keep all marks within the intended oval.
(Image by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu, via Unsplash)
I’ve long been fascinated by the concept of errors. Nolan Arenado of the St. Louis Cardinals has won the National League Gold Glove award for third basemen for ten consecutive years, with a fielding percentage of about .98. For a decade, he’s misplayed one ball out of every fifty hit toward him, and he’s the best there is.
Musicians, not so much. A guitarist or pianist with that error record would be sent back to the woodshed for a lot more practice. Of course, they have a lot more under their own control, burning in those sequences over and over with precise repetition, not like Arenado having to deal with a scorching, spinning ground ball skipping randomly across grass and gravel without warning.
There’s a famous story told by John Updike about the experience of getting a box of his latest book from the publisher. Every time, it was a little miracle. The beauty of the cover. The precise alignment of the stacks. Even just the smell of clean paper. It just pleased him immensely to see the physical outcomes of all that work.
He’d pick one from the top, start thumbing through it, seeing the typeface they’d chosen, the spaciousness or compression of the pages, the header and footer signaling that it was A Real Book. And inevitably, within ten minutes or so, he’d find a typo, and the rest of his day would be completely lost.
I’ve now had the chance to sit with Foreman the way a reader would. I’ve gone through it in four large sittings: “September” and “October” one night, “November” through “February” a second night, “March” and “April” last night, and finishing the working year with “May” through “August” this afternoon.
One thing I found is what I always experience. While I’m writing, the scenes feel slow, and a little disconnected. After I’m done, when I encounter the book as a reader, the scenes are sharp and interrelated. The book is both quick and coherent, which is good, because when I’m writing, I feel neither.
But there were four errors. In a novel of 94,332 words. A fielding percentage of .9999576.
Dammit!
It reminds me every time of how fragile the reading experience is, and why book designers and copy editors deserve double their current wages. Here we are, immersed in some family drama or a snowstorm, completely taken away from our current lives… and then some bit of text gets sideways and we realize that this whole damn time, we’ve been interpreting squiggly ink on a sheet of paper. It takes a while to trust the story again after you lose a tire like that and end up in the catch fence.
People think of writerly errors as misspellings, and sure, those happen. But the four errors I made were of four different types.
The first was common enough: the naming of an offstage character who wouldn’t play much of a role in the story, and then encountering that character again and giving him a different name. Angie’s brother was Eric the one time before we ever met him, and then Matt every one of the other nine times he said something or someone talked about him. Sorry, Eric.
The second was just a page layout glitch, a closing quotation mark at the end of a paragraph that somehow got loose from its family and ended up all by itself on a new line. How that happened, I don’t know. I’d blame the typesetter or the page designer or the copyeditor, but those are all me, and we all missed it.
The third was another name change, but a different kind. Two friends were going through a difficult experience that traumatized one of them. The other led her away and got her situated, and in the flurry of people and pronouns, I used the wrong name for one of the actions. It’s like walking into a glass door, you never see it coming and it just stops you hard.
And then the last one was an editing artifact, in which I’d recast a sentence four or five different ways, and when I got it the way I wanted, I moved on to the next one, leaving a crumb of incorrect verb tense behind me.
There are SO MANY ways to mess up a piece of text. I made one mistake for every 23,583 words I wrote. But those four… grrrrr.
With all that said, though, I finished the book an hour ago and just sat. It feels good to have put 94,332 words into a box, and to have them become a family and a community and a landscape. To have them become people we care about. To walk away with hope for their lives after the book’s season has closed.
Herb Childress 