People forget what they want to forget.
Writers, being obsessive people, work hard to avoid forgetting something important – like, say, proofreading the first sentence of a submission again to avoid a hideous typo – and yet, we all know the pain of hitting send and immediately realizing we’ve forgotten something important.
A friend recently sent me an article from Vice that opened with this line: “In 2013, Carolyn Ford* began to use marijuana to compliment her distance running regimen.”
It’s quite an image. The cannabis in question, having gained the power of speech, can hardly be silenced. “You looked great out there today! That was really a stroke of genius, forcing yourself to take a day off before you got in your twelve-miler!”
I could fathom the writer, Mike Darling, typing “compliment” when clearly the word he wanted was “complement,” and I could even imagine the mistake somehow, amazingly, slipping by an editor. But how could the glaring, step-in-dog-crap kind of mistake just sit there, in the opening line of a piece available for public consumption, without being corrected? Finally I just found Mike online and emailed him and he quickly wrote back – “Thanks for the catch!” – and fixed the issue.
We’ve all been there. Most of us as writers have a kind of mental checklist of certain things we’re especially focused on avoiding, and yet, even the most careful writers often make odd blunders. Reading submissions for residencies here at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, I’m amazed at how often people who clearly took time to put together a submission make errors on par with complement/compliment.
One highly recommended writer with a graceful, inviting prose style sent us a fiction submission recently that had not one but two mishaps in the first few grafs – akin to “complement” versus “compliment.” In her case, I talked to her on the phone and gently (I hope) suggested she resubmit, having fixed the two issues, which she did – and we accepted her to come be a writer in residence here.
Look, I’m well aware that emails and social media posts now contain many more typos and other missed key strokes than before, and it’s partly intentional. Busy people, it seems, take a certain pride in showing they’re too busy to proofread their own typing. Some might even think that if the President of the United States makes typos and bizarre capitalization choices his own personal style, we all have license to be sloppy.
Here’s the perspective of someone on the other end. Great writing requires great focus, great intensity of attention to the little details, and the ability to tune into different levels of detail all at once. Probably if you’re showing up to a social gathering at, say, the home of New Yorker editor David Remnick, you want to do a quick checklist of A, nothing stuck between your teeth, B, fly not open, C, both shoes still on.
We all know this. We all want to avoid glitches. But in pushing so hard, in digging so deep to work out so many different issues in a piece of writing, we hit the wall at some point and succumb to exhaustion. Finding a way to make good choices even when we’ve hit that wall of exhaustion is what it often takes to lift writing to the next level.
– Steve Kettmann
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