A Praise Song to Human Editors
Will Chatty GPT ever learn to edit itself?
As I wrote in my last post, AI is extremely chatty. Any writer who’s received one of those spam messages urging you to connect with a famous author or get a book promotion package you never requested, will see that the fulsome praise of your work can take an entire page not to mention minutes of your precious time. Recently, I got an invitation from an AI generated scam focused on editing my published picture book Lucy and Henry Are Twins. The scam email is 144 words longer than the entire text of the book including the title. (How and why I would want to edit a published book is a mystery to me.)
I have been publishing traditionally for (eek) fifty years and through all those decades, I have been both challenged and supported by dedicated editors who love stories and readers, and who have spent their lives making good books better.
I sent my most recent manuscript, the fourth in my series that began with The Castle in the Attic, to Margery, the editor who has worked with me on the series from the beginning and who is a talented and prolific children’s book writer herself.
Margery knows all my quirks and with great patience, she points them out to me every time. She and I both prefer the penciled line edit to a digital program, so here is a sample of one of the more lightly touched pages.
I use the words just and even too often. I repeat words usually in the same paragraph and occasionally, in the same sentence. She cuts my unnecessary explanations, my long descriptive passages, and urges me to replace pronouns with the characters’ names. She is alert to my continuity issues. (Ex. See p. 88, line 8. William knows that Tolliver is not around.)
But more than that, she is attuned to what I’m trying to achieve in the story and how best to help me realize it. As every good editor knows, the way to get a writer back to the page with a sense of energy and excitement is first and foremost to tell them what they are doing right, what in the manuscript is working. I happen to love the revision process because I know it’s my opportunity to get closer to my original vision for the book. Once I’ve taken the time to absorb what she is saying, Margery’s editorial letters always send me back to page one with enthusiasm.
Every experienced writer knows that we are our own worst editors. We fall in love with our characters, our settings, our descriptions and when we type THE END on the bottom of the page/screen, there is a feeling of such joy and achievement that we have little objectivity left. That’s why I try to take weeks if not months away from the book to let it rest. With time off and the help of an editor like Margery, I’m able to see my work more clearly and cut more drastically so that the story moves as swiftly as it needs to do in this age of short attention spans.
Will AI replace the human editor? Many feel it already has, but I’m not one of them. AI is a mathematical tool without conscious awareness, an inner life or lived experience. Those are the qualities I look for in the editor casting her eye and wielding her pencil over my hard won words.
I’m thinking this morning of when my husband and I returned from a couple of nights in Calistoga, a charming town in California’s Napa Valley. Yes, it has its share of upwardly mobile types who go there to visit the many wineries. But there also are others who need to be replenished by the pastoral setting and many opportunities to take walks in the surrounding hills. I need that uplift today. 
For everybody except those hiding under a rock, it’s impossible to avoid AI these days. 
I’m grateful to Al Sirois, a fellow Regal House author, for sharing with us his writing journey. 
Since my late 20s, I’ve recorded my dreams every morning, curious about the wonderful dramas that unfold each night in the subterranean depths. During a trip we took a while back to Osoyoos, B.C., I got a better understanding of dreams and the role they play in our lives. 
I recall returning home a while back after spending time at a recently built rental home on the Oxnard, California, beach. It had a wonderful view overlooking the harbor and ocean. You might think I would miss the incredible views and location, as well as the house, brimming with technological toys. But I didn’t. It was a relief to return to our simple Richmond abode, built in the 1940s. 
As a young woman in the 50s growing up in Canada, I was intrigued by hockey and football. Baseball didn’t exist for me then. It hadn’t entered Canadian consciousness, and it would take some years before it did. But I didn’t feel deprived. Hockey and football had much to offer at that time, including handsome, vigorous guys. 
Being part of an on-line writing group for several years provided me with many benefits. But the positives also produced a few negatives.
I didn’t get to sleep till 1 AM this morning after reading a fascinating article about the assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. I’ve felt that in many ways, he’s my spiritual father. A-I describes his work as intricate “signature boxes, glass-fronted shadow boxes that serve as miniature, poetic theaters. Inside, he meticulously arranged collages and three-dimensional ‘found objects’—such as old maps, vintage photographs, watch parts, and marbles—to create dreamlike, nostalgic universes that celebrate memory, astronomy, and romantic cinema.” 
I’ve just finished rereading Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady and have mixed feelings about the era and the characters. It’s difficult to read about Victorian morés from a 21st Century perspective. Not only do I need lenses that will give me a bi-cultural perspective, but I also feel squashed between a culture clash. Just after I finished with Portrait, I read a review of A. M. Homes’ book May We Be Forgiven in The New York Review of Books. One of her main characters says, 
In the SF Bay area, we’ve recently had unseasonably warm days, totally out of character for us at this time of year in San Francisco and the other nearby coastal regions. Most of us have been delighted to sit out in our yards at night and enjoy this new balmy climate. But then I read in the paper recently that the planet has been recording one of the hottest springs, reminding me that while I’m luxuriating in these above-average temperatures, the weather extremes are killing the planet. It’s a startling and disturbing statistic.