The dying art of editing

Do publishers not bother editing books any more? And do authors not take the trouble to check their work before they deliver their work to the publisher?

I ask because I’m spotting more and more errors in published works – both novels and work of non-fiction – and it really annoys me. I’m not talking about typos necessarily (though they’re not unknown), but about errors in punctuation or syntax, or simply instances of bad writing that should have been eradicated, either by the author or their editor, before the book was printed.

Take the opening sentence of William Boyd’s ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’. It’s a superb novel, one of the best I read last year, but it starts unpromisingly:

“Let us start with the river – all things begin with the river and we shall probably end there, no doubt – but let’s wait and see how we go.”

That contradiction in the section between the dashes, between ‘probably’ and ‘no doubt’, pulls you up short. Any decent writer (and Boyd is a great deal better than decent) ought to have spotted it when they read through their draft, and deleted one or the other; it’s what authors do. So did Boyd not check his work? And did Bloomsbury not edit it when he delivered the novel to them?

I’ve just finished reading another excellent book, ‘The Champion’ by Tim Binding, and it contains a classic example of the kind of sloppiness I’m talking about. The narrator, an accountant, discovers that a builder hired by his employer is taking liberties with his bills. On page 304, the builder is referred to as Paul Langley. Two paragraphs later he’s become Lumley, then four lines after that he’s Langley again. Further down the same paragraph he’s still Langley, then he’s back to being Lumley. Two pages later, just to confirm the error, he’s referred to as Paul Lumley.

You can see how it happened, of course. Somewhere in the process of writing the book, Binding decided the builder should be called Lumley rather than Langley (or vice versa), but he didn’t do a very thorough job of making the change. And, once again, neither he nor his editor at Macmillan proofed the typescript thoroughly enough before publication to spot and amend the error.

Does any of this matter? It does to me. A good novel immerses you in its world, and anything that jars when you’re reading risks breaking that spell. Good writing is writing that you don’t notice – and I, for one, notice errors.

The illiterate guide

Having finally bought myself an iPhone, I popped into WH Smith yesterday and picked up one of several guides to the device that were on sale there. I now wish I’d spent a bit longer making my choice, because The Ultimate Beginners’ Guide to iPhone (even the title is slightly off-kilter) is without doubt the most poorly-written commercial publication I have ever seen.

Even just skimming the first few pages on the train home, I spotted several typos: ‘sinked’ for ‘synced’, ‘piece of mind’, ‘fore more see page 37’... Further tell-tale signs of illiteracy soon revealed themselves; ‘its’ and ‘it’s’ used interchangably, commas and hyphens either used wrongly, or omitted when they were needed, and of course the grievous overuse of exclamation marks.

Above all, the English is just appalling. Take this sentence: “Amazing seems to little of word to describe it’s performance!” What’s amazing is how many errors the writer has managed to cram into 10 words - errors a GCSE student would be ashamed of. The whole guide reads as if it’s been hurriedly translated from a foreign language, or written by a non-native speaker, and I suspect one of these is the real explanation. Either that, or James Gale (named and shamed as Editor on the contents page) and his colleagues at Black Dog Media are just rubbish at English - which makes publishing a spectacularly poor career choice for them.

I’ve spent much of my career as a sub-editor, so I take bad writing personally (not to mention the fact that I spent £8.99 on this piece of illiterate garbage). But there’s more to it than that. The real issue here is that this is supposed to be a technical guide; if the authors can’t spell simple English words correctly, why should I trust them when they’re giving me instructions on how to set up my iPhone, or listing technical specifications or statistics? It’s bad enough wherever it crops up, but in non-fiction in particular, poor spelling and writing undermines the entire enterprise.

A bad week in December

I wrote a while ago about the benefits for a writer of reading bad books. I wouldn’t say A Week In December, the most recent novel by Sebastian Faulks, is a bad book exactly, but it has some serious flaws which got me thinking.

I should start by saying that I’m a fan of Faulks’ novels, all but one of which I’ve read and enjoyed. But they were all set in the past – various parts of the 20th century – whereas A Week In December is that most self-concious of literary forms, a State of the Nation Novel.

During the course of the week in question (the year isn’t specified, but the book was published in 2009), we follow the progress of a number of characters in London. Most notably, there is a ruthless, amoral hedge fund manager and a would-be Muslim suicide bomber, and the main question at the heart of the novel is which of them is going to cause the most damage. Then there’s a down-at-heel but sympathic barrister, a female tube train driver, a Polish Premiership footballer, the hedge fund manager’s pot-addled teenage son, a cynical literary critic, an ambitious politician’s wife, an Asian businessman who’s made a fortune from chutney...

The list goes on and on, to such an extent that Faulks has provided a sort of key to them all in the first chapter, under the pretext that most of them are being invited to a dinner party that takes place on the final day of the week in question. A friend suggested that the publishers must have insisted on this list being added to help the poor, confused reader, and I suspect he may be right. I certainly found myself referring back to it at regular intervals.

Using a large number of characters isn’t a literary crime in itself, of course, though in a novel of fewer than 400 pages, it’s not particularly reader-friendly. The contrivance of the dinner party is clumsy, too – pretty much the only major character who isn’t invited, children aside, is Jenni the tube driver, and you sense that Faulks would have sent here there as well if he could just have contrived to make her one of the other characters’ long-lost niece or some such. And don’t get me started on the caricatures, most notably the critic, R Tranter (Art Ranter – geddit?), whose entire characterisation smacks of revenge.

No, what I really wanted to write about was the hedge fund manager, John Veals. Clearly, any State of the Nation Novel written towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century is going to have to deal with the financial markets, and Veals is a folk devil, the personification of everything that led to the financial crisis whose effects we’re still feeling. The trouble is that, in order to explain why Veals is so evil, Faulks has to go into detail about what he does and how it works. Thus, approximately 80% of the long sections of the novel in which Veals features are devoted to meticulous explanations of how various aspects of international finance operate.

Many years ago, I read a book about how to write fiction. I don’t remember much of the advice it contained, but one phrase stuck in my mind: “Don’t let your research show.” Large parts of A Week In December feel like they consist of nothing but research, and for me at least, they spoiled the experience of reading the novel. It felt like homework: rather than engaging with the characters, I was spending my time trying (and failing, it has to be said) to understand the complex financial world they inhabited.

There is a counter-argument, of course: that this is important stuff, and that unless we all understand how a few clever, greedy, amoral people brought the global financial system to its knees, we can’t begin to have a chance of preventing them doing the same thing again in the future. Maybe the novel is a good medium for that kind of education. But on the basis of A Week In December, I don’t think so. I suspect many readers will simply tire of the economics lesson, put the book down and read something else entirely. And I wouldn’t blame them.

The benefits of reading bad books

Like most keen readers, I don’t read many bad books. There are plenty of tried and tested authors I know I can trust, and when selecting a new book to read, I usually base my choice on a combination of recommendations and reviews from trusted sources, word of mouth and other factors.

But I have a bad book in front of me now. It was a gift, which makes me feel a little guilty for dissecting it - but what the hell. The thing is, I reckon you can often learn more about writing from a bad book than a good one.

The book in question is Our London Office by Thomas Armstrong. Published in 1966, it is long since out of print, and though I’m told Armstrong was a popular author in his day, these days he doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry - the ultimate indignity.

Our London Office is the fourth in a series known as The Crowthers Of Bankdam; a grand saga following the fortunes of a family of West Yorkshire textile merchants. In this volume, set in 1957, the youngest son, having fallen out with his father, has come to London to start a cosmetics company with a friend, but after many twists and turns, he ends up mounting a coup and returning to Yorkshire as head of the family firm.

So why is it so bad? To start with, although it’s less than 400 pages long, the book seems to go for ever. Armstrong doesn’t seem to have grasped that, having invented characters, he doesn’t have to document their entire lives. So every day in his hero’s existence has to be accounted for, and even if the last interesting incident occurs at lunchtime, we still have to be told what he does in the afternoon, what he has for supper, how he spends the evening and what time he goes to bed.

Even that wouldn’t be so bad if the author wrote sparkling prose. Armstrong doesn’t. To give you a flavour, here’s the opening of Chapter Three:

“In the early days of August there was every sign that the national economy was to have one of those belly-flops which regularly occur whatever colour the board of management at Westminster. But however the international bankers may have been looking with narrowed eyes towards London, Ray and I had our own problem to solve: whether to stabilise C-W’s turnover at its current level, or to crack on.”

This passage illustrates another fundamental problem. The book is about business – two businesses, in fact, the fledgling cosmetics firm and t’mill back in Yorkshire, and Armstrong is keen to follow the progress of both. So we hear an awful lot about turnover, and production, and cashflow, and balance sheets, and a whole lot more besides. Any writer would struggle to make this stuff sound interesting; in Armstrong’s hands it mostly resembles extracts from a particularly dull annual report.

But the book isn’t just about these two businesses. Oh no. Armstrong keeps around a dozen plots on the go throughout the book, making it hard work for the reader, who has to keep up with the exploits of the hero’s girlfriend, family, colleagues and other contacts. A good writer uses sub-plots to amplify or counterpoint the central plot; Armstrong simply seems unable to leave anything out, and thus condemns himself (and the reader) to follow each character’s progress remorsely.

Finally, there’s the central character himself, Charles Crowther. Even without reading the previous volumes in the series, it’s clear that Charles is meant to be seen as the clear-sighted, modernising influence the family firm needs to free it from the shackles of the past and make it competitive again.

Unfortunately, he comes across mainly as an arrogant, intolerant prig who knows best in every situation, and is thus extremely hard to like. Never more so than when his free-spirited girlfriend starts dabbling with drugs, a development he sternly (but vainly) tries to nip in the bud. When she eventually dies of a heart attack caused by too much heroin (or some such), Charles is clearly upset, but you can sense him (and Armstrong) thinking that it’s for the best, really. A chap can’t be burdened with a junkie for a wife, not when he’s got a business to run.

I realise that this last issue can be put down to changing attitudes, but I think the rest provide useful pointers for any writer. Indeed, whenever I’m struggling with a passage in the novel I’m working on, I tend to wonder what Thomas Armstrong would do - and then do the exact opposite.