I don’t want to sound a negative note; it is of course a joy when you feel you get it right, more so if you get something published and see your name in print, more so still if any kind of payment follows but, that said, writing can be a tough old business. Indeed, there is a well known quotation (so well known that I cannot think who said it) that writing is easy – all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper, until the drops of blood form on your forehead. You may well know the feeling; I have mornings when mopping up blood is pretty much all I do.
Take care
Certainly the process of writing takes care, thought, time and often a considerable amount of fine tuning. Once when Oscar Wilde was asked what he had been up to one day, he replied that he had spent the morning reviewing a poem that he had written and had taken out a comma. Then, he added, “In the afternoon I put it back”. Perhaps nothing most of us write comes out as well as we hope, and much of the time writers spend, when they are not sharpening their pencils or making yet another cup of tea to avoid writing anything at all, is spent editing, amending, adding or deleting and fine tuning in a variety of ways; perhaps plethora of ways puts it better, or maybe surfeit is a more appropriate word … no, let’s just leave it there.
Writing can be a hateful process – sometimes we hate writing, but often we love to have written. Furthermore it is not a question of aiming for something specific; no one says “It should be like this”. There is no template or ultimate model. We are all struggling for originality and how that occurs is, to an extent, a mystery. Take fiction. It was Somerset Maugham who said “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are”. No help there then.
Other people, not least spouses and those close to writers, do not entirely understand any of this. They try to, of course. But it is perhaps a little bit of a stretch to understand that staring out of the window for half an hour is both work and the most important thing to be done that morning, especially when the bathroom has been scheduled for painting for weeks. Nevertheless there are many for whom writing is important in ways ranging from being an interesting diversion to a whole way of life or their very livelihood.
Evidence of the need to check
If you doubt that it is true that writing is difficult, look around at the evidence; private diaries apart, as most writing is meant to be read, this is clear to see. For instance, there was, for a while, a notice on Paddington station that said, “Passengers must not leave their luggage unattended at any time or they will be taken away and destroyed”. This is not evidence of a gas chamber hidden in the basement below Platform 12, rather it is proof of just how difficult writing can be and the blindness that can so easily overcome the writer, as they struggle to check things – too often we see what we mean and not what we have actually written down.
And sometimes we just skip checking altogether. The station sign just mentioned is only a single sentence. If it is difficult to get that much right, then perhaps writers can be forgiven for struggling to complete a 2000 word article or certainly a whole book, when even a comparatively short one can be 80,000 words – every one needing to be appropriately chosen and deployed.
Look around further: Check in at Sydney airport and you will be handed a card asking, “Has anything been put in your luggage without your knowledge?” That’s a “don’t know” isn’t it? Ilfracombe Council offer “Free micro-chipping for retired people”, not so that such people don’t get lost, in fact the service is for their dogs. A university web site asks you to enter a password consisting of, “Between 7 and 8 Characters”. Hmmm. In fact anything to do with figures seems to create particular difficulty; a tyre retailer guarantees that their tyres will not need replacing for “up to 60,000 miles”. Worn out and useless after a hundred miles and wanting a replacement? “Oh no governor, read the guarantee”.
On the basis stated, getting to end of the road before they wear out would mean that their promise has been fulfilled. A sign at a ferry terminal announces, “Shuttles leave every half hour … on the hour”; and was presumably originated not only by a poor writer, but by someone with a pretty odd clock. A recruitment agency advertisement states “7.5 ton delivery drivers wanted”; surely not so, they’d never get in the cab. And a sign in a department store says “Ears pierced while you wait” – there’s some other way to do it.
Again, all these examples are a way short of an article or book. Instructions seem to pose particular problems. A child’s scooter has a note with it saying: “This product is not designed to be used on roads”. Fair, and safety conscious enough, but further down the list it reads: “Not designed for off-road use”. I hope it’s nice to look at in that case; perhaps it’s designed to hang on the wall like a picture.
A jacket, bought at a major supermarket, is labelled “Machine washable, dry clean only”; worse a scarf is labelled “Dry clean only in cold water”. One package offers stern advice - “Warning: potatoes – handle with care”. Potatoes? Special explosive potatoes are they? On the A435 there is a sign saying “No access to vehicles over 10 tons, except for access” and another which declares enigmatically “Sign not in use”.
Perhaps my favourite example of such mistakes is a sign in a hotel in Nottinghamshire. It says: “In the interests of security bedroom doors must be locked before entering or leaving the room”. A good trick if you can do it … or evidence of a fifth dimension, perhaps. Again this is only a single sentence, but it is one written, printed and placed on the inside of 256 rooms all apparently without anyone noticing that it was nonsense.
Now some such errors can be checked automatically. On even the most modest computer, a spell checker will tell you not to write professor with two f’s and one s. It checks this sort of thing for you, but it won’t even twitch if you write cheque instead of check, as both are real words. You can even install a program on your computer that will read back to you whatever you write. But the voice it does it in is such a flat-and-expressionless-monotone-without-any-of-the-correct-emphasis that this is no panacea for accuracy either.
The truth is that if you are to write anything even half way decent, then two stages are vital. You must first be inspired to write. Not always easy. It was Joyce Grenville who said, “If I knew where my inspiration came from, I would go there again”. Secondly even when inspiration has struck you have to get the words that express your ideas down in a correct, clear, original and pleasing way and the only way to do that is to check, check and check again with doubtless some editing along the way. The responsibility for all of this is yours. Ultimately there is no other way but to do it yourself. The best writers are often fanatical about it; fanatical that is about both their writing and about getting it right.
The moral
Enough. That’s more than my thousand words already and a rather long way of commending careful checking to anyone with a yen to write. So, what to do now? Maybe I should check some more, edit some more, condense it all down to just five words – “check, check and check again” or just tear it up and start again. No, let’s just send it to the editor and let her decide.
PS anyone see any errors in my checking?
Patrick Forsyth - Patrick Forsyth is a management consult with a hundred or more books to his name who writes mainly busness material but also travel and ...
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