A Week in the Country

            Back in the days when giants like Harold Ross, E.B. White and James Thurber roamed the hallways of The New Yorker, that magazine regularly ran fillers  consisting of mistakes made in other publications with a wry comment added.

            One of the regular headings was “Our Forgetful Authors,” which appeared over excerpts from a book, usually fiction, in which several passages on different pages stated a fact differently. For example, a female character’s hair might be described as light brown on page 32, auburn on page 68 and reddish-blonde on page 131. When I was in college, I always thought it was hysterically funny.

            Now that I’ve written a mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, and have a second coming out in a couple of months, I’m not as inclined to laugh. Truth is, that hits a bit close to home, and having walked that mile in an author’s shoes, I can see all too easily how mistakes like that happen. It’s a miracle there aren’t twice as many.

Time Dims the Memory

            Implicit in writing an inventive work is that there are no pre-existing facts. The author is sole custodian of the information and has to catalogue it as the writing of the book proceeds. That sounds a lot easier than it actually is.

            Part of the problem is that a book is typically written over an extended period of time — six months to two years is a normal range. By the time you’re two-thirds of the way through, it’s easy to forget what you wrote in the first 30 pages months ago. And if you write the way I do, you’re focusing relentlessly on getting the prose right as you go, and not necessarily on noting those finer details for future reference.

            Working from a good outline helps, but is no guarantee. In my second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, I did a thorough outline, setting forth what would happen in each chapter, and also outlining the various aspects and personality quirks of the characters in the book.

            Then, in the course of writing it, I decided that an important scene planned for Chapter Two should be moved to Chapter Three. A couple of months passed between the time I made that decision and reached the point in Chapter Three where the scene should appear, and by then I’d forgotten all about it and left it out of the first draft altogether.

The Total-Immersion Revision

            I’m happy to report that I was able to catch that mistake, and several others, by taking a different approach to editing the first draft. I decided that I needed to get away and focus on that task to the exclusion of all else. So through the magic of the internet, I found a cottage in a secluded rural area north of San Francisco, booked it for six nights, and spent the past week there, fixing the book.

            It took about 13 months to write the first draft, so as I say, there were plenty of inconsistencies to be cleared up, in addition to the ordinary polishing and revising. But the benefit of being able to do the revisions in a short time frame (which would have been impossible at home, with all its myriad distractions) was incalculable. I’m doing it this way from now on.

            The other piece of good news is that even after spending a week with the book in close quarters, I still like it and think it’s a step forward from the first one. In a couple of months it’ll be up on Amazon, and we’ll see if the readers agree. 

The Bullet and the Moon

            Back in the days when giants walked the hallways of The New Yorker offices on West 43^rd 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.