(This is a bit of a rant.)
As a writer, I have just one set of tools to use in my work:
my words and the language in which they are found.
Which words I choose, how they’re used, how they’re
assembled, how they’re combined, which rules I adhere to slavishly, which rules
I deliberately bend or even break…. These are the tools that I have—that any
writer has—to use to surround a reader with the story and entice them inside.
When that happens, when that siren song is successful, a reader can become
totally submerged in the story, so much so that they never want to leave.
So it bothers me to stumble across the sloppiness of other
people. When I, as a reader myself, want to be submerged but I’m brought up
short by someone else’s carelessness. It could be the author, the editor, the
typesetter, the I-don’t-know-whom, but SOMEBODY has goofed up, and it throws me
right out of the book!
I’ll give you just two examples.
“[the hedgehog] was
very prickly and riddled with flees.”
—The Mermaid Garden
by Santa Montefiore, published by Simon & Schuster, 2011
No, the hedgehog was “riddled with fleas.”
“The boat moved with a
nauseous, relentless rhythm.”
—The Lie Tree by
Frances Hardinge, published by Amulet Books, 2016
No, the boat itself wasn’t feeling sick (“nauseous”); it was causing sickness in
its passengers (“a nauseating,
relentless rhythm.”)
Things like this bother me because all of the people
involved get paid—and get paid real money—to do their jobs correctly. And it’s
not like they are being asked to design a skyscraper or pilot a cruise ship.
This is not (to use two very overused clichés) “brain surgery” or “rocket
science.” They accept their jobs with the understanding that they can and will
perform those jobs well. And then a lot of money is spent creating and
publishing a book. (One source says that the total cost of publishing the first
printing of a typical hardback book can be as high as $250,000.) And then, for
as long as physical copies of that book continue to exist in the world—for
multiple decades—the mistakes that are in it are out there, confirming just how
lazy or ignorant someone was who was supposed to help make that book look good,
but also—and even worse—spreading that ignorance to other people, people who
believe, rightly or wrongly, that what a person reads in print has to be
correct. This is especially bothersome for things like the “nauseous, nauseating”
example, above, since that mistake is in a Young Adult book, and now tens of
thousands of young people can go through the world forever misusing those terms
with confidence.
It makes me very angry and very sad at the same time, and I
have to ask: Doesn’t anybody read these things before they’re published? I don’t
mean merely cast their eye over them; I mean actually read them.
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