When the Editor Lives in Your Head…
(To see the earlier Blogs, Page Down)
I suppose other writers have this problem as well, but the editors’ voices don’t begin and end with my own work, which makes reading books at times troubling. The voices aren’t always welcome; they say, “Wait a minute. Stop there. Where did that come from? Whose voice is that? Where’s the punctuation? Where’d she get that rag? But he wasn’t wearing a coat before…” See what I mean?
I’ve read some books that were so wonderfully written that I read right through the missing period, or punctuation outside the quotation marks, even though the editor in my head saw them, and commented. I just finished reading a wonderful story, but the editor in my head could scarcely let me get through it.
An expensive book written by a Ph.D. with lots of accomplishments, it’s a wonderful story of a real woman in dangerous times, a slave woman in 1860-61, in Norfolk, Virginia. I wanted to keep reading it, and I finished it, in spite of the editor in my head who could hardly fall asleep at night worrying over all these “mistakes.” The first time I was jarred off the page was when, in the middle of a slave dialogue written in dialect, one of the slaves responds, “Well, how’s that working out for you?” I jumped back into the 21st century, and the editor in my head shouted, “Huh?” The slave woman has a bad leg and walks with a cane. She refers to herself as gimpy, a gimp, having a gimp leg. My eyes literally spun around those words trying to quiet the editor who lives upstairs in my head. I searched the history of the word, noun and adjective, and discovered they originated in 1924, and 1931. Dejected at her careless research, I continued reading. When I read someone had a funky hair do and then read funky a half dozen more times, I stared at the page quite a while, before searching the origin of funky. In 1920, the slang referred to body odor.
The plot has a crazed white southern guy who’s already killed loads of slaves, tracking our heroine and her dear friend through swamps and forests in winter snow, freezing, bent on torturing and killing them both, and yes, they know this. Our heroine has in her satchel, hatchet, oyster knife, poison, rope, and carries a loaded rifle. She outsmarts him three times and has him in a helpless position three times. One time she puts a black widow in his pants and leaves him in the snow. Another time she hogties him upside down from a tree (did I mention she’s a tiny woman half frozen?) and stuffs a dirty rag in his mouth (where’d she find that?) and covers his eyes with her scarf (which she needs for warmth) and leaves him. I get that she’s a virtuous person, not a killer. But is that realistic? She has two missions driving her: protect her friend from the man who wants her dead, and get important information to Washington. And this man…do you really think she wouldn’t have killed him?
A great story, average writing, and poor editing; disappointing. My wish for every writer is to have an exceptional editor take up residence in your head, forever. Even though it might mean you become overly critical of other works, it also means you’ll be that critical of your own. And we all need other eyes to edit our work. We need to be poked by questions.