When my first published story came out,\u00a0 I was startled at how differently it read, set in a two-column layout.\u00a0 I’d been worried the story wouldn’t feel fast-paced enough–but in that format, it flew by, almost too fast-paced.\u00a0\u00a0 That was my first experience of how the choice of layout affects a story.<\/p>\n
Throughout the editing process,\u00a0 the editors and I see the story in manuscript form:\u00a0 Courier 12 font, double-spaced, 25 lines per page,\u00a0 one side of page only, header line at the top.\u00a0 Over the years, I’ve learned to mentally transform this manuscript format–in which the eye handles the text one way–into something approximating the published format–in which the eye, with a different page-width, length, type-size, and spacing, handles the text differently.<\/p>\n
For those of you who aren’t writers, here’s an exercise that will make clear what I mean:\u00a0 take a book you like, but haven’t read for awhile, and type (or computer enter it)\u00a0 a page or two of the book, so you end up with the same words on\u00a0 standard size typing paper, in Courier 12 (a nonproportional font), 25 lines to the page…and compare how it reads to how the book reads.<\/p>\n
When I get page proofs, the words are set in type the way they will be in the book–the same size, the same spacing.\u00a0\u00a0 Then it’s printed onto 8 1\/2\u00a0 x 11 paper (and contains some crop markings around the edges, to be ignored by me–that’s all about the cut size, since the book itself isn’t that size.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The page numbers are totally different.\u00a0 Kings<\/em> in manuscript format was 870 pages, not including the extra bits.\u00a0\u00a0 Kings<\/em> in page proofs is 481 pp, including extra bits.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That’s a lot of reduction, and makes it read faster, at least for fast readers.\u00a0\u00a0 The eye can scan the whole page faster than a page of manuscript, and there’s more on the page.<\/p>\n It’s always exciting for me, because this is when I find out if my internal transform worked–if I correctly gauged the pace from scene to scene, and so it flows nicely with variations that will enhance readers’ experience–or if I pushed for too much pace, or let it drag.\u00a0 Editors have even more experience than writers with this (they read a lot of books) and thus when an editor says, in revision, “This part drags” or “This feels rushed,” what they mean is “When this is set in type…it will read slow\/fast.”<\/p>\n I’m 300 pages into the first run of through of page proofs now and having multiple reactions.\u00a0 First, it’s a very clean set of proofs–in 300 pages, I’ve found five things that need fixing.\u00a0 (Italics suddenly appeared in a few places where they weren’t wanted.\u00a0 Easy to fix.\u00a0 There’s one lower-case that needs to be upper-case, and one comma that should be a semi-colon or colon (I need to check my copy of the copy edits to see which.)\u00a0\u00a0 Second, it’s reading well.\u00a0 And third…boy, have I forgotten some details since I last looked at it.\u00a0\u00a0 Continuity errors are now being corrected before you folks even see them.<\/p>\n How, you may wonder, can a writer tell that it’s reading well? \u00a0\u00a0 I start checking page proofs with a tight focus on nits–missing quotation marks, wrong or missing or doubled punctuation, misspelled words none of us caught before,\u00a0 lines starting with a punctuation mark that should’ve been attached to the previous line, italics out of place, that sort of thing.\u00a0 I’m not supposed to be reading for story in this process, except to be sure that there’s not a missing chapter or something.\u00a0\u00a0 (Only once, in 20+ years…a late\u00a0 editor-requested revision didn’t make it into proofs. )\u00a0\u00a0 So I’m reading very slowly,\u00a0 not paying attention to sense, but only to form.<\/p>\n On clean proofs, like these,\u00a0 when you’re not held up by errors in every line…the story that reads well will suck you in (yes, even if it’s your own) and pretty soon you’ll be reading too fast to notice what you’re supposed to be looking for. \u00a0 (At least, I do. )\u00a0 So then\u00a0 you have to stop, go back 20 or 30 pages and force your mind to look for those nitpicky typesetting errors.\u00a0\u00a0 The number of times I find myself gliding along faster, instead of poking along staring at the punctuation and spelling, indicates (to me, anyway) how well it’s reading.\u00a0\u00a0 (Those of you with a natural knack for nitpicking always find all the mistakes, but that’s not my reading style.)<\/p>\n First run-through, I read front to back, in 50 page segments (at least I try–if it’s a rush job, it’s 100 page segments.\u00a0 More than that without getting up and moving around, and my mind blurs.)\u00a0\u00a0 Second run-through, I read back to front.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, you’ll catch errors that way that you don’t catch reading front to back.\u00a0 In the days before computer typesetting, the occasional upside down, misaligned, or broken “piece” showed up…and was most easily found by scanning pages upside down (a trick learned from a friend whose mother ran a small print-shop.)<\/p>\n Page proofs are usually sent out to professional proofreaders as well, so even if I miss something, there’s a good chance someone else will catch it.\u00a0\u00a0 The more time the writer has–to do a few pages, take a break, do a few more pages, check it against the copy-edited version (which means you have to have photocopied the copy-edited version), the better job the writer will do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When my first published story came out,\u00a0 I was startled at how differently it read, set in a two-column layout.\u00a0 I’d been worried the story wouldn’t feel fast-paced enough–but in that format, it flew by, almost too fast-paced.\u00a0\u00a0 That was my first experience of how the choice of layout affects a story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,52,5],"tags":[59,31,107],"class_list":["post-835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-editing","category-the-writing-life","tag-page-proofs","tag-the-book-business","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=835"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":836,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions\/836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}