Proofread Your Stuff

Let me say this again: Proofread your stuff!

Not everything about writing is fun. While some of what a writer does is grand and glorious bursts of creativity, or basking in the adulation of the readers who love the writer’s stuff, a lot of it just seat-to-the-chair hard work, and some of it is real drudgery.

One of the most drudgesome tasks a writer has to perform is proofreading. This is the business of going through your manuscript word by word, correcting spelling errors, fixing grammatical mistakes, making sure there are no omitted words, making sure the paragraphing is correct and seeing that opening and closing quotes match.

Proofreading is no fun. That is why beginning writers can come up with the most amazing ‘reasons’ not to do it.

Which is a deadly mistake. Proof your work. Proof it carefully. If you don’t, your chances of ever making a sale are just about zero.

Still, the excuses keep coming from beginners. Among my least favorites are:

● “Proofreading is the publisher’s job”

If you don’t do a careful job of proofreading your manuscript no publisher is going to consider it.

●”Proofreading is uncreative”

Proofreading is damned uncreative. It is about the least creative work I know. It is also a vital part of being a writer.

●”The editor will see past all that to be basic quality of my story.”

What the editor will see is that you’re either lazy or illiterate. Either condition promises trouble for the editor down the road. Editors hate authors who cause them trouble and authors who cause them unnecessary trouble are shunned.

●I’ve got a spellchecker, so my spelling is fine.

Like bloody hell! That attitude is why spellcheckers are one of the worst things to happen to basic literacy since Dick and Jane.

A spellchecker deals with strings of characters, not meanings. If a character string appears on its list, it will pass it without comment. That means it can’t distinguish between “to”, “two” and “too”, even though the differences jump out at readers.

There are worse examples and you see them all the time in amateur writing. “Horde” means a bunch of people, canonically Mongols. “Hoard” is a collection of something, usually treasure. And “Horded” means you desperately need to curl up with a nice, warm dictionary. “Principal” is the guy in charge of a school. “Principle” is a fundamental rule. “Capital” is a building. Capitol is the city where you find the building. And on, and on, and on.

If you’re not sure what the word means, look it up before you use it.

Sometimes a spellchecker can get you into trouble with more than just your editor. When I was working on the college paper, one of the reporters was assigned to do a story about a sociology professor who was just back from West Africa where he had been studying the problems created by educated Africans leaving their home countries for the West. Throughout the interview he kept talking about expatriate Africans.

Now this is a very sensitive issue in Africa because many Africans see expatriates as turning their back on their countries. So the professor was furious when the newspaper article kept referring to ‘ex-patriot’ Africans.

I don’t recall seeing that reporter around after that semester.

If you’re not a natural at proofreading, join the club. Almost no writer is. Most of the writers of my acquaintance are naturally lousy spellers. I didn’t learn to spell until I worked on a newspaper copy desk in college and even today I’m not good at it.

But you’d never know any of that from a professional writer’s manuscript. The worse you are at spelling and such, the more carefully you go over every word of every line on every page

Good Advice, Badly Taken

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

In general, writing advice is a series guidelines rather than Received Word from On High. While there are some things that you never do, most advice is given in the nature of suggestions and must be applied appropriately.

Unfortunately beginning writers all too often take advice as Holy Writ. The result can be pretty damaging to a writer.

The classic example is AE Van Vogt, an immensely popular writer of science fiction's Golden Age. Early in his career Van Vogt read a book titled "The Only Two Ways to Write a Story", by John W. Gallishaw that included a number of rules for fiction writing. One of those rules was that scenes should be about 800 words long and the author should introduce a new plot twist or surprise in every scene.

As advice, that's not bad. It's on par with the admonition to "shoot the sheriff on the first page" when writing adventure fiction. Unfortunately Van Vogt took it not as advice but as a command. He tried to use it in every scene in every book he ever wrote.

The result was an unholy mess. It resulted in bizarrely complicated plots with more loose ends than a poorly knit afghan. To see what I mean, try to read, say, "The World of Null-A". (The problem wasn't helped because Van Vogt was an enthusiast for just about every movement that roiled through science fiction in that era, from General Semantics to Dianetics, and some, such as eye exercises, that never made it into the mainstream.)

In an essay titled The Cosmic Jerrybuilder in his book of criticism "In Search of Wonder" fellow author and SF critic Damon Knight attempted to analyze the plot of The World of Null-A and its sequel The Players of Null-A. The result made painfully obvious what an utter mess the books were.

In an interview late in his life Van Vogt claimed that Knight had misunderstood his use of the 800-word scene. Personally I suspect that Van Vogt misunderstood what Knight had said, since he referred to it from a second-hand source and his paraphrase differs significantly from Knight's actual point.

In a sense it doesn't really matter. The system Van Vogt described in the interview of dividing each scene into five steps and using fictional sentences', each containing a hang-up' is sufficiently rigid to produce pretty bad fiction.

It's important to note that what's wrong here isn't so much the advice as the rigidity with which it is followed.

Believe it or not, it's possible to rise above such handicaps. Van Vogt was such an outstanding natural storyteller that he was able to carry the reader along in spite of his method B at least the relatively unsophisticated reader of the 1940s. It's significant that when Van Vogt returned to SF in the 1970s he was much less successful.

Far too many beginning writers commit the same sin of literalism. Unlike Van Vogt most of them don't have the natural talent to carry it off.

Almost every single rule or aphorism or piece of advice has counter-examples. Even something as important as >show, don't tell' doesn't always apply. Taken literally it produces large sections of prose which don't add to the story and do it in minute detail. Summarization and abstraction are important tools of the writer.

Fundamentally, it comes down to judgment. A writer must have the judgment to select the appropriate tool from her toolbox and apply it to the situation at hand in an appropriate. Eight hundred words is not a bad length to shoot for in a scene, but other considerations are much more important to writing a good scene than length.

How do you develop the judgment? Practice, practice, practice. You write and rewrite. You study authors to like to see what works. Above all, you think about what you're doing.

This isn't nearly as easy as internalizing a rulebook and following it to the letter. But anyone who thinks this racket is easy is severely mistaken.