Avoiding Literary Howlers
“At first Laura couldn’t see the trap, and then she noticed a large rat, with half its tail missing, run from under a pile of fern thongs. When she was sure that the trappers were not nearby and the coast was clear, she removed the fern thongs covering the trap, and there lying amongst the peanuts was the other half of the rat’s tail. She tipped the nuts out onto the ground for the wildlife to eat and then flattened the trap.”
The opening paragraph to this post is taken from a scene I was re-working quite recently, and it occurred to me that this particular piece of writing could highlight a problem many writers will face from time to time when their concentration slips. I am not using this particular text because it is a literary masterpiece, because clearly it isn’t.
The eighty or so words that the paragraph uses to build a coherent thought are just one of the many building blocks that are required to move a story forward and complete a manuscript. But here’s the thing. Eighty words in amongst an eighty thousand word novel, for example, is almost negligible. In fact it accounts for only 0.1% of the word count. The chances of this type of error infiltrating and hiding in your work is downright scary. Vigilance is the keyword in this situation.
The more eagle eyed amongst you will have already spotted the two glaring errors in that opening paragraph. They are not spelling errors or grammatical issues, so even the most finely tuned word processing editor would not have brought these to the writer’s attention. The warning is clear. Don’t become too reliant on automatic editorial checks. Yes, they are extremely helpful, but they can also give the writer a false sense of security that all is well with their manuscript. Those opening eighty two words contain two embarrassing errors which the original author didn’t spot during the writing process for one reason or another. A needle in a literary haystack.
It’s all to do with the way our brain is wired apparently. I personally don’t understand the complexity of the brain, nor do I pretend to, but beta readers would have spotted them or would they? An editor doing line by line checks would almost certainly have got his blue pen out, green in my case, and underlined the literary rascals. Errors still get through the editorial process of even the more well known authors, so no system is completely foolproof.
I had a good chuckle at the thought of a quiet walk through a woodland on a summer’s afternoon and being impressed by the colourful thongs adorning the fern fronds as they moved lazily in the cooling breeze. This error was not detected until the author’s proofing copy arrived on yours truly’s desk. One hilarious embarrassment was fortunately avoided.