Lynne Patrick
After all the activity of the past few weeks – short holiday in Guernsey, visits from family and new American friends, a larger than usual complement of theatre and book reviews – I had time to take a few deep breaths last week, and do a little future-contemplating.
Now that paid work doesn’t take up my entire week, the income associated with it has fallen as well, so in order to maintain a level of disposal income which adequately feeds my book habit, I’ve been looking at ways to cut business expenses.
One expense which seems to have increased disproportionately in the past two or three years is the fee for the post office box I use as a business address: my way of keeping home and work separate since my workplace is only twenty yards from the house. When I started Real Writers, my editorial consultancy/appraisal service more than twenty years ago, everything travelled by post, and it made sense. But now technology has taken over the world, and the P O box is empty more weeks than not; most projects have arrived by e-mail or via the website for a couple of years now, so I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to bow to the inevitable and make the service online and e-mail only.
Which requires a few changes to the website. Which in turn has filled my mind with thoughts about some of the authors I’ve had contact with over those twenty-plus years. Which is a very long preamble to a post which is something of a godsend in a week which has been a little bare of other activity.
So – first of all the essential disclaimers: if I’ve edited or appraised your work, and you think you recognize yourself in this post, it’s safe to say it probably isn’t you I’m talking about. Experience has shown that the problematic authors I’ve dealt with mostly had no idea what the problem was – or even that there was a problem. Most authors I’ve dealt with were – are – competent and professional.
Very, very few were less so. On a couple of occasions I’ve pulled back from working with an author at all because some sixth (or seventh or eighth) sense told me we would disagree to an extent that would affect the quality of the work I carried out. And I can recall just one occasion when I pulled the plug, and said I couldn’t edit a certain author’s work any more. But I’ve found that the vast majority of authors are all too aware how useful a dispassionate pair of eyes on their work can be.
I think that vast majority would agree that there comes a point when you’re so involved with what you’re writing, so connected to the characters and tangled up in the plot, that you don’t see the wood for the trees. It’s hard to step back far enough without laying the work aside and doing something completely different for a few weeks, and sometimes those weeks aren’t available.
That’s when those fresh eyes come in useful.
It’s amazing what you miss, or remember wrongly, or are so sure you know you don’t bother to research.
And that, of course, is a large part of an editor’s job: to spot the errors before they escape into the public domain and embarrass the author.
The editor as safety net: now, there’s an interesting concept. Here are a few of the glitches I’ve caught over the years:
In one book, two characters had been childhood classmates – but when the story took place one was twelve and the other was nineteen.
In book seven of an established series, the protagonist appeared to have moved house, without any reference to such a major life-change in the text. In fact the author had misremembered the street name from one book to the next.
In an historical, the characters visited a place of entertainment which existed in real life – but not until ten years after their visit.
In another historical, a character who lived in what we would call dire poverty suddenly had a pile of spare clothes, having had just one of everything until that moment.
In yet another historical, sort of, set decades ago but within living memory, police cars had sirens, which were still twenty years in the future.
It’s so so easy to do. Every one of those details is minor, and didn’t affect the plot or the outcome. But minor factual errors are like misplaced apostrophes: each one pricks a tiny hole in the willing suspension of disbelief. Also, if the reader notices one, s/he is constantly on alert for the next, which distracts from the real substance of the narrative.
I was recently revising a novel of my own which first saw the light of day a dozen or so years ago, and there, slap bang in the middle of a page, was a glaring typo which I’d failed to pick up in the course of countless reworkings and half a dozen proofreadings. So far I haven’t noticed any factual or continuity errors like the ones listed above – but then I wouldn’t, would I?
I dread to think what else is in there waiting to trip me up.
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