by Paul Anderson
EdNSW hosted an online workshop, Copyediting fiction, in July 2021, presented by Nicola O’Shea. There were two sessions — the first on 22 July, the second on 29 July — totalling five-and-a-half hours.
Nicola is an experienced fiction editor and teacher. She started editing fiction in-house at HarperCollins Publishers Australia. In her freelance career, she edits for a range of publishers, and works directly with authors. She has taught editing at University of Technology Sydney and the University of Sydney and also runs an online structural editing course for fiction.
Each session began with a presentation before we worked through various exercises as a class.
The goals of copyediting fiction were recapped as:
- error-free text that suits genre and readership
- clarity, continuity, consistency
- maintaining the author’s voice/writing style.
Exercises were given to participants to be completed in advance. Nicola went through each onscreen, explaining her edits, with some back-and-forth discussion on the way through. Learning aims included solving point-of-view (head-hopping) and dialogue exchange problems. Two exercises were mini-copyedits (879- and 1208-word extracts); a style sheet was prepared for the last.
Nicola has an inclusive approach to copyediting. She puts a lot of comments in the margin — suggestions to the author, as well as explanations and corrections — managing at the same time to change as little as possible in the text. ‘Fiction editing is a dialogue between editor and author,’ Nicola said.
The class size (15 participants) meant there was access-for-all to the presenter throughout, and created a nice group cohesion. Breakout rooms were used in the first session to discuss a couple of the exercises in even smaller peer groups. There was a funny moment in the second session when it transpired that three people had, independently, chosen the same published novel (The Catcher in the Rye) as their example of a distinctive voice (author’s narrative voice or a character’s voice).
Participants received a Copyediting fiction: checklist and other resources post-workshop.
Thank you to Nicola and all participants for a spot-on workshop. Feedback included the following comments (shared with permission):
- ‘A really well-presented workshop. I learnt a lot of things and found myself applying what I had learnt during the first workshop to the exercises for the second. The information was easy to understand and presented in such a way that it was easy to pick up on and implement. This was well worth the time.’
- ‘Thanks to the event organisers and Nicola for a fabulous and informative workshop. I couldn’t believe how quickly the time passed, we were so engaged.’
Sara Kitaoji was the Zoom host; Susie Pilkington and Julie Ganner AE assisted behind the scenes.
EdNSW will run a second series of this workshop in September, as the first booked out quickly and we have a waiting list.
For more information on our workshops, please contact Sara Kitaoji, Professional Development Coordinator, at ednsw.profdev@iped-editors.org.