One weird editing trick

Mark Chiusano

We’re going to add something new along with your monthly Works Progress: an essay or two about writing and craft, and maybe some reading recs. It’ll be fun and infrequent. Don’t worry—we’re still doing mostly stories.

We’ll be back with a great one on Aug. 1, after our usual summer break.

In the meantime, here’s a post from Mark about a weird editing trick.

-The Editors

This spring, I found myself doing revisions on two book manuscripts.

It was a pretty dumb situation, particularly while also trying to teach and freelance and get toddlers to playgrounds. More to come about all that soon (the writing projects, not the playgrounds). But for now, I want to zero in on one particularly dumb piece of the editing, which was adding quote marks for every single line of dialogue, across ~600 pages.

I’m not sure exactly when I started not using quote marks. It had something to do with Junot Diaz and Bolaño and stream of consciousness Hemingway, me copying as opposed to some firm philosophy. But eventually it cohered. I liked the way a lack of quote marks put description and dialogue on the same level. I liked how the equality could enrich both sides, and how it let you focus more on conversational snippets, and silence. And at its best it all helped add up to a headlong tone, pulling the reader along on a rockless river to the very end.

Recently, though, I’ve been rethinking the quote marks. I’m a little more worried about clarity than I was while getting hooked on The Savage Detectives. (I’m also no longer 22.) Short attention spans leave less leeway for games in the text. As Laura Miller complained in Salon way back in 2009, “what writer of serious fiction today can possibly afford to put readers off for the sake of a little highbrow preening?” Well, not me. And crucially, this stylistic choice runs into some obvious problems in nonfiction, the genre with which I earn most of my daily bread. Previous generations of nonfiction writers could essentially make up their dialogue, which I think was bullshit and just another unacknowledged way that modern journalists are not working on a level playing field with their forebears. We actually try to record reality, not nonfictiony half-fiction. But that’s another story. For my book about gig work I carefully transcribed a year’s worth of conversations, chit chat, and monologues between delivery bikers and Uber drivers and the customers we served. The veracity is part of the appeal. So it didn’t really make sense to forgo the usual tool to denote, “yep, this is entirely real.”

Since I was already now on the side of the grammatical right in creative nonfiction, it was a quick jump to give up the ghost and add quotes to my fiction, the second book.

I did feel bad about it at first. This is a novel about who owns one particular plot of land in Brooklyn over the course of 400 years. It’s all a little mystical and also violent and yes, I hope, headlong, and I liked my old style. I liked playing fast and loose with an occasional description. I like the line of dialogue that can pop out of nowhere, like here:

To him it felt like armor, or possibility, and yes, the future. For the first time this country seemed to be offering him something. A bounty. The sugar scent was on his cheek now, it intoxicated him far more than Joris’s weak ale.

What are you drawing?

A voice behind him. He whirled. And there was the widow Hester, hands clasped, arms a triangle, glistening like the turtle shell.

I was still pretty sure that the reader would get on board with all this after a few pages, gaining a little thrill to encounter “what are you drawing” and be as surprised as the character. But these days I also don’t want to risk leaving someone behind. So I started—on page one—reading over the book and adding quote marks.

This was unbelievably painstaking. When I started I figured I’d need a few hours and then could turn to a freelance article. This turned out to be laughably naive. Some pages had fifteen or twenty quote marks to add, and my fingers started feeling carpal tunnelly after an afternoon of repetitive clicks. There ended up being 4,350. But it wasn’t even just the mechanical adding that took so long. I basically had to reread to make sure I found every conversation in the text, and then reorient around question marks and explanatory dialogue-adjacent phrases.

It ended up taking a couple days of almost-constant work. But there was a payoff—and this is the tip for editing I clickbaited up top. This strange style of re-reading—half skimming, half careful examining—was the perfect mode to catch other high level problems. Awkward repetitions stood out. Baggy paragraphs looked really baggy. It became obvious if a character wandered too much or strayed from his or her mission. Clustered (added) quote marks usually meant things were happening, the book was active and moving and working well. If too many pages went by without a line of dialogue in sight, something had probably gone wrong.

I ended up trimming around 10 or 20 pages from a 300+ page book and improving the rest, simply through this almost-automatic editing. The book got sharper on a line level, and also as a mountainous whole.

There are other ways to access this kind of half-conscious state, strangifying a manuscript enough that necessary changes become clear. In my newspaper life I’d sometimes read over a column on my phone before filing it by laptop. Like lots of people I also print out longer manuscripts when I edit, and eventually read them out loud, and that works in a similar way. I had a student once suggest using a digital tool to read your work back to you, which sounded fun. But I did not expect that a pretty rote and annoying task like the quotes would have any benefit at all.

So, maybe it’s worth another skim of your novel to take out or add a bunch of proper nouns. Or to do something dumb like change double quotes to single ones. It might surface all sorts of other ways beyond control-f that the book could improve.

And certainly, the upsides of this handcrafted editing show what you’d lose by letting Claude add all the quote marks—something I was way too scared to even consider, not least for all the humanist, philosophical reasons that friend of Works Progress (and my main human editor) Charlotte Alter has been exploring on her Substack.

Our own brains and practices might be the source of editing machines as yet unknown.

“Thanks for reading.”

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