Anyone has had the perception that editors actually ruin your work?
They don't understand your metaphors, they don't know the hidden reason of your word-picks and they misunderstand a lot of your writings.
Is it possible for a book to be worse once it is edited, Veeky Forums?
Or perhaps am I just thinking that I wrote a masterpiece and re-reading makes me see how mundane it was?
Editors turn your book into their book.
gotta have an editor that's nigh the same level of genius as the author themselves, someone who really understands the message and works with the author, otherwise it becomes a battle of the egos, and the editor can really fuck up a book that may have otherwise been a masterpiece. plus if you didn't keep the master copy pre-editing, you're a dumbass. if you did, just compare the two, and see how the works are different, what makes the work worthwhile should stick out like a sore thumb and help you to communicate with your editor your concerns.
Is there a word command that can delete all edits done by someone else?
Yes, I'm a dumbass. I did not keep the originals.
Just pasted the whole edited mess into the text.
Half my figures of speech died.
>someone else fiddles with your work
>assume they got it all right
>save over your only copy of the original before reading what they changed
if you're really that retarded, then you're not smart enough to have written a masterpiece
There has to be word1.docx somewhere, impossible someone just lolhereugoyolo his hard work
It's amazing.
I start liking the text back whenever the editor got lazy and just let things be.
This is ridiculous.
Sounds like a legitimately shitty editor. Edit your own work and clarify that the work is not a rough draft and that any edits should be for the purpose of syntax and correction, not flow or style.
You completely fucked yourself by losing your master copy though. You may have to ask your editor if he has a copy of your submission.
well, see if the editor has the original copy of the work. they might have been more clever than you and kept a master copy. I don't really know what to say other than I'm sorry your life work got ruined. Though, this gives you a chance to go over it all again, and make it better. I'm sure there were quite a few great authors who had setbacks like this, and worse, having to remake and hone and refine their works after some crazy flood or fire or someone using a few hundred pages as toilet paper or something. Yeah, it sucks now, but you might look back one day at your new sparkling book, and realize that this only made the work stronger, and made you stronger as an author. Don't give up, user. If nothing else, this will be a potent learning experience.
Thanks...
I'll try. I'm just so sad right now.
It just looks generic. The style is gone.
We live in a world where copies can be made instantaneously. Back up your shit.
Hell you mentioned pasting the whole thing, which means you wrote it on a PC. Does your email sent folder not have a copy of the files you sent to your editor?
>I'm sure there were quite a few great authors who had setbacks like this, and worse
This, iirc Hemingway lost some of his stories and before the typewriter, losing work was very common.
If you have to rewrite, use the less butchered areas of the edited work as a basis, a critical eye for the editor's work may expose flaws in the original work.
If i may ask, what sort of book was this? Was it something that the prose was an essential part of? Obviously prose is important, but was it more of a fantasy book with a lot of neat ideas and plot carried? was it an interconnected work where characters bounce off of each other in a specific way? Or was it one of those flowery books that have a message that gets drowned in the sound of the author's voice? Just trying to get a picture of how difficult this book might be to rewrite and refine. If it's the flowery one, yeah, that's disappointing. Getting one's flow into motion is difficult enough, let alone getting the words just right to a poem you lost and are trying to rewrite from memory. Hopefully it's just a novel of ideas and plot and characters, and the prose can be reworked to adjust for the changes that would come from a rewriting of the novel. Don't get too sad now anyway. I'm sure there's plenty that's salvageable, and if it didn't take you so long to write the book, you can probably remember the path your mind took when you were writing it to begin with. I would have to say just don't make the same mistake again of letting your child go to the doctor without keeping an extra child as backup.
Just to depress you even further, the failure to fully understand your work is what you're gonna get from 99% of your potential audience.
Keep in mind you're trying to hammer a complex painting into a dull, malleable sheet with vocal commands. You're only gonna get the impression accross
any examples you can provide of what you remember you wrote and what the editor changed it to?
I tink we bin rused lads
Wow, pretty sure I was going to Veeky Forums, but it looks like somehow stumbled into some reddit hugbox instead, where everyone is naive enough to believe a dumb feelposter
If this isn't bait, either search your emails for the OG doc or get an IT guy to find it on your computer, there's probably a copy saved somewhere, Word sometimes does that.
>gotta have an editor
Why though? What does an editor bring to a book, and what qualifies them to mess about with what the author wrote? Concept seems a bit strange to me.
...I should add that I can understand the idea of an editor with a track record of making books successful. But how would such an editor start out- how would they know more about writing than the authors they try to edit?
Also when people talk about getting an editor for some self-published urban fantasy or whatever, it seems safe to assume they don't mean paying for Stephen King's editor.
Critiquing your own work becomes basically impossible at a certain point of the process. Theoretically, an editor will judge the work from a neutral standpoint and deal with formal and stylistic mistakes that the author himself can't see.
It's the same reason for why you don't master your own music.
>half my figures of speech died
Sounds like you probably overused them, thinking it made you clever. Anyone can just tick off one rhetorical device after another. I'm guessing your editor made it much better because he saw through the bullshit. If "metaphors" and "hidden reasons for work picks" aren't done carefully you just end up with shitty writing.
Both could be equally true.
reminder than Samuel Beckett helped edit James Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake'
This tbqh, and they're not to blame.
GUYS, I HAVE GOOD NEWS.
I got my pre-edit drafts back. I'm right now editing my book and exchanging the lines that got unfairly lost in the editing.
It's not all over!
>didn't save the original version
sorry but you're a retard
Show Veeky Forums different versions of the same paragraph! We love to judge!
My editor browses Veeky Forums, I'm 10% sure of it.
I'm also afraid of later on, after I publish it, being related to Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums.
It's not that this place isn't magical. But those who can see the memes are thought crazy by those who can't handle the banter in here.
Just fucking do it Jesus Christ.
Give concrete examples, at least.
You're novel is shit because you're a cunt. Go work in marketing or some other shit job where you would have been before the internet allowed you to get lost. Before it was cool to be fucked up, etc.
Veeky Forums is mostly middle class rich kids who have decided they want to be "artists" now, and authors despite having LITERALLY nothing to write about.
Nothing has happened in their fucking lives yet because of rising levels of narcissism, being brought up on constant bullshit pop culture, worshipping the icons, you know, the "burning out before they fade away" stinkers, they genuinely believe they're destined to be a writer/artist/musician/some other made up romanticised figure from a popular novel that they haven't even read but watched a short clip or a movie about.
iirc this happened to Robert Louis-Stevenson when his mom burned his manuscript of Jekyll and Hyde.
If anything, having Veeky Forums know about it might make it more popular. You know some of the people will buy it just so they can rip it apart and others will buy it just because they spoke to you.
There is no such thing as bad publicity. Faggot.
As an editor and mother, I don't even read through your s****y work but just go through them per sentence.
This is why only solitary weirdos with no interests or passions besides the reading and editing of texts should be allowed to edit.
So how do I become editor? Sounds pretty great
You're even more of a cunt than the people you're bemoaning t b h.
Waiting on examples of OPs work. Come on, show us.
>using ragefaces from tumblr
pleb alert
at least change the imagename to hide your shame
>so stupid he didn't keep several fucking back-ups
>thinks he wrote anything even close to being good
All of my this. Just finished my first manuscript and I emailed thst thing to myself in several emails and kept it saved on a pen just in case I lost it pre edited
WHAT THE FUCK, you didnt keep the originals?
For one, never blame the audience for not getting your work. It's possible what you think is masterful metaphors and hidden meaning are complete gibberish to everyone else.
For another, yes it's entirely possible your book just sucks and it came out nowhere near as good as it was in your head. In fact it's more than likely since you're on here.
>le the customer is always right cuckery
If death of the author was deemed necessary in the 20th Century, I think we need a death of the reader for the 21st to do away with this asinine notion of the consumer (and that's all 99% of contemporary readers are) as sacred. Social media, blogging, and everyone being able to publish their own reviews online have shown that most readers are retards who shouldn't be trusted to determine the worth of anything.
If they're so retarded, then it should be pretty easy writing something that pleases them, right?
Pleasing them shouldn't be the goal. Authors shouldn't be held to the same standards as prostitutes.
Poeople on Veeky Forums don't have lives this interesting. This is either one of rusechan's lesser works or someone trying to be rusechan.
this
how do we kill the reader
What's so interesting about an editor fucking up your writing? It happens all the time.
Right right. Because writing something so that other people will read it is the very last thing in an authors mind. Real authors write so that they alone will enjoy it, and bask in their superiority of everyone else.
You didn't write a novel, faggot.
Write without care or concern, share with tactless impunity.
do it you worthless nigger
It's not about basking in superiority. Writing, hell , any form of creating is about giving birth to what's in your mind.
That profit-seeking-cocksuckery of some people never stops amazing me. And by amazing I mean disappointing.
I once submitted a short story to some online collaboration effort. I was worried if the readers would misunderstand the little twist I put in the end of it, so I had the characters outright verbalize the point on three occasions over the course of the story, to help break the blow. Well, the editor selecting the submissions still missed the point completely and rejected the piece using his false conclusion of it as the basis.
Rather than trying to appeal to everybody, you have to accept that not everyone will understand your work. Simply because a shocking amount of people out there are pretty fucking stupid and barely literate. Don't try to spoonfeed plebs, it's not the author's duty to explain himself.
This.
Think of how stupid the average man is and then realise 50% are stupider than that. And they don't keep to their interests, no matter what you do, how intellectual you think it is, really dumb morons will interact with it.
That's not how averages work, that's how medians work. I understood perfectly, I just wanted to educate you.
its that one guy who posts that slightly altered line from the critique thread every time.
Thank you, I'll have to stop saying that.
>it's not the author's duty to explain himself.
Uh....it kind of is. Actually, that's sort of the main duty of an author.
Also, maybe they didn't accept your story because they didn't get it, maybe it's because your story sucked.
>That profit-seeking-cocksuckery of some people never stops amazing me
Yeah, really. Because who wants to like, make money writing. Real writers spend their mornings typing away at a starbucks, hoping to god others ask them what they're writing, even though it's never once happened in five years, and never get published and complain on shitty cartoon boards about why the world doesn't get their work. That's a fucking true artist right there.
>word-picks
Lel
There's no artistic point to making money. Obviously, a human is many things, so even someone who is an artist will have other reasons to want to make cash and if he wants to try it, good for him.
What relevance that has in a literature discussion board I don't know though.
Are we discussing how to write or how to make cash? Is this Veeky Forums?
>Yeah, really. Because who wants to like, make money writing
Usually, deluded people. Everyone's a writer, user. You're a silly fuck for thinking you have a reasonable chance at it. You misunderstood that user entirely.
>There's no artistic point to making money
Of course not, all the best artists have no way of supporting themselves, and are homeless and catch pneumonia in july and die at the age of 19.
Dude, you're full of shit.
My last short story was just 6 pages of the words, "Crab Fuck," repeating over and over again. My professor gave me an F and asked me what the hell it was, and I shrugged and just said, "It's just way above your head you plebeian nothing." The class gave me a round of applause, and i fucked like ten bitches that night.
>reading comprehension
>Lonely shutin
>projections and assumptions
You have not feed my curiousity and now it is hungry. You have been warned. Share the work before I make you shart the mart!
The avant-garde musician Jandek wrote seven full novels that he burned before realizing that he's a musician and not a writer.
then just upload it to pastebin with an expiration time on it