DAVID BARRIE
'
Tuesday, 1st February 2011. On deadlines.
“If you want something done, ask a busy man.” That was one of my father's favourite dictums. (It's a snappier version of Parkinson's Law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion”). The corrosive effects of the absence of any constraints are well known to PhD students whose theses inch slowly towards completion (until, in some cases, they realise that they are inching away from it).
This Friday my publisher will send the files for Loose-Limbed to the printers, since our tussle over the editing of the book came to an end early last week. Or would have done, had my weekend not been disturbed by thoughts of one episode in the book which had niggled at me since I wrote it, although I was never quite sure why. It finally came to me: a character said something that made perfectly good sense at that point in the unfolding of the plot, but which would come to seem very strange once all the facts were known. No reader was likely to trip over the problem while ploughing through the book, but once he or she got to the end and sat back to mull things over, then the episode would return to trouble them (just as some foodstuffs creep back up on you a few hours after you've eaten them).
So I rewrote the scene in question and made forced my editor to update his files (to his credit, at no point did he protest by saying “But nobody'll ever notice” – readers of crime fiction are notoriously eagle-eyed). Here we have a case of a flaw (albeit a minor one) which I put up with for something like five months, only to correct in the course of the final countdown.
Thank heaven for deadlines and the real-world production process. In the future, the fact that a digital publication can be endlessly updated and rediffused to its readers may well prove not to be such a good thing after all. In the absence of anything resembling a definitive version, who will bother to struggle after the elusive goal of near-perfection?
“If you want something done, ask a busy man.” That was one of my father's favourite dictums. (It's a snappier version of Parkinson's Law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion”). The corrosive effects of the absence of any constraints are well known to PhD students whose theses inch slowly towards completion (until, in some cases, they realise that they are inching away from it).
This Friday my publisher will send the files for Loose-Limbed to the printers, since our tussle over the editing of the book came to an end early last week. Or would have done, had my weekend not been disturbed by thoughts of one episode in the book which had niggled at me since I wrote it, although I was never quite sure why. It finally came to me: a character said something that made perfectly good sense at that point in the unfolding of the plot, but which would come to seem very strange once all the facts were known. No reader was likely to trip over the problem while ploughing through the book, but once he or she got to the end and sat back to mull things over, then the episode would return to trouble them (just as some foodstuffs creep back up on you a few hours after you've eaten them).
So I rewrote the scene in question and made forced my editor to update his files (to his credit, at no point did he protest by saying “But nobody'll ever notice” – readers of crime fiction are notoriously eagle-eyed). Here we have a case of a flaw (albeit a minor one) which I put up with for something like five months, only to correct in the course of the final countdown.
Thank heaven for deadlines and the real-world production process. In the future, the fact that a digital publication can be endlessly updated and rediffused to its readers may well prove not to be such a good thing after all. In the absence of anything resembling a definitive version, who will bother to struggle after the elusive goal of near-perfection?