The first lesson I learned about writing was to check for errors and then check again. And I keep learning the same lesson over and over. I’m not the first or the worst mistake-maker. Writers have been making errors forever. Google the topic “mistakes in books” or “authors’ mistakes” and prepare to be overwhelmed. These mistakes take many forms, and some have become famous. In the “Wicked Bible” of 1631, the 7th Commandment reads, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the shipwreck survivor Crusoe is on the island watching his ship sink. He takes off his clothes and swims back out to the ship to salvage supplies, which he brings back to shore in the pockets he no longer has.
Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy has two lovers “like two small chips being tossed on a rough but friendly sea.” Did he intend them to be ships? Nobody knows, but we suspect. Simple typos can easily survive a writer’s scrutiny, especially if the letters still form actual words. In The Good Earth Pearl Buck describes a group of huts clinging to a wall “like flees to a dog’s back.” A contemporary error that I just learned about is a thought by Cersei in the fifth book of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire: “‘I am beautiful,’ she reminded himself.”
There is a story that Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s father, believed his writings were informed by the Holy Spirit. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson supposedly asked, “Cannot the Holy Spirit, then, spell?” Spelling and punctuation slip-ups are painful, but substantive errors are worse. About two thirds of the way through my book The Old Man, two characters escape pursuers by taking a train up the west coast to Canada. They take a bus from the border to Vancouver and then a cab to Victoria, where they check into the Empress Hotel. I once went from Vancouver to Victoria and stayed at the Empress. What could I possibly get wrong? I had forgotten that Victoria is on an island reached by a two-hour ferry trip with a forty-minute drive on either end of it. People noticed.
Within the first twenty-four hours after publication, I received the first ten emails pointing out my mistake. I still don’t know how all of those people read two thirds of the book and discovered my shame so quickly. But that didn’t mean the emails stopped. A year later the emails still hadn’t stopped. Two years. Three.
Any mistake is humiliating. It seems that it’s always too late to fix them, because we don’t know they exist until they’re in print. For the rest of my life, every time I walk through a used bookstore and see that book, I’ll know that the mistake is still in it. I’ll want someone to buy it, but know that if they do, I will be caught again. The next email is coming. And worse, the next error is probably already lurking somewhere in the manuscript I’m writing now.
The writer isn’t even always the source of the error. One of the most famous mistakes occurs in Melville’s Moby-Dick. A typesetter misread the words “coiled fish of the sea” as “soiled fish of the sea.” Nearly a century later a highly respected critic published an essay pointing out the brilliance of the choice of the word “soiled.” This was actually one of the events that prompted the founding of the Center for Editions of American Authors, an institution which gives a writer reason to hope that if he gets good enough, after he’s dead some professor will fix all of his mistakes in a scholarly edition. The Center adopted methods like reading a text aloud backwards while a listener followed along in a second copy, which seems to have caught mistakes, but must have driven both scholars mad while they did it.
Some mistakes are mysterious. To promote my book Sleeping Dogs, the publishers printed 2,000 Advance Review Copies. Soon after these ARCs were mailed out to the usual bookstore chains, newspapers, magazines, authors, and critics, somebody noticed that the gatherings of pages had been sewn together out of order. I remember the ARC as starting in the conventional way, with something like pages 1-20. But then it went rogue: page 36-72, 115-131, 323-365, and so on to the end. The publishers sent all the recipients an “errata sheet,” which was essentially a set of instructions for reading the pages in numerical order. A short time later the reviews began to appear. If every critic received the errata sheet, not all of them read it. The review in one major publication said the book was “curiously disjointed.” Another said, “At times it seemed almost incoherent.”
Even a favorable review can misfire. A few years after the ARC printing mishap, I wrote another book that made me hope for success. This time an ARC was sent off to an influential critic with a letter giving him an incorrect publication date. Probably the publication date was correct at the time, but something caused the publisher to change the schedule by a few weeks. In any case, the review was published on the date the critic had been given. The book was not. This was a good review. My editor called it a “selling review,” meaning that it might actually make someone who had never heard of me, which was practically everybody, want to buy the book. The problem was that on the morning when the review appeared and this theoretical reader wanted the book, no copy of the book was for sale. This time, the publisher’s solution was to print an excerpt from the review on a stiff cardboard poster that could be displayed in bookstores, possibly to draw attention to modest stacks of my books.
During all of those years, I was making unassisted mistakes at the usual rate and catching them at a lower rate. I referred to a car model made by Nissan as a Toyota. I revised a chapter, changed a revolver into a semi-auto pistol but forgot to change later references to it as a revolver. I sent heroes and their enemies alike off with faulty driving directions. I can’t remember all of my mistakes, but the ways they used to elude me are familiar. For instance, when a word is left out, the mind of the reader will often helpfully supply it, keeping the error from being caught.
The reading mind is a strange place. In college I was a guinea pig in a psychological experiment. A large number of words were flashed rapidly before my eyes, and I would read them aloud. The researcher found that if an occasional obscene or blasphemous word was slipped in, the mind would often misread it as something else, maybe because some inner censor ruled such words not to exist within this activity.
Other errors occur because it takes a long time to write a novel, and it’s difficult to keep everything consistent. As new pages are written, details like characters’ names can change, making that draft of the manuscript incomprehensible.
I’ve come to believe that never making mistakes is impossible, catching them all is a dream, and the only way to prevent them is to leave the paper blank. Since I’m not willing to do that, I’m looking forward to more years of hunting and correcting. I tell myself it’s a lively pursuit, with almost the suspense of a silent, nearly motionless sport.
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