In a new interview at The Rusty Key, Harry Potter continuity editor Cheryl Klein spoke at length about her experience and relationship to editing the Harry Potter series.
Take a look at the fantastic Q&A after the jump!
Here’s a brief excerpt from the interview:
The Rusty Key: How would you describe your experience as one of the editors of Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows? Could you elaborate on your role as the continuity editor?
Cheryl Klein: It was pretty thrilling altogether! In general, editors must keep track of the running of all the fictional machinery within a book—how the characters develop emotionally, how readers react emotionally, whether certain words are capped or italicized, that the mental “movie” of the book unspools smoothly in readers’ minds. My boss Arthur Levine, who acquired the series, has always been its true editor, and the one who works directly with J. K. Rowling. But on these last two books, along with a wonderful trio of copyeditors and proofreaders, I took care of many of the editorial “fact” functions—that spells did what they were supposed to do according to their previous usages in the book; that details about the characters didn’t change randomly; that wands and other objects were always where they had been fictionally left last (especially important in Deathly Hallows, obviously). That left Arthur free to concentrate on the emotional experience for the readers and characters, and as I’m rather more detail-oriented and he’s rather more emotionally oriented, it was a split that worked pretty well for us as an editorial team.
If you’d like to read the full interview, click here.
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