YES, THE WORDS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN HOW THEY’RE TYPED, BUT ON THE OTHER HAND .
March 1988
All right now, class. Before I dismiss you today, I want to make sure you all understand the assignment. You’re to go home now and begin work on a novel, and next Wednesday at this time I’ll expect you each to deliver a finished manuscript of 60,000—75,000 words. At least one of the characters must be a woman who fights forest fires in the Pacific Northwest, and a key element of the plot is to be the revelation that she is a collateral descendant of John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress. And, if you should have any free time during the week, you might want to—yes, Rachel?
Sir, will you accept dot-matrix submissions for this assignment?
Will I accept dot-matrix submissions, which is to say manuscripts produced on a dot-matrix printer? I’ll accept manuscripts written in crayon on an uncut scroll of yellow teletype paper. I’ll accept manuscripts chiseled into stone tablets. I’ll accept manuscripts scratched into the dirt with a stick, then photographed from a hovering helicopter. It doesn’t really matter to me what your manuscript looks like, Rachel, since I have no intention of reading it.
You don’t?
Of course not. How could I be expected to read all the novels this class is going to produce, and what good would it do if I did? The point of your assignment is for you to do it, not for me to tell you how you did.
There are, however, reasons more important than my own personal prejudices that might make you avoid crayon, or stone tablets, or dot-matrix printers. The appearance of your work can influence its reception.
Before I go on, however, I want to say loud and clear that the subject under discussion is not the pros and cons of dot-matrix printers. I know that there are some dot-matrix printers that are virtually indistinguishable from letter-quality printers without the aid of a magnifying glass, and I know that there are other dot-matrix printers that produce a text that looks as though it could best be decoded by running one’s fingertips across the dots, and I know that there are all grades of printers between the two. In my experience, everybody’s personal dot-matrix printer is one level less readable than its owner thinks it is. But that’s not the subject. The subject is appearance.
Logic tells us that appearances shouldn’t matter. Our work, after all, consists of shaking a whole slew of words loose from the dictionary and arranging them in a presumably pleasing order. It is this arrangement of our words rather than their appearance upon the page that communicates itself to the reader, for better or for worse. Furthermore, what we produce is by definition unfinished; unless we are desktop publishers of our own work, someone else will determine such matters as typeface and page size and other elements of book design, asking of us only that we provide the words themselves. If this is all the world requires of us, what does it matter if those words are composed of dots? Or, for that matter, if they’re in crayon?
The answer, of course, is that certain persons will have to read the manuscript before it reaches its final form, and that their reactions to it may affect its ultimate fate for better or worse. On a most obvious level, if you submit a manuscript that is hopelessly amateurish in appearance, one that is typed in brown italic on beige paper, let us say, the likelihood of its being read at all is extremely small. People whose job it is to read manuscripts, and for who reading is more a chore than a pleasure, would resent you from the first glance for making their job more burdensome. But this resentment would barely enter into it. They would know on the basis of experience that manuscripts so amateurish in appearance are invariably just as hopeless in execution. They would know not to waste their time struggling.
It is for this reason that one learns early on to follow the formats for manuscripts that have evolved over the years. Understand, please, that no one specifically decides to reject a manuscript because it deviates from standard format. No editor says: “Hmmm, this joker puts his page numbers on the left instead of the right” or the other way around “so I’ll have to send this back. Too bad—it was pretty good otherwise.”
That doesn’t happen. What does happen is that a manuscript that departs significantly stands out. It proclaims itself the work of someone who does not know better, and this predisposes the reader to be aware of everything else that is awkward and uninformed about the work.
Does this mean manuscripts have to be perfect? Flawlessly typed on high-rag bond? No, I think not. No editor I’ve ever known objects to a certain number of hand corrections, or the occasional xxxxxx’d out section. As long as everything’s clear and easy to read, readily comprehensible to everyone called upon to deal with it, it’s acceptable for a manuscript to look as though someone had to work a little to get it right.
As a matter of fact, it may be a mistake to submit a manuscript that looks too good. Years ago there was a writer of westerns whose other occupation was operating a Linotype machine; he would compose his fiction at the Linotype, pull page proofs, and submit those to his publisher. He got away with this because he was a pro and had established a good relationship with the publisher, otherwise, though, I think his typeset submissions would have been ill-advised. People who are professionally accustomed to reading and editing work in manuscript form are going to have a harder time coping with it in any radically different form.
Similarly, a fellow I know was one of the first to move from a typewriter to a computer, and he was delighted by the tricks the machine would perform. One thing it would do on command was justify margins. (This is computerese. It doesn’t mean the machine would provide a philosophic rationale for the existence of margins. It means that it would automatically space the words and letters so as to create straight margins on both sides of the page. But you already knew that, didn’t you?)
At first, my friend submitted manuscripts with justified margins. They looked very good, better than anyone’s manuscripts generally look, but there was something wrong with them. They didn’t look like manuscripts, and people accustomed to reading manuscripts with a ragged margin on the right found this justification, well, unjustifiable. My friend, no fool, stopped doing that. He still justifies margins in his personal correspondence, and that looks a little weird, too, but it hasn’t moved me to return one of his letters with a rejection slip.
Recently I gave a copy of the manuscript of my most recent novel, Random Walk, to my son-in-law. He liked it well enough, but said he kept being distracted by wondering how it would work for the general reader. “I think I’ll have to read it again sometime,” he said, “so that I can just let myself get involved in the story.”
A partial explanation, I suggested, lay in his having read a manuscript rather than a bound book. When I read a manuscript, I read more as an editor and less as a pure reader—irrespective of whether I have any editorial or critical function to perform. A manuscript is something in the process of becoming a book, still unfinished, subject to change and revision, open to editorial input, and very much the product of a human mind. A book, on the other hand, is finished. It’s set in type, it’s printed, it’s copyrighted, it’s done. My critical muscles relax somewhat, and I’m more likely to get caught up in the story.
Kenny said he could see this must have been operating. “When I would hit a deleted section, I’d try to figure out what you had written and then cut out. And that would take me out of the flow of the story.”
Before I submit a manuscript, I go over any xxxxxxx’d out sections with a marker, rendering them neatly illegible. So no one can get distracted into puzzling out just what I changed my mind about. Still, with the predominant number of word-processed (and thus typographically perfect) manuscripts in circulation, it may be that a manuscript with hand corrections and deletions calls unwelcome attention to itself these days. I myself may be too much of a Neanderthal to change, but it’s a point to ponder.
The influence of appearance on reality doesn’t end with the manuscript. Further down the line in the publishing process, the same elements apply.
There are several intermediate stages between manuscript and book, and people are apt to read a novel in any of these stages, and the form in which they read it may affect their reaction to it. Book club editors, reprint editors, trade reviewers, various subsidiary rights buyers, foreign publishers, all may have a look at the book before it is indeed a book, and their response may have a good deal to do with its success or failure. Some will be sent a photocopy of the manuscript. Some may look at loose galley proofs. More will see bound galleys, or proof copies, which consist of unedited galleys chopped up into page-sized chunks and bound together in the approximate form of a book.
When the publisher’s lead time and promotional budget are sufficient, bound galleys may take the form of a reader’s edition, which is essentially a copy of the trade edition, its interior pages all in final form, but with a soft cover rather than a hard one. The best reader’s editions these days look like legitimate trade paperbacks, with cover art and all.
A reader’s edition has several virtues. First of all, it lets people in the book trade (and the author, and the author’s agent) know that the publisher thinks enough of the book to go to the trouble of issuing it. At the same time, it provides all these influential readers with a nice finished book, something attractive enough to keep, and something sufficiently clean and polished in appearance to be a shade more readable, more inviting, more engrossing, than a bound galley.
(Finally, let it be said, it can be cost-effective. Bound galleys are OK when you just need a few dozen copies, but they’re quite expensive on a per-copy basis and the cost doesn’t drop much with quantity. If you’re going to bring out a reader’s edition of a thousand or more, it’s cheaper than issuing bound galleys, although it looks as though it costs a lot more.)
Does the form really make a difference? I think so. Some months ago a publisher sent me, in hope of a blurb, a bound copy of a manuscript, with the text printed on both sides of the 8½ x 11 page. While I didn’t find it impossible to read, I’m sure the format was partly responsible for my disinclination to finish the book. If it had been absolutely wonderful I probably would have read it anyway, and if it had been terrible I wouldn’t have read it no matter how beautifully it was printed, but this book was somewhere in the middle, and I’m positive the presentation had a negative effect on my response. More recently, another publisher sent me a photocopy of a dot-matrix manuscript; I read a few pages, realized I liked the book enough to want to enjoy the experience of reading it, and discarded the manuscript so that I could wait and read it in book form later.
And what does all of this mean to you? If you’re starting out, of course, it means that you would do well to learn how a manuscript ought to look. There are books that cover such fundamentals, and the desire to be more than a beginner should not prevent one from learning what beginners ought to learn.
Most of you already know how to prepare a manuscript. But perhaps a consideration of appearances and how they alter circumstances might be appropriate nevertheless. The words we write ought to be our sole message, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. The medium is indeed the message, or part of it, anyway. And if this column gives you something to think about along those lines, well, that’s part of its message.