I’m starting a new novel. A chapter book, to be precise. To be even more precise, a follow-up to Duck for a Day, whose characters I love altogether too much to leave alone.
When I wrote Duck for a Day, I knew it needed to be around 8000 words (ish). So of course, I wrote 15000. Then I pruned it to 12000. Then I sent it to my long-suffering editor, and she wrote back to me and said, altogether unexpectedly, “I love this, but it really needs to be around 8000 words.”
Eventually, we got there.
I’m a recovering pedant. I try not to let my work as a copyeditor/proofreader spill over into my daily life. I know how annoying it is to have someone gleefully pointing out errors, not least because there are so many of them all around us that once you get started, there’s scarcely room for anything else. And to a certain extent, as long as the communicative intent is clear enough, what are a few stray apostrophes or typos between friends?
But yesterday I broke my rule. Yesterday, I found myself compelled to send an email that began “I’m sorry to be a pedant, but this seems like the sort of thing you would want to know.”
No, this post has nothing to do with Alice in Wonderland. It has to do with editing, and my exasperation with my own verbal (textual?) tics. I know we all have them – those words and phrases we use over and over, that we rely on lazily as filler or meaningless ‘beats’ to break up dialogue. But having done a fairly quick couple of rounds of revision on my 2011 title Surface Tension, I’ve realised how pervasive some of mine are, to the extent of feeling embarrassed at what I put my poor editor through.
Meg McKinlay 