Saturday, August 06, 2005Truth vs. AccuracyMy book is at the printer.This, to me, feels much the same as Frodo saying "The ring is in Mount Doom." Much like Frodo I've been walking around the past few days in a stupor. I have thought of him often. As he was walking down the slopes, did he turn to Sam and say "Uh, remind me again ... who's bright idea was that?" The day before it was supposed to go to the printer I had a call scheduled to go over some last minute proofing with one of my editors. She is ruthless and had already been over the book once; her comments were excellent and all served to tighten and refine the text. Dorthea is great. And so I was looking forward to getting her proofing comments. I had also asked her to find yet another pair of eyes to look it over for typos and other things I may have missed. I am really concerned about being as perfect as possible with this thing, so I want to stay humble and accept comments and not be a big old prima dona about how every word I write is perfect and untouchable. So I called Dorthea the afternoon before the text was going to press. I had about twenty five notes from my own review of the manuscript. Confidently, I expected the call to last no more than a half hour or so. I was pretty sure I'd found every typo or formatting problem or spacing between the ellipses that I could. The call lasted three and a half HOURS. The other proofer had found about twenty problems per page. And had methodically gone through and cleaned up the entire text for me. It was hellacious. I wanted to put my head in the oven. I learned some very bad things about myself. For example, I am very bad with serial commas. I am very bad about fragmented sentences. Like this one. And I start sentences with the word "and." But I don't seem to care. Oh, it goes on and on and on and on. The paragraph above should really read like this: I learned some very negative things about myself. I am bad with serial commas. I am not conscientious about fragmented sentences, like this one. I begin sentences with the word "and." I do not care. It goes on, on, on, and on. Yessir. It's shorter. It is grammatically correct. It is clean and neat and... lifeless. But it's right. I have a great respect for accuracy. I have an enormous respect for the English language. I love words and the last thing I want to do is rape them, run over them, disrespect them. I am not the world's best grammarian. I learned a lot of things during those three and a half hours. (For example, did you know when you use an adverb with another word as a combination adjective, you don't need to hypenate? As in "this is a duly noted rule." Interesting, huh? Seriously.) So I was forced to confront an ugly truth: my writing is not accurate. My writing is not right. My writing is quirky. My writing is... my writing is wrong. This is a bad thing to find out the day before you send something to print. This is a bad thing to hear after a year of the most intensive work you've ever done in your life. This is like telling Frodo on the edge of Mount Doom "oh sorry bub. You've been going in the wrong direction the whole time. You really need to go back to Hobbiton and start again." After the call I curled up in a fetal position on the couch and moaned audibly for about ten minutes. I was not happy. I called my people. Scott, my designer, told me to burn every page of notes I'd just taken. Cynthia had me read her some of the comments and told me that I should ignore most of them, but that some actually helped. I liked Scott's idea better. But Cynthia had a point. Some of them were good comments. I had to accept that they did improve the work. I took the next day off from work and worked for about three days non-stop. I went through every edit and decided: does this help, go sideways, or hinder the meaning I was trying to convey? Does this kill my voice or make it clearer to the reader? Does this make it better? The most telling moment came up with a sentence the other proofreader didn't understand. It's in the story called "The Berm." The sentence says "The accuracy of the situation did not in any way destroy its truth." She didn't get it. And suddenly, I did. The proofer was going for accuracy; I was going for truth. They are two different things. This has become one of the most profound lessons of my long writing life. Accuracy is there for a purpose: it makes language clear, it adheres to a standard, it makes reading smooth and enables the meaning to come through without cluttering up the landscape with lots of personal artifact. Accuracy serves a purpose. And in many situations, as most of my friends know, I am an accuracy nazi. I will walk out of a movie if I see a misplaced apostrophe in the title sequence. I will not patronize a restaurant with too many typos in the menu (this is true.) I had four editors and three proofers on this book. So I'm not a slipshod hippie freak who just wants to dance free-form any which way and let people stumble onto the meaning if they can get around the junk. On the other hand, my voice is... my voice. After writing millions of words, this is how that voice has started coming out. People are reading it and are loving it. My voice is mine. Sometimes it's not accurate. But sometimes it's more than that: sometimes it is true. For me. For me and my way of looking at the world. This is my truth and the way I write it has a lot of fragments and run on sentences and weirdness and funkiness. And finally, after those three days of staring into the abyss, I've emerged and decided I am unapologetic. Of course I have cleaned up things that got in the way. And I'm sure there are things I have missed that are going to cause me great embarrassment because they are still really wrong. But I also consciously know that there is some stuff in the book that's just there because I like it. Because it sounds good. Because it's right, for me. I acknowledge it and am going to let it stay. That is the way it is. The book will be in print the first week of September. With its funny sentences and smattering of language that at least one proper society has found offensive. Fuck that. If you've read this far and have survived the flagrant disregard for some of the rules of the language, you will love it. The ring is in the fire. And I'm walking away proud. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:29 AM  
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