April 9, 2003
Me Write English Good
Being Edited

A few months ago, the universe messed up in its eternal vigilance against my success, and I acquired an agent. How I managed to convince a professional literary agent to take on a manuscript of mine and try to make us both some bucks from it, I don't rightly know, to be honest. It involved voodoo; I remember all the chicken fat. I think it involved me becoming an indentured servant of some sort, too, but I'm almost certain there's a buyout clause in that, so no worries. How it all happened doesn't matter, because I'll certainly never be able to remember clearly enough to tell you. What matters is that upon deciding that my writing is good enough to try and sell to the Illuminati who run the publishing business, she immediately ordered me to have the book copy-edited.

I'm sure the fact that my best creative efforts are stillborn, grammar-challenged monstrosities that need a lot of corrective surgery before they can walk right is no surprise to you cynical bastards. Neither is it a surprise to me, honestly. I dutifully had the million minor mistakes ironed out of the manuscript and never lost sleep over it, to be honest. What it did, though, was make me think of Mr. Galvin.

Me Draw Bad: Yes, I drew my own cover for the book too.

I wrote my first book when I was 9 or 10 years old. No shit. If you're sitting there thinking that, seeing as it's increasingly unlikely that I'll turn out to be a literary Mozart, chances are I didn't have an original thought in my head at that age, you'd be right. My first book was a ninety page reconstruction of the recently-read Lord of the Rings, often disguising the wholesale theft of characters and concepts from the original books via the transposition of single letters in the names of things. It's safe to say that this opus, which was titled The War of the Gem and which I still have a copy of, was possibly the most unoriginal written work produced in the civilized age.

Still, this being modern-day America, the simple fact that a 9 year-old kid could scrape together 30,000 words in a moderately coherent narrative was by itself pretty remarkable, and I got a lot of attention for being some sort of precocious super-nerd. Probably my beleaguered parents thought that all their troubles were over, since they'd somehow produced a genius boy. We know now that none of that came true, but at the time it probably seemed possible, especially when you consider that my parents probably perceived their choices as being my son is a precocious literary genius or my son is incredibly strange. My Dad was sufficiently proud of my efforts to take my 90-page manuscript to work and run off a few copies, one of which he handed to his friend and coworker Joe Galvin.

Mr. Galvin went ahead and did something I'd never heard of before: He edited the damn thing. Tore it apart, actually, relatively. Certainly he went easy on a 9 year-old, but for a kid who'd never considered the possibility before, it was a pretty savage edit. Looking back, it was incredibly nice of the guy to sit down and try to teach a snot-nosed and not very original kid to use quotation marks when writing dialog. It was also the beginning of my long love/hate relationship with editors. Editors make me look like I actually speak English as a first language, but they also taunt me with their superior attention to detail and ability to write more good than me. Fuckers. I'd like to think that I bring the razzle-dazzle to writing, that being able to, you know, spell properly and construct grammatically correct sentences is just the uptight demands of the great unwashed masses. But sometimes I wonder.

You see, the thing is, when I finish something–say, this column–I am usually of the opinion that it isn't written in some sort of English-related sub-dialect that draws contempt from true scholars. And yet, even the most casual review of my written works usually reveals a host of really huge mistakes, for which there is no excuse when you're a reasonably well-educated native speaker. Sometimes, when I get something back from a good-natured editor and it's covered in red marks (which is to say, every time I get something back from a good-natured editor) I feel an urge to put a propellor beanie on my head and start writing sitcom scripts.

Still, I owe a debt to Mr. Galvin, a man I don't ever recall meeting and about whom I know absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he worked with my Dad for some years and knew how to diagram a sentence. If it weren't for him I might not even be using quote marks today, seeing as I'm known for my stubbornness in the face of Huge Piles of Evidence that I Am Wrong, and lord knows I doubt I'd have gotten even this far in my writing if it weren't for his not-so-gentle guidance, all those years ago. So here's to Mr. Galvin, wherever he is. Blame him.

If you want to tell me what you thought of this column, you know where to find me.

Jeff