Silk Purses and Sow’s Ears

By Mur Lafferty On June 17, 2010 · 5 Comments · In Musings

There’s that old country saying: “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Meaning that if you start with crap ingredients, you won’t make anything good.

I was talking to a nonfic author who had received some bad editorial comments on something he had written, and the publisher had given him a one day turnaround time. He did the edits on time, but still worried that the editor’s negative comments were bad enough to hurt his reputation with a publisher.

When I wrote RPGs, the number one advice given me was “always turn stuff in. You can be the smartest person in the world, but they can’t put your brilliance in a book if you don’t WRITE IT and TURN IT IN. If you hand them crap, they can at least edit it.” So I told this author that in a little while, the publisher probably won’t remember him as the guy who wrote the thing that needed all the work, they’ll remember him as a reliable author who turned around good edits in one day. And there are far too few of those around these days.

So you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But you can make something that will hold change. And that’s better than nothing.

Tagged with: editors • sayings

5 Responses to Silk Purses and Sow’s Ears

R.W. Harper says:

June 17, 2010 at 11:25 am

Having had published some nonfiction work, I had some run-ins with editors that liked words structured in certain ways and technical edits were always a pain. However, I did find out that resistance is futile and showing flexibility to adapt to the editors style leads to a solid reputation at a publisher (especially at an Academic press).

Fiction is easier, if it sucks – they tell you and you do it again, again, a little more and then again. Writing for games is about the same – I live it every day. Though, I am in the editor position more than the writer position.

Editing sucky is better than publishing sucky. You’re right about publisher forgetting about editing experiences over time as long as you’re an agreeable writer to work with.

Just my thoughts.
Michelle M Welch says:

June 17, 2010 at 11:26 am

My copyeditor told me about one of the authors he works with, a major bestseller (whom he didn’t name) who turns in manuscripts that are barely in standard English. It’s the copyeditor’s job to straighten them out and make them readable, then send the books back to the publisher. If that author keeps turning out bestsellers, I hardly think the publisher’s going to care about the unreadability of the first draft.
Pat Berry says:

June 17, 2010 at 11:41 am

Unless there are enough other authors who write bestsellers in excellent English. Why put up with all that extra editing work if you don’t have to?
Kat says:

June 17, 2010 at 8:21 pm

Ever casually read a blog post and then think, “Wow, that’s exactly what I needed to read today.”

Today I needed to read this post. I know for a fact it’s true in technical writing within the corporate world, but it’s good to know it applies elsewhere too.

Thank you!
Smander says:

June 23, 2010 at 4:30 am

I have to agree with you on this one. However, I think it’s also really important to submit your best work. It really is worth putting in the effort, learning a few grammar tricks and so on so when you hand in your work you feel good about it. This was also advice given to me by an editor for the Sydney Morning Herald who said they generally don’t even bother reading articles that are poorly written. His comment was, ‘rubbish in, rubbish out.’ In other words, if what you give them is bad then what they publish will be bad, no matter how much time they spend trying to fix it up. Thanks for sharing.