Margaret's Column

In 1936, Margaret Mitchell was awaiting the publication of her only novel, Tomorrow Is Another Day. It’s a good title, at once wistful and optimistic. And it’s the heroine’s personal philosophy; she repeats it many times in the story. But right before the book went to press, Mitchell instructed her publisher, Macmillan, to change it to a phrase that’s used once, only in passing: Gone With The Wind.

When does an author know when a book is ‘finished’? When have you stopped making your work better, and are now only making it different? It’s hard to answer that question. I’m getting ready to submit my second book to the publisher. I’ve gone through it many, many times now. I’m not finding any more typos; I think I can say I’ve caught them all (or at least I hope so) If not, I can still make corrections when I get the galley-proofs.

But-I don’t quite like the way I phrased that; let me rewrite it. Does this name suit this character? Can I find a better one? (I recently changed a character’s name back to what it was originally). Am I being tasteful with love scenes, or am I just pulling punches? I should explain more about this plot point; nah,  readers are smart enough to figure it out.

For writers, books are like children. You’ve done the best you can, and you hope it’s good enough. But you can’t resist the last piece of advice before they're out the door. And once they're out the door, for all to see, they’re not yours any more. They belong to any one who will read them, whether that’s a hundred people or millions. Readers have their own ideas of how stories should go and how characters should develop.

Witness the lively discussion of the final Harry Potter book. Everyone had different ideas, only a few of which coincided with J..K. Rowling’s. Yes, I would have liked to see some things fleshed out more, but it’s her story, and not mine. What looks vital to readers can seem secondary to the person who actually has the whole story in her head; as I’ve said before, authors and their readers have a weird relationship. The Hobbit has millions of fans, myself among them, yet on rereading it in the early ‘sixties, Tolkien was momentarily tempted to rewrite the whole thing. Could he have improved it? Who knows.

So, you proofread, or pay a professional if you can afford it. You weed out the typos and the homophones. Then you do it again. And again. You fill in that bit of back-story and change that person’s name. Finally, you must say that’s finished-and let it go.

We all use the spell-check and grammar-check, (at least I hope so), but there are many things that those handy features won’t catch, such as homophones (every writer’s sworn enemy), misspellings that are actual words, and missing words like a and the. This last error can make you sound like Boris Badanov. Only careful rereading will catch any of these.

I’ve been a member of an on-line writer’s workshop for three years, and I’ve noticed something that might sound weird: It’s easier to spot other people’s errors than it is your own. That’s because your eyes start seeing what your fingers intended to type, but didn’t. I’m not harsh to people who don’t catch all the typos, because I know that I’ve probably missed a few in my own stories. If you have the money, spend it on a professional proofreader. This isn’t cheap; most SPAs are on their own.

I read an editor’s site once; she offered a proofreading quiz to anyone who was interested in being an editor. The qualifying score was 100%. If this sounds a bit hard-nosed, think for a second. Let’s say that the allowed score was 98%, or two errors out of a hundred. In a 95,000 word manuscript (the length of my own two completed books) 2% is nineteen-hundred. That’s a lot of mistakes.

So we get to work, reading carefully, concentrating strictly on the words, ignoring their meaning and the story we’re telling with them. Teh for the, form for from, though for thought. It’s numbing. In the end, you hope you’ve caught everything. I thought I had caught everything with The Bretton Katt Alliance; it turns out that I missed a few (a corrected edition will be out in a couple of months). Trust me, nothing makes the stomach roil and the sweat break out like the discovery of post-publication errors. We love our books, and we want to do right by them. It’s only fair to readers, and to ourselves, that we put out the best possible product. (But I can do without reviewers whose snide comments imply that you didn't proofread at all).

That said, I don’t understand why some people are more judgmental of SPAs than they are of more famous, best-selling writers. One post on an Amazon board even said that best-selling authors had ‘earned the right’ to be sloppy. With the money that some of these people get, you’d think readers would hold them to the highest standard. Nobody has the right to be sloppy.

In the past few years I’ve seen errors in books by some major writers (I won’t mention names), mistakes that somebody on the proofreading staff should have caught and fixed. But proofreaders, like self-published authors who must do their own proofing, are only human beings, and human beings aren’t perfect. We must keep some perspective. We’re not surgeons; errors are annoying, even unprofessional, but no one will die because of an error in a novel (at least I hope not).

So once more we open the file, and begin, line by line, until our eyes get tired and we must stop for now. We find another two or three mistakes that we missed the other day. We fix them and close the file. And tomorrow we’ll do it again.