20100718 The Writer’s Bane

I was going to hold off on this subject, for when I was to speak of preparing the manuscript for publication, but Evan Peters changed all that.

The subject for the day is now typos. The reason is that I threw up my mock-up of the ROAD KILL book cover yesterday, and Evan read it over. And he found a missing word. This kind of shit drives me crazy. Not Evan finding it (for which he has my thanks), but me missing it. I’d like to say it’s a rare occurrence but that’s a load of BS.

In re-reading the back copy, Janice and I found at least 3 more and some clumsy writing. In just a few blocks of copy.

Now imagine you have a book of a couple of hundred pages. Spelling errors have been virtually eliminated with modern editing systems (I use MS Word for novels, and Final Draft for scripts). Grammatical errors to some extent are at least flagged.

With ROAD KILL, we have read, and re-read it, each time finding at least one error on every single page. EVERY time I read it. We even printed the entire thing out, and found more. I put the novel away for a few months to come back with fresh eyes and still more.

Are our brains wired to gloss over mistakes, once we are too familiar with the materials?

A bunch of common mistakes:

Using one word, when you intend another: “Quite” for “quiet,” or “there” for “their,” or “your” for “you’re.” They are spelled right, and sound right, but they ain’t right.
Crappy punctuation: Commas where they shouldn’t be. Missing question marks.
Missing Quotes: Leaving the end quote (“) off the end of a block of dialog.
Missing words: You’ve just left it out and don’t realize it’s missing until you read it out loud.
Adverb reliance: My first draft was peppered with them. It’s considered the realm of the novice. I went back and rooted those bastards out, targeting the “ly” words. Slowly, quietly, wistfully. I did leave in a few, but not more than one every 3 pages, instead of the 3 per page I started with.
Clunky sentences: Using 8 words when 3 can get the job done.
Using the same word twice in the same paragraph or even sentence: “Claire knew she had to go, because she had to be there,” becomes “Clair must go; she had to be there.”
Passive voice: I’ve done almost three decades of business writing, and passive voice is the style you adopt for that. You don’t say “We’ve changed the HR polices.” It’s phrased as “The HR policies were changed.” It’s less confrontational. And it’s weak, lame and lays there like a plate of cold spaghetti noodles. This took the most time on re-writes, but it was the best thing I did for the book.

Some tricks we used to clean up my manuscript:

Have someone read it aloud back to the author. Janice did this while I sat in a chair with my eyes closed. Hearing her stumble over a mouthful of dialog due to a poorly worded sentence was painful.
Print it and read each sentence starting from the bottom. After you have read the book a few times, your eyes just skim over the words, and the errors.

I sent out the book to a group of friends, not only for typos, but plot holes and bad logic. I have built up a mental picture of the character, and know why they might react in a certain way. I also know why they may act differently in a certain situation. But the reader isn’t privy to all that, and if I haven’t dropped breadcrumbs along the way, the result is a leap in logic that makes absolutely no sense. Fresh eyes can alert the writer to these issues. You have to have a thick skin, and go into it knowing that these people are going out of their way (and dedicating valuable time) to help you. It’s much better than to throw it out before thousands (you hope) readers and find it then.

Thanks again for Evan, and today’s topic. I’ve put a corrected version of the cover out for your review.

Mark E. Poole
(Note: after I published this post, I have found and corrected 5 different errors. Grrrrr)