomorrow's. They are culturally driven. They were not passed down from a divinity on a stone tablet. If I veer outside the rules the worst I can expect is to be ignored, not killed. Road rules on the other hand, if ignored, can lead to a brutal real-world death.
Perhaps a closer analogy would be to compare writing rules to dining etiquette. If I break with proper dining etiquette I may not be invited back to dine, but I won't be harmed in any other way.
For example. My first book has been in or very near the top 1,000 kindle paid for listing for four months and it has been for sale only four months. That puts it in the top .001 percent of sold kindle books, that's not too bad considering it is competing against a million other books, literally.
It has consistently been in the lower 30's in the category of paid kindle fiction/action-adventure. That's not a narrow niche, it's a broad category. From that I think it is fairly safe to infer that however poorly I may have adhered to the rules, readers enjoy reading it. Wouldn't that be my goal?
This book is self published so I am free to regard or disregard my editor's suggestions as I see fit. I assume you are correct about traditional publishing editors, but I have no experience there.