Like many others working at JAMA Network, I’m a writer as well as an editor—and not just of blog posts! I’ve written the script for a graphic novel, Mooncakes, that will be published in 2019, and my first short story was published last year. I’ve been writing science fiction and fantasy for a long time now, but I only started working as a manuscript editor for the JAMA Network 3 years ago. Since I’ve started working here, a question I get asked frequently is: how has editing medical articles and working with AMA style affected your writing?
The short and simple answer is: not much. Science fiction writing and medical writing are such vastly different spheres that it’s pretty easy for me to ignore my medical editing brain when writing, or when I’m editing my fellow writers’ stories.
However, the long answer is a bit more complicated. I can ignore my medical editing instincts, but I can’t ever fully turn them off—I have to restrain myself from changing “though” to “although,” or “compared to” to “compared with,” if making that kind of a change would interfere with the author’s or character’s voice.
Other times, though (see what I did there?), I’ve found that listening to my AMA-editor voice has made me a better writer. For one thing, it’s encouraged me to be more succinct. My colleague Iris Lo wrote a post about removing redundancies in a manuscript, and I’ve found that this is an important guiding principle in all genres of writing. It’s especially useful when writing short stories—I have a tendency to be overly verbose in my writing, but in a tale of 4000 words or less, every word needs to matter. When I look back at my writing from 3 years ago and compare it to my writing now, I’ve found that my prose is sharper, and I’m enjoying my first publication success as a result. Most of that is just the natural shape of writing progression, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t attribute a part of it to my work here at the AMA.
And, every so often, I’ll have a character say “compared with” instead of “compared to.” Because grammar sticklers exist in every universe!—Suzanne Walker