Back
in the days when giants walked the hallways of The New Yorker offices on West
43rd Street, none had the stature of the late E.B. White. Not only
did White write many of the magazine’s editorials for a quarter century, he
also edited one of the most popular features, what I call the mistake fillers.
These were excerpts from books, magazines and newspapers that featured
embarrassingly funny mistakes, to which White would often add precisely the
right quip at the end.
I
actually sold a couple of mistake fillers to The New Yorker over the years and
always enjoyed reading them. There were several that ran under standing
headlines, such as “Block That Metaphor!” and “Our Forgetful Authors.” The
latter consisted of quotes from a book, usually pages apart, in which, for
example, the author would describe the leading female character as a blonde on
page 65 and as a redhead on page 132.
At
the time I shook my head over such errors, wondering how an author could be so
careless. Then I wrote a mystery novel myself, The McHenry Inheritance, and came to appreciate how easily it could
happen.
Where’s The Bullet?
A
book is written and rewritten over a long period of time — years, in the case
of mine, and, lame as it sounds, the author can’t remember every detail.
Sometimes an entire section is added or removed along the way, and everything
still has to remain consistent, not that it always does.
The
first chapter of my book, “The Angler and the Sharpshooter,” didn’t even exist
in the first few drafts. It was added a couple of years later at the suggestion
of an agent, who thought it would be good to get a dead body into the first few
pages, on the theory that readers who don’t encounter a corpse within a few
minutes are apt to give up on the book.
So
I added that chapter as a flash-forward, from a different point of view, to the
murder that occurs in Chapter 4. It was quite well-done, if I do say so myself,
and has received a number of compliments. There was just one itty-bitty problem
with it. In the original draft, I had the bullet lodging in the victim’s body;
in the flash-forward, I had it going clean through. That was a lot more
dramatic, but given how the scene was described, it would have been nearly impossible
for the sheriff to recover the bullet, which was a vital clue.
Two Full Moons in a Week
Don’t
ask how it happened, but this July, days before the book was to be submitted to
Amazon, I realized there might be a problem there and caught it when I re-read
the two chapters. I rewrote the opening to keep the chain of evidence intact.
Several
years earlier, on about the fifth rewrite of the book, I was tinkering with
Chapter 8, where the action takes place under a full moon. Something at the
back of my mind told me I’d mentioned the moon in Chapter 3, which took place five
days earlier, and sure enough, when I checked, the moon was full then, as well.
Since it mattered to the story in Chapter 8 but was merely descriptive in
Chapter 3, I shaved a little off the moon in the earlier chapter.
That
made two close calls, and who knows if there wasn’t a similar mistake I failed
to catch. If you spot one, please e-mail me. On Amazon, at least, it’s easy to
make revisions.
