Manuscript, the face you put on a story

A favored trope making the rounds at several levels of sophistication is the observation that one achieves at age fifty the face one deserves.  Particularly since in recent years you find yourself observing the presence of your father in the mirror on those occasions when you shave, you have no quarrel and great acceptance for the equation.  This leaves you the audacity and perhaps mischief to set forth an even more telling observation:  Any page of a writer's manuscript is the earned face the writer's work deserves.

More than ever, particularly with so many emerging writers submitting manuscripts in various degrees of completeness and in such variety of format, a page is in its way a calling card, a resume, a measure of the writer's competence and regard for a work in question.  One of the requirements for a book proposal, particularly if the work is nonfiction, is a demonstration of Why me? as in why am I the person to write this book?

And yet.

Considering all the manuscripts you have had presented you in your role as editor and as instructor, adding to those the many you have submitted of your own work, you properly ought to have a sense of how you wish a manuscript to appear--particularly your own.  Although you cringe at manuscripts submitted in the Times Roman font, you are as relatively tolerant of it as you are of, say, races other than your own, willing to look past the tint of a particular skin, the sag or arch of an epicanthal fold, the jut of a jaw to peer into the individual behind them, often thinking of them as manuscripts, stories out in submission, having great appeal to those who take the time and make the effort to know them.  Your bigotry begins to manifest itself at the careless use of homophone, where it's and its are used interchangeably to convey either verb in contracted form or pronoun, for the merest instance.  Because spelling was never a thing you could take for granted within your own writing, you begin to exhibit the resentment of entitlement you associate with those who have come by accuracy in their spelling with relative ease.  Do you not fucking spell-check your manuscript? you think when you see such egregious abandon.  It is one thing to be flippant about it, as in "I have trouble trusting a person who has only one way of spelling a word." but something entirely other when the periods and punctuation marks as well as the chips are down.

An early test of the dust jacket of a book is its potential to lure a prospective reader to pick up the book for a closer examination.  Your own standard of aesthetics dictates that you would not pick up a book designed to look like or remind you of something you would not pick up.  Subjective, but effective as a bottom line.  An early test of a manuscript is its clear unmistakable authority as represented by type face (you prefer and use American Typewriter), legibility, generosity of margins and proportion of text to white space.  There was a time in your writing life when typewriter ribbons were an issue to the point where the newer ribbons were saved for submissions, the well-worn ones or those embellished with black shoe polish (liquid, from the bottle) or laundry blueing (still available, by the way) used for beginning and intermediate drafts.  This makes you sensitive to the degree of blackness on the page.

Of course you want the senses engaged as you succumb to the invitation to read the page as transmitted by the previous page and the inherent sincerity and presence you are made to feel from the successive paragraphs.  You want every word, space, line, and margin to count for something; you are fucking Odysseus, on his way home to Ithaca, or so you say, and the Sirens are singing to you, trying to seduce you away from thoughts of Penelope and that kid, Telemachus, whom you already wish would get out and find some kind of a job whereby he could take care of himself and not be causing you to trip all over him.

You have tried any number of things with your face including mustaches, beards, goatees, and side burns extending down to a level with the corner creases of your lips, thinking variously to look older, attract sophisticated women, attract unsophisticated women, look more dignified.  None of it worked to any notable result, leaving you with embellishments to manage instead of merely shutting up and shaving.  You did try similar approaches with your approach to manuscript preparation to the point where you were spending more time with that aspect of presentation than you were with storytelling.

Back in the day, when you were assigned to a copyediting mentor who asked you if you were religious then told you that henceforth you would turn to a new Bible, The University of Chicago Manual of Style, you were also told of another book, the title of which will readily suggest how far back in the day back in the day was:  Words into Type.  Turn to page 45, you were instructed with the severity you might have been directed had Words into Type been a burning bush.  The heading is in bold:  Special Responsibilities of the Book Writer.  These are set forth in the following nine pages.  It is easy to be dismissive of a book about publishing that has the word "type" in its title, equally easy to thumb through the pages of CMOS, then ask with a patronizing air, "Don't they have people who, you know, do this sort of work?"

Yes, "they" most definitely have people who, you know, do this sort of work.  "They" are called authors.

The Yearning Curve

When you are in the beginning stages of learning a particular discipline, there comes an idealized peek into the future, when you visualize yourself in the act of performing that particular activity, flawlessly, effortlessly, as though you had been intended from birth to arrive at that state. This peek into the future is in the way of a gift to yourself, an incentive for learning so well that you have invited the discipline into permanent remedy within your being. Some of the disciplines, such as the grammar and syntax of the English language, are basic. Others, such as sexual performance, are primal. Yet others, such as operating a vehicle, required that you be licensed.

Some things, such as sex and voting, can be engaged without much advance preparation, although in each case, advanced preparation is ultimately to your advantage.

Some stages of learning involve the awareness of tools and the understanding of their use. Before you were forced by circumstances to trade in your hip joints for those of a titanium design, you were much concerned with the nature of running shoes and a study of stride and lift and, of course, the mechanics of hydration. The night before a half- or full-marathon was a splendid opportunity to show your awareness of nutritional and metabolic processes as well as your own pleasure in preparing a meal of pasta and lobster for their carbs and glycogen. You now consider instead of running shoes the mechanics of swim fins and such stylistic devices as Total-Immersion swimming.

As the need and opportunities to become a book editor approached you, there were tools mentioned in revered tones, beginning with CMOS, The Chicago Manual of Style, which you have owned since your first purchase when it had a green color, not quite that of lime Jell-o. There was also the Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Biographical Dictionary, the Atlantic Monthly Short Lives, a Merriam-Webster Geographical Dictionary, a world atlas. You used some of these items more than others. When you had the seniority to do so, you implemented changes such as substituting The American Heritage unabridged for the MW, at which point one individual you knew and respected congratulated you on coming of age to the point of choosing the standards for your publishing venture. (Emboldened by this vote of confidence, you promptly instructed the copyeditors in your employ NOT to hyphenate Moby-Dick.)

Many of the books-as-tools you grew forward with have tumbled off the desk and into obsolescence as entire technologies have changed. Does it date you beyond measure to speak of a favored guide, Words into Type, which still has a pretty effective section on the author's responsibility to a manuscript and a project? You don't have to answer that, but you do have to know what being a professional entails.

At one time you thought to assemble a style guide for fiction writers, still not a bad idea because, splendid as it is, CMOS is more for the nonfiction writer. In your way, the work you now have out in submission, The Fiction Writer's Tool Kit, is, as the title suggests, a tool, a reference guide for the fiction writer. You are inordinately fond of the publisher who is now looking at it, but even were they after deliberation to decline, the work helped you and was at the point of this essay, your tool kit for story-telling and for the construction of non-formulaic fictions.

These thoughts have come tumbling down on you precisely because you set out this morning to restore some order to the shelves closest to your working area. Which tools can you live without? Which are you likely to use again and again? And one of the most intriguing mysteries of all: There is no question about the place Mark Twain occupies in your esteem and your dreams. You've carefully set out an entire bookcase devoted to him and such books about him as you care to keep. The mystery that arises has its origins in the second tier of the bookshelf closest at hand to you, where CMOS resides with Words into Type, The Copyeditor's Handbook, A Dictionary of American-English Usage, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, and other such compilations, right next to a pile of Big Little Books used as a sort of decorative bookend, is Chaucer A to Z, The Viking Portable Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, John Gardner's The Life and Times of Chaucer, and yet another volume of The Canterbury Tales before drifting off to a new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? You would hardly call yourself a mediaevalist or even a Middle Ages man. Could it be that you see in Chaucer the human condition writ large as a writer's tool kit? It could be.

Everyman's Library

writer's bookshelf, the--a close-to-hand selection of books in the writer's work area; an idiosyncratic selection of reference guides and comfort reading the working writer will use; inspiration and edification between covers.

For some writers, the basic reference guides--The Chicago Manual of Style, an unabridged dictionary, Fowler's Modern American-English Usage--are enough; others still have titles related to a specific project in the works. Yet other writers have titles at hand to remind them of the cadence or vocabulary of a particular work. It is also possible that some works, discovered early in the writer's development--works such as The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-exupery--elicit a sentimental and inspirational connection. The important consideration: Past, present, and future reading are essential to the writer's continuous engagement with craft. The temptation to rely on easily accessible Internet references, the quid pro quo of you look, they tell, does not enhance retention where it matters--in the storage vaults of the senses.

The compiler of this lexicon keeps at close hand, in addition to CMOS, the (unabridged)American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 3rd and 4th eds., Fowler, and The New York Public Library Literature Companion, Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Love and Death in the American Novel, by Leslie Fiedler, Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom, The Oxford University Press Classical Dictionary, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley, The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler, Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. These titles gravitated through frequency of use to the bookshelf adjacent the writer's desk.

What are yours? On consideration, what do they say about you and what you write?

Get a Room, Editorially Speaking

stet--from Latin stare (to be) for "let it be" or "let it stand"; editor or proofreader notation indicating a marked word or passage on a manuscript or proof is to stand as now indicated; a writer's note to an editorial suggestion or deletion, thus an authorial override on an editorial opinion.

Editors have a complex menu of responses to matter included in a manuscript, ranging from the highly idiosyncratic to the recognition of house conventions. Some responses relate to the use by the author of comma splices or Arabic numerals instead of spelled-out numbers. Other responses are more substantive, involving material the author wants in the final text as opposed to the same material the editor would like to see omitted from the text. When an author answers an Author Query or AuQy on the manuscript with a stet, the author is having the last word, presumably after taking the editor's query or suggestion into serious consideration.

By the time the decision is made to publish a particular work, and the deal has been contracted, notes and queries from the content editor are considered friendly, helpful suggestions, particularly since the editor was probably a party to the arrangement for publication. Editorial notes and suggestions made after the fact of contract are not mandates; the agreement or contract may have had provisional mandates--change the narration from third to first person, make the ending a happy ending,don't kill off Uncle Fred--and the writer will have been aware of these. The stet decisions involve last-minute details. Example: An editor may conclude that a particular exchange of dialogue will by its very use of words and specifics convey that Ms. Kitty is angrily energized and thus mark for deletion the attribution "Ms. Kitty said hotly" as a goes-without-saying notation. But the writer, wanting the reader to be sure of Ms. Kitty's frame of emotional mind, may say stet, at which point the editor says OK before moving on to the next matter.

Copyeditors are less likely to query on usage; their work is mechanical intervention in the service of consistency of use according to a house style (if book, the style guide is likely to be CMOS Chicago Manual of Style); if magazine or newspaper, more likely to be AP, NY Times, or a style guide based on these). Writers are not likely to get into stet decisions with copyeditors unless the copyeditor is challenging a statement the writer has set as a fact. For an example, in a story in which the writer has claimed that a character who is a professional boxer bears a stylistic resemblance to Muhammad Ali, the copyeditor may circle Muhammad Ali and write in the margin "who he?" The writer may believe Mr. Ali's name needs no attribution and thus lines out the query, then writes stet.

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled MSS

manuscript--the text of a narrative, either printed on 8 1/2 X 11 manuscript paper, or as a formatted electronic package including captured keystrokes, which may be transmitted by electronic mail; one or more pages of text formatted in accordance with the publisher's conventions.

The writer's first responsibility in preparing a manuscript for submission is to learn the publisher's conventions. Most book publishers in the U.S. standardize on (and copyedit to) the conventions of CMOS, The University of Chicago Manual of Style, aka Chicago Manual of Style (latest edition). In addition, most book publishers standardize on punctuation, spelling, usage preference, and word-break conventions articulated in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate (Eleventh Edition), although a wise and useful investment for the writer is the American Heritage (unabridged) Dictionary of the English Language (fourth edition).

Magazine and journal publishers have different usage conventions relative to the use of numbers, abbreviations, capitalization, and punctuation. A handy guide is The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, yet another is The Associated Press Stylebook. For scholarly book and journal publications, the conventions of The Modern Language Association's Style Guide are useful, particularly in the presentation of bibliographical and source notes.

A major key to the preparation of any manuscript is the consistency of usage.

Basic requirements for short story and novel manuscripts:

Opening Page for Short Story or Chapter-Opening Page for Novel

1. Twenty-pound basis weight white paper with an opacity factor of at least 90 percent.
2. One-and-a-quarter to one-and-a-half-inch margins top and bottom.
3. Author's name, address (including e-mail) single-spaces in the upper left margin, first page.
4. Approximate number of words, rounded to the nearest hundred, flush on right margin, lined up with Author's name.
5. Numbers 1-4 are single spaced. Everything else in the manuscript is double spaced.
6. Five double spaced lines below to centered title.
7. One double spaced break below to author's name, centered.
8. Text is a twelve-point face such as American Typewriter, Baskerville, Courrier, (Unless a specific publisher requests it, do not use Times Roman.) printed in black ink. The use of computer composition makes for greater convenience in rendering italic.
9. Page number centered at foot.

Regular Text Pages

1. Author's last name or novel or story title, flush on left margin
2. Page number: either flush on right margin or separated from author's name or story title by a hyphen.
3. Use the # symbol, centered, or The End to denote completion.
4. Two-line space breaks throughout to separate scenes.

It is not necessary to concern yourself with copyediting, punctuation, or spelling until you have engaged and completed the revision process. The goal of the revision process is to have a manuscript that can be sent forth into submission with no further work, thus any preparation of manuscript is mechanical.

You may have some reason, particularly in longer works, to use different type faces to convey such effects as handwriting, interior monologue, shifts in point of view, newspaper stories

Much of the time, we will not have direct personal contact with those on the receiving end of our manuscripts, meaning that the arrival of the manuscript and its condition speaks of its creator to the reader. As you would not appear for a formal gala wearing sweat pants, your manuscript should reflect at first glance, via its crispness and legibility, your having dressed for the occasion. One or two strike-outs or uses of liquid erasure will not cause editorial eyebrows to twitch, but the reality is that professional writers tend to prepare their manuscripts as though the words on them merit respect and consideration. Think how you would feel if a colleague handed you a business card that had coffee stains on it, notes scrawled on the back, and perhaps a dented corner.

Think of the impression your manuscript will have on the reader, known to you or not; then think of that reader settling into reading your text, formatted, punctuated, and spelled with consistency, your choice of words exquisite, spiraling upward to the authoritative sense of authorship you mean to convey.

The Writers' Tool Kit

An absolute pushover for gadgets, I fall upon mail order catalogs from any number of purveyors, whether the tempting kitchenware or sophisticate espresso makers of Dean & Delucca or Williams-Sonoma, whether the electronic inducements of Radio Shack or Circuit City, the high-priced exotica of Harrington, perhaps even the Hammecher-Schlemmer or, indeed, Russell's; so long as it is a tool or gadget, I want it, sometimes even as much as I want the knowledge and expertise to use these--these utensils. I have already had problems with the Mac Store, thus arranging for their notices to appear in my in box as junk mail.

Working editorially on a project about our early Homo sapiens forbears, the Cro-Magnon, I am particularly acute to how ingeniously they contrived tools for projects at hand such as hunting, fishing, curing hides, carrying the equivalent of a lighter for starting fires. It might be accurately said that some among the Cro-Magnon invented the needle by using a sharpened sliver of bone or antler to link hides by sewing them with tendon.

Everywhere I look, professions carry about the tools of their choice: artists carry charcoals or pastels or oils or watercolors; sculptors carry chisels, knives, saws; chefs carry knives.

I sometimes carry a MacBook or a CMOS (Chicago Manual of Style), but never my unabridged American Heritage; often my Ancora fountain pen or my Mark Twain Conklin, even from time to time a Moleskine notebook (graph grid, of course). My more favored tool is my curiosity, which surely gets me into more trouble than a terrorist-suspect at an air port. Curiosity--what if, and would would it be like? There is also the possibility of a book, which at the moment is Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin, but that can change. There is also the presence in the tool kit of enthusiasm, which is the fuel that keeps the writing and the curiosity going against the enormous inertia of distraction, the same kind of distraction that seizes the attention of a scent hound catching a whiff of--of an interesting scent.

What else should be in a writer's tool kit? What quality or element? Perhaps an ear for the music of words and ideas, perhaps an eye for a subterranean pattern or perhaps a lack of pattern. Perhaps a feel for a person, place, or thing? Perhaps a voice, cynical or not, optimistic or not. Perhaps a sense of humor, the ability to see myself at the root of all folly, made more foolish yet by my attempt to embody seriousness and decorum. Perhaps a Faulknerian belief that Mankind will prevail, this in the face of growing evidence that we as a species are on an endangered list.

Perhaps the most useful tool of all, the Swiss Army Knife of writers, the fact of having loved and perhaps won or perhaps lost, the fact of having given a damn, the fact of caring