DAVID BARRIE
Tuesday, 4th January 2011. On trusting your ear, rather than your eye.
The manuscript of Loose-Limbed, the third Franck Guerin book, is now with the publisher. That means I’m caught up in the editorial process, which involves me defending what I wrote tooth and nail and them explaining to me (more or less patiently, depending on the day) why no sane reader would be willing to plough through the book in its current state. Of course, in the end of the day it’s the editor who has all the power (after all, they’re paying to publish the thing, not me), but convention holds that editor and author should work together consensually whenever possible, so compromise rather than confrontation is the desired goal. That said, I’d be an idiot to prove too recalcitrant, as experience has shown that a reader who hasn’t lived with a manuscript for months on end, as I have, is a better judge of its vices and virtues than I am.
However, this time around I did try something new to make things less painful for the editor – I read the entire manuscript aloud while preparing my final version. This turned out to be a revelatory exercise, as it mercilessly exposed my weakness for complicated syntax, and allowed me to spot errors that had survived through countless previous read-throughs (I was blind to what was actually written on the page, so accustomed had I become to what was supposed to be there). Now that the Kindle allows readers to lie back and invite a robotic voice to recount their book to them, ensuring that a phrase is easy on the ear seems a prudent move – and one that takes us back to a time when Homer gathered his listeners around him and charmed them with his tale of wily Odysseus.
The manuscript of Loose-Limbed, the third Franck Guerin book, is now with the publisher. That means I’m caught up in the editorial process, which involves me defending what I wrote tooth and nail and them explaining to me (more or less patiently, depending on the day) why no sane reader would be willing to plough through the book in its current state. Of course, in the end of the day it’s the editor who has all the power (after all, they’re paying to publish the thing, not me), but convention holds that editor and author should work together consensually whenever possible, so compromise rather than confrontation is the desired goal. That said, I’d be an idiot to prove too recalcitrant, as experience has shown that a reader who hasn’t lived with a manuscript for months on end, as I have, is a better judge of its vices and virtues than I am.
However, this time around I did try something new to make things less painful for the editor – I read the entire manuscript aloud while preparing my final version. This turned out to be a revelatory exercise, as it mercilessly exposed my weakness for complicated syntax, and allowed me to spot errors that had survived through countless previous read-throughs (I was blind to what was actually written on the page, so accustomed had I become to what was supposed to be there). Now that the Kindle allows readers to lie back and invite a robotic voice to recount their book to them, ensuring that a phrase is easy on the ear seems a prudent move – and one that takes us back to a time when Homer gathered his listeners around him and charmed them with his tale of wily Odysseus.