How to Edit like Bill Murray
Entry posted by Darbury
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A good editor is a good reader.
By that, I don’t mean that he or she is well-read (although that helps). And I don’t mean that he or she reads exceptionally fast (although I’m sure that helps, too).
An editor’s most important job is to serve, quite literally, as the reader’s proxy. If you want to edit anything — a magazine article, a TV script, a visual novel — it’s your job to approach the text not as yourself, but as someone you’ve never met, someone who doesn’t share your likes, your dislikes, your accumulated knowledge. And that doesn’t mean approaching the text as some imaginary “ideal reader” either. They, like unicorns and affordable housing in San Fran, simply don’t exist. Seriously, when you ask a content creator to describe their “ideal reader,” they invariably end up describing themselves. Instead, it’s your job to edit for the “average reader.”
And just who is that? And how do you edit for them? That’s going to vary from title to title. If you’re editing some hardcore and super-niche VN, your assumed reader will be very different than that of some light and frothy moege. (And if you’re editing a Sakura title, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Let me buy you a shot.) That said, I do have some basic ground rules I try to follow.
1. Anticipate that this could be the reader’s first VN.
I've decided to edit visual novels because I believe in them as an art form. I want to see their English releases improve in quality and become more widely accepted outside of certain closed cultural circles. That means I choose to invite new VN readers into a text and make them feel, if not at home, then at least like a welcomed guest.
Stop. Put down the pitchforks. I’m not talking about dumbing down VNs. This is simply Writing 101. Among the authors I know, a common credo is, “A good novel teaches the reader how to read it.” (Unless it’s trying very, very hard to be unreadable. *cough*) A text in translation needs to work doubly hard to achieve this. First, it needs to bridge the gaps in cultural knowledge between the original audience (Japanese VN fans) and the secondary audience (Western VN fans). Otherwise, the work becomes much harder to read and enjoy than the author ever intended.
As you edit, read with beginner’s mind. Where might someone new to the VN genre get hung up? Which cultural nuances might prove confusing? Ask yourself if there’s a way you can bring clarity to those aspects without diluting the original text. If you do your job right, they’ll seem organic enough part of the VN that the experienced reader will barely know they’re there.
2. Choose to operate on the same timeline as the reader
As an editor, you have a luxury the reader does not: access to the full text. You probably go into the project already having read a large chunk of the VN several times over. Maybe you were even involved in the translation of it. Whatever the case, you run the risk of your brain filling in gaps that might leave the average reader confused.
Think of yourself as Bill Murray midway through Groundhog Day. Trapped in those endless 24 hours, he bull-rushes through his routine, responding not to what people are actually saying, but what he remembers them saying in past loops. He falls prey to over-familiarity and, as a result, alienates everyone he meets. It’s only when he learns to interact with people in their timeframe again, living and responding in the moment, that he finally gets what he wants. (The girl. It’s always the girl.)
Be late-movie Bill Murray. Edit mindfully.
When working on KoiRizo, I forced myself to do three separate editing passes. First, I tackled each script completely blind, going in with no more knowledge than any other reader. No cheating, no reading ahead. As I encountered lines that left me, the reader, feeling like I just missed something, I edited them as best I could but flagged them for later. Maybe the author intended that line to be cryptic. Maybe it was foreshadowing. Or maybe something got lost in translation. No way of knowing, so best to keep moving.
After reaching the end of a script, I’d start back at the beginning and do another full edit, this time focusing on the lines I’d flagged previously. VNs tend to be episodic, so if I hadn’t found the answer I needed inside that self-contained script, I elevated the flag and left a comment for the translator asking for clarification.
Finally, when I’d finished an entire route, I’d go back do a third, quick edit through the whole thing, top to bottom. I had all the facts from the scripts and all the notes from the translator, so if something still wasn’t working, it was likely all my fault. And that meant it was time to really hunker down and do some major surgery.
Technically, I also did a fourth edit pass once I’d finished the entire VN, since some of the routes had little in-jokes and references to other routes, but I consider that more of an enhanced read-through than anything, since I was only making tiny tweaks. Which brings me to my last point ...
3. Read, read, and read again
You might be done editing, but you’re not done reading. Find that beginner’s mind and read through everything again. And again. And again. Forget that you’re the one who rewrote the words on the page and just try to approach them anew. Be the reader. Each time, you’ll probably find something new — typos, grammatical errors, slight nuances you might have missed earlier that change the whole meaning of a line.
I read through KoiRizo a bunch of times and I know I still missed all sorts of things. Sorry! I've been kicking myself whenever I see the occasional typo report float through. (Editors are not proofreaders, by the way. Or vice versa. Fodder for a future blog post.) But at a certain point, a work just wants to get out in the world, warts and all.
And that’s another part of editing: learning to let go.
- Gibberish, Chronopolis, Tenkuru and 3 others
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