Adina Edelman: editing, emotion, and the voice of conversational feedback
The magical creativity of a well-crafted story is enthralling, but underpinning every page is meticulous technical work, ensuring the seamless flow that allows us to lose ourselves in a book. Adina Edelman joins us to shed light on the science, craftsmanship, and process that make our favorite books an enchanting escape.
Adina is a freelance editor who works with many of the frum publishers. She’s worked on at least 90 books to date, specializing in middle-grade, memoir, and fiction.
After earning your BA in Creative Writing and interning at the Baltimore Review, a literary journal, you went on your own to do freelance editing. How does your background inform the editing you do now?
College was very helpful because of the writing workshops. I am a writer, although I don't do that as a career, and that’s very helpful in helping writers with their books. The process of giving feedback to someone and pinpointing what is and isn’t working is very necessary in the role of an editor. That carried on to the Baltimore Review as well. We receive about 10,000 submissions a year from so many diverse voices and writing styles. You really have to be able to pinpoint what an author's voice is and what's publish-worthy.
What are the different types of editing, and when are each needed?
The first step is called developmental editing. Different editors will define this differently. I look at it as the manuscript is done and you need a big-picture look to make sure the whole structure is sound, there's character development, all the plot points make sense. If you're standing at the Grand Canyon, you're just looking down and over it during the developmental edit. The next step is line editing and copy editing, where you're walking in the canyon itself, going line by line and making sure that it flows. Line editing is the sound of the sentence and the artistic side of things, and copy editing is more technical, the punctuation and spelling.
Then there’s proofreading, which most people are very familiar with. When you’re up to proofreading, it's a very clean manuscript. A proofread might catch between a hundred to 200 errors. It’s very light, just making sure that everything has been caught. You're not making any style decisions at that stage. If a sentence is unclear but grammatically correct, you leave it, which is very hard. That's why you want a good copy editor so that all that stuff is cleared up first.
I read this great description about a particular editor: “His business was to understand where the writer wanted to go and get them there a little sooner.” Editing is a backstage role, where you put your heart and mind into someone else’s work. Where do you see the boundary between the author’s preference, style, and craft, versus what the editor brings to the table?
When I first started out in editing, I was talking with Sara Miriam Gross, an amazing editor and ghostwriter. She said, Before you go into editing, make sure you're not doing it because you want to be writing, that you're not just trying to live vicariously through the author. At this point, I recognize that if I start feeling like I want to rewrite a whole thing, I need to go off and write my own thing for a little bit, just to get it out.
At the same time, there is some writing that's objectively good or bad. Where would you put yourself if you were working with a piece that you thought wasn’t good?
It will come down to the skills of the writer. If I know a writer's really good at revision, I'll just leave a comment saying, “Here's what's wrong here, here's some suggestions.” I won't put in the text itself and edit. I'll leave an example sentence in a comment and say, “Here's kind of what I'm looking for as a change. You don't have to use this exact language, this is just to get your brain pumping.” And sometimes they'll use that language, and sometimes they'll go and do something great on their own. Or if a writer is very protective of their work, I would leave it in a comment because they want that autonomy. But if it's a writer who has trouble with revisions, I might put the suggestion directly into the text.
Authors come from a creative and idealistic place, where they’ve put their soul into a manuscript and see a part of themselves in it. Editors bring the analytics and logical objective point of view and are there to cut and criticize and leave that piece of soul bleeding red. What does a good author/editor relationship look like?
The first thing you need is respect on both sides, just like any good relationship. That they're open to my feedback and understand that I respect their work, and that I also worked hard on the edits. And then it’s just about having that openness of feedback. When I give critique, they know that I'm critiquing the work, not them, and they won’t take it personally. And Boruch Hashem I've worked with a really good group of authors who are very receptive, making it a conversation. If there's a misunderstanding, they'll clarify that and I'll be like, “Oh, I totally got this wrong, thank you for explaining it to me.” That openness is so important.
I enjoy making the edit a conversation, where I'll ask, “Is this what you intended?” Or, “Let's talk about this aspect,” especially at a developmental stage. Some authors are at a point where they don't have time and they need the editor to take over a little bit more and do their thing and hand it back to them. So you need to make sure that the process the editor deals with fits for you.
For myself, sometimes I'll be handed a really unclean manuscript, and I'll leave my comments as I first go through it. And then I have to go back later and edit my comments to make sure that they're nice. I look at the tone of the editing, not just the tone of the writing, and make sure I'm being respectful and not ordering them to do something, but suggesting it.
What is the hardest scene for a writer to get right?
I would say any scene involving strong emotion. Often, telling creeps in instead of showing, or a lot of melodrama is given to try to overcompensate the fact that the reader cannot see what's actually happening. When you're engaging with someone, you can pick up their mood just from their facial expressions, or by what they are and are not saying. Having to transfer that to writing involves a lot of subtext. I don't think a lot of writers have tried to get proficient in that, and they often fall back to cliches. So then we have to identify the emotion that's happening. Step one is, what are some showing lines that we can give instead of the telling? And then read it out loud. Is this something realistic that a person would say or do? Because often it isn't. There are a lot of heavy emotions in memoir and fiction, and that's definitely something that writers have trouble getting right. It's hard.
I've seen you write, specifically, “I am not a book coach.” At the same time, you're deeply involved in a book journey and I imagine that an author who's inexperienced will come to you and see you as the person who's done this so many times. What do you think authors misunderstand about the publishing process?
I'll get people who come to me and say, I'm writing a book, can you help me? But they’re two different areas. I say, “I'll step in once you have your manuscript complete—here are some book coaches you can reach out to.” Even though I am coaching an author through the editing process, it’s very different than coaching through the writing process.
Time is a big thing that is misunderstood about publishing. Someone will come to me in May saying, “I need my book edited. I want it published in August.” I'll be like, “Do you have a little bit of leeway in that timeline?” Because if we're starting from a developmental edit, and then the author needs time to revise, editing itself could take upwards of five months, depending on the size of the manuscript. And after that it needs to be typeset, the cover design, the ISBN, all that. It's a long process. I have an author whose book was good to go, but then she needed to get permission for lyrics that were used in the book. I finished her book last August and she is only now getting ready to go ahead. Unfortunately, it's these little things that people don’t expect that push off the timing.
Are you usually hired by the writer, or by the publisher? How would the process differ based on who initiates?
Either I work with the publisher, or with self-publishing authors. Some of those self-publishing authors are Jewish authors who are referred to me by the publishers. That process is definitely a little different. It will depend on the author; sometimes I’m given more time because I get to choose when my deadline is, as opposed to with a publisher who needs it by a specific date. So that's a huge factor. Also, if a publisher gives me a copy edit, I won't necessarily be in touch with the author. Sometimes I'll leave them comments and they'll send it to the author, but I won’t necessarily be emailing or talking to them.
Let’s zoom in on the frum publishing market. Frum publishers have been increasingly solidifying restrictions about what they will and won’t write about in response to or from fear of reader or bookstore pushback. How does that affect your editing?
Yeah, there are sensitivity guidelines. When I was starting with Israel Bookshop, the editor asked, “Do you have a Bais Yaakov background? What seminary did you go to?” Just to be able to understand if I would be able to pick out those things that would be problematic.
Often it's just hashkafic things. Memoirs always bring up this kind of thing where there's very difficult content and you need to make sure that everything is brought across in a way that is realistic and relatable, but not impinging on any halachic sensitivities, and that people will feel respected. I know which words shouldn't be used, for example. Some of them don't even want references to WhatsApp. Sometimes it'll come up like, “Oh, you missed this, here's something that you need to know for future books.” I think it's sort of a given that most of it will be picked up.
I feel like the female memoir is an expanding genre, where it’s not just a baal teshuva story, but more personal than that.
I think it's important. I worked on Where Is the Daughter I Raised, and another book just came out recently, Compatible With Life by Devorah Schendler, which I edited, another beautiful book. And the recently published Even If I’m Not by Devorie Kreiman. Those are amazing examples of how they had this really hard story and were able to go through a process of coming out the other side, to a certain extent, and show their journey and how they grew in their Emunah. I think everyone who has gone through life has experienced something difficult, so even if they haven't gone through that, they can relate to the emotion. I know that I gained a lot of strength from just editing them. They're amazing books.
I want to ask you about two specific projects that you've done. You edited Rocking Horse by Leah Gebber, who is the editor of editors and has trained many of the best frum writers. Why does she even need an editor, if it was already published as a serial?
That was a very fun one to work on. There's some beautiful scenes in that book. One thing to note is that that's different because it's present tense. Across the board in any publishing, present tense is still relatively newish, it's not the go-to. I think it was really well placed here because this is a historical novel, talking about something that happened a few centuries ago, but the lessons and the conflict are things we can relate to in the present day. By making that historical placement in present tense, it presented it like this is happening now, in a sense.
I came in at the line edit stage. It had already been published as a serial, so the story was mostly sound. I was just coming in to make sure there were no inconsistencies, which can happen in a serial story, and that there was flow and good sentence structure, which she's great at.
The serials are generally very clean, they just need a proofread, and looking out for those inconsistencies. It could be timing-wise—there was one book I worked on that had the mother's name different in the beginning and the end. Little things.
You edited Eureka, Dina Nueman’s cross-genre fantasy/humor/science fiction pre-teen book. I interviewed her last year and actually asked her how her editors deal with her conversational/stream-of-consciousness style. What was it like to edit such an informal writing style?
That was so fun. She has such a distinct voice that is so enjoyable. I've seen it in books in the secular world where it's that distinct, engaging voice in middle-grade books. My job as an editor is not to say, Oh that's a run-on, let's fix that. It's like, this is a 12-year-old talking, and she is going to give over her thoughts like this. So it's okay.
The whole concept of fragments is so effective in fiction when used correctly because it's reflecting how we think. So they're not incorrect in that context. So a lot of what she did was very purposeful. The only thing I would change is if something might be unclear to the reader.
What have you been reading and recommending recently?
I love reading and editing middle-grade books. A well-written middle-grade book can be read at any age. If there’s something that you come back to and it seems like it isn't as good as I remembered, it’s probably not a great book. Only Mimi from The Circle was so well written. It's short stories, which is nice for readers who have shorter attention spans or may have problems with the memory aspect of it. And the same thing with Bundle of Joy by Rochel Burstyn, who is kind of groundbreaking, that was also a great joy to work on.
There are a lot of secular middle-grade books that thankfully are clean and I recommend a lot. It's really helpful to read those, especially if you're trying to learn writing techniques that you won’t find as much in Jewish publishing. For example, omniscient point of view, which is when you have an all-seeing narrator.
The Ogress and the Orphans and The Girl Who Drank the Moon are two middle-grade books by Kelly Barnhill that are both omniscient. She does a really good job of staying within one character in a given scene, so it’s a little easier to handle, but it's still very omniscient in the fact that there's this external narrator. Point of view is a skill that can be practiced, and the more you read and pinpoint “What point of view did this author take? How did that impact the story?” the more you can bring it into your own writing.
Great content. Thank you for posting!