LAST RITES

by Rob Lopresti

When you leave the house in the morning do you go through a mental checklist? Turn off coffeepot. Glance in mirror. Set door alarm. Wipe fingerprints off axe handle.

And so on. I do the same thing when I am ready to send something out to a publisher.

Before the postman rings

For example, I have just completed a short story which will no doubt cause the first editor who sees it to sprain a wrist in her eagerness to write me a check. But before I brighten her day there are a few steps I must do.

I have a file on my computer labeled “buzz” and it reminds me of all the words I need to watch out for. This means taking advantage of Word’s Ctrl-F feature and lining up each suspect for inspection.

First I check for the words I tend to overuse. They are usually the bits of physical punctuation that fit between lines of dialog, like frown, shrug, and sigh. (My sister Diane Chamberlain says that the characters in her novels tend to wince too much, which suggests that while being in one of my works is boring, being in hers is actually painful.)

Next come the weak words that usually add nothing to a sentence, such as very and just. After having been edited by Michael Bracken I added got to the suspect list. Michael hates got with a passion and while I don’t feel that strongly about it, I agree it needs to be considered carefully.

And then it’s time to put ly in the witness box and see how many adverbs are trying to sneak into my story. I may decide to let a few of them live, but I figure each one that I kill improves my prose a tad.

Speaking up

Once all the weak words have been chased out of the manuscript it’s time to read the story out loud. By the time you have edited a work ten or more times you aren’t reading what’s on the paper anymore, but seeing a text that is partly in your head.

So read it out loud. Amazingly the mouth and the ear together will catch many things that slip past the eye. For example, I will often change part of a sentence and not finish the clean-up. My eye sees what it thinks should be there but my ear isn’t fooled by “he saw the a box,” or “they runs down the hall.”

The reading-out-loud trick also catches occasional infelicities of language and those occasions when I use the same word three times in the same paragraph. Maybe a synonym would be an improvement?

And finally …

After that there is nothing left to do except say the magical incantations to the goddess of free lance writing (also known as the patron saint of lost causes) and seal the envelope.

Then you can begin worrying about whether you put postage on the enclosed envelope.

And where did I leave that axe?