Know Jack #484 Down the Garden Path

“Humans don’t want sober advice, but affirmation that their folly is wisdom.”   Ralph Peters~Endless War

One of the greatest mistakes I made as a new author was to self-edit my writing. Now, there’s nothing wrong with going over what we’ve written to refine and polish the work. That is a must, but it is not the end-all of editing. I say that because there are always errors that we simply cannot see. Oh, the optic nerve works fine in relaying the image. The problem lies in the brain that refuses to make sense of the signal. Other evidence aside, this alone does not mean something’s wrong with our brain.

Our brain knows what we wrote and, at times, refuses to see anything else. My editor once asked me to read a sentence that I wrote. I read it aloud for her.

“Read it again,” she said.

It did, and she repeated her instructions to read it once more. On the fourth try, I read the words on the page and realized those were not the words I spoke the first three times.

My brain may not be the best example to use, but it’s the only one I have. I once used a similar object lesson in a scripture reading class I was teaching. I drew an incomplete circle. I left a small open space at the top where the circle was not closed. I asked the class to describe the figure I drew. Everyone responded that it was indeed a circle and was astonished when I replied that it was not. Our brains love to fill in the blanks. The lesson was aimed at not reading things into what was written.

Now, as a fiction writer, I love for readers to read things into what I’ve written. Often, I count on them reading things into the story. Leading folks astray, or rather getting them to lead themselves astray, makes for the best plot twists. Mystery writers live and die by that device.

When we’ve written a book, we have high hopes for it. To have an editor come along and attack our baby seems like a personal affront to our literary genius. A good editor doesn’t work for us. They work for the reader, who is the ultimate judge of our literary genius. That said, the best editors have a direct stake in book sales. A hireling runs when the wolf comes, an owner stands in the gap and protects the sheep. I need all the help I can get.