4 October 2004
Proofreading
I have just printed a typescript of my novel Labyrinth. It's taken a couple of hours. It has consumed about one and a half inkjet cartridges and one and a half reams of A4 paper. That's 750 pages.
The layout on the page is fairly straightforward: Times New Roman font, 14 point, one and a half line spacing, 2cm margins around the whole page. Paragraphs are indented by 2cm. Sections within chapters are separated by Roman numerals: i, ii, iii, iv and so on. Chapter headings are in 16 point. There are no footnotes of any kind.
I have stapled each chapter to make it easier to handle. These sections I have then perforated and placed in large lever arch file.
This typescript has been prepared for proofreading – by me and by my husband, Greg, who works with me. As we look closely through the text, we are trying to find inconsistencies. Perhaps one of my characters has blue eyes early on, then green eyes later.
There are an extraordinary number of details of this sort to look out for; some of them even smaller details. (In the film business, it is called continuity – making sure that the cigar gets shorter from scene to scene, not longer, for example.)
But still more remarkable, in a long text like this, is the fact that sometimes the name of a character may be wrong. Perhaps you changed your mind about what to call someone – to avoid having two members of your cast with names confusingly alike – but you didn't pick them all up. Suddenly you can find the old, original name for someone cropping up for no reason!
It is also ridiculously easy to change, say, the name of a character's home town and then miss a previous reference to the city in the text.
Of course, there will be another proofread in the future, when the typesetter has prepared the page proofs of the actual book – the object that, finally, we can hold in ours hands and say: 'This is it!'
As the text I hand over to my publishers will be an electronic one – spell-checked by computer – the errors that crop up shouldn't be spelling mistakes. They will be odd typos, like 'fro' instead of 'for' or 'tat' instead of 'that'. There will perhaps be inconsistencies around American English versus English English – 'vigor' and 'vigour' and so on.
All of these details, however, pale into insignificance when compared with changes to the more fundamental aspects of a novel prompted by reading the thing on paper at last.
You may decide that one of your characters' motivations is inadequate once you read it baldly on the white page. Or you may – reading your text quite quickly, as you hope someone reading in bed or on a beach might – you decide to make changes to how soon or how late in the novel you reveal certain narrative secrets.
Or, like me, you may come across a historical detail reported in an academic magazine and want to incorporate it into your work.
So near … but not quite there.
In a Labyrinth, you can see your goal before you reach it.
