Homophones, Typos and Spellcheck Oh My!

This post is geared to anyone who's ever had to write something that someone else is going to read. How many times do you reread something before you turn it in, or hit send? Do you give it a cursory glance or do you scour it for mistakes?

I can only vouch for myself when I say that I obsess over anything I write. Does that mean my manuscripts and emails and texts go error free. HA! Hardly. It just means I'm a Virgo and perfectionist and I hate when I let mistakes get by me.

Take for instance the dreaded homophone.

 They are my downfall because spellcheck won't catch them. If a word is spelled correctly, then it must be right. Wright? (See what I did there?) Wrong. (So I've learned over and over again.) Yes, homophones are only one of my downfalls. I'm guilty of the misplaced modifier or the occasional dangling participle although I like to think I'm getting better at catching them. And what about your average typo. You wouldn't believe the mistake I found in my last book. And this after reading the thing aloud three times before I published it. But it's still better than all the other mistakes that made it through other books. (And those went through critique partners, editors and me - multiple times.) I'm still amazed at the amount of things that can get past several sets of eyes, but it only goes to show that we're all human. We all make mistakes. I'm trying not to beat myself up over it too much. I've been saying the phrase, "Let it go" a lot lately and it has nothing to do with Frozen!

For what it's worth, I will say that reading my manuscripts aloud has definitely helped me catch most of my typos. But still... I agonize over the ones that get by me. (I know, I hear the music gearing up now... "Let it go, let it go...")

Sometimes I blame my homophone problem on my dyslexia. I'm easily confused when it comes to letters (and numbers for that matter). I have tricks to help me remember which meaning goes to which word for certain words, but on occasion when I'm tired, I still blow it and get it wrong because I don't take the time to think it through.

Then there are the typos where you've got two words next to each other and because one of them is spelled with one extra letter, spellcheck won't catch it. Grrr... But I rely on you spellcheck! How can you let me down that way? Then again, I only have myself to blame. (I certainly can't blame other people for missing mistakes if I miss them too. At least I think I can't. Let me know if I'm wrong about that!)

What about you? Do you have a pet peeve when it comes to mistakes or grammar? Let me know so I'm not so alone!

The Importance of Bibles

by Janis Patterson

Be at ease – this is not a religious rant. I am using ‘bible’ in the purely secular definition, i.e., ‘a book that is considered the most important one for a particular subject.’ (Just to put things straight, Bible with a capital ‘B’ is the religious book; bible with a small ‘b’ is the definitely un-religious context I’m using here.)

I’m talking about the book about your book.

Confused? You shouldn’t be, either about bibles or books that obviously haven’t had one. We’ve all read a book where a minor character changes names somewhere in the book – Mavis the bookkeeper becomes Maura somewhere around chapter 22, for example. Or a location shifts without reason or warning – the crime scene is located north of the river for most of the book, then suddenly migrates to south of the river for a chapter or two, then miraculously appears back on the north side. The detective who favors a Beretta suddenly and without justification starts carrying a Glock. Such mistakes are not only confusing and irritating to the reader, they are the sign of a lazy writer.

When I become queen of the universe, one of my proclamations is going to be that everyone writing a book has to do a bible. Many writers – especially the good ones – already do. There are all kinds of formats for bibles, from expensive software to cheap spiral bound notebooks, but however they work all serve to keep your characters, locations, timeline and odd facts straight.

I do a bible for every book I write, and mine are about as simple as you can get. (Warning – I’m a pantser, so if you’re a plotter or some other kind of writer, you’ll have to adapt this to your particular process.) When I open a new file to start a new book, I open two – one for the manuscript, one for the bible. As I write and something (character, location, whatever) appears, I flip over to the bible and make a note of it. Just a short note with all the pertinent information – the bigger part that particular whatever plays in the story, the bigger note it gets. Later on, if I reveal something more about that whatever, I add it to their entry in the bible. Entries are usually single spaced with double spaces in between one and the next to set them off.

I don’t bother to alphabetize or rate entries according to importance – I just note them down as they appear. Believe it or not, this doesn’t create a problem when I have to go look something up several chapters later. As I said, the entries are short and very factual, and for most books the entire bible doesn’t run more than 3-4 pages – a lot easier to flip through than going back through the whole manuscript to find the name of Lady Bellingstoke’s butler or whatever.

The one exception to this generality was my semi-paranormal gothic INHERITANCE OF SHADOWS – the bible for that ran almost eighteen (yes, 18!) pages of dense copy. In my defense, however, I will say that book was more complex than any other I’ve ever done, with a romantic storyline, a father/daughter storyline, a sort-of-ghost story and seven different books written about seven different worlds, all of which had a direct bearing on the main action of the novel! All in one book… When I sent in the final conceptual manuscript to my editor I also sent in a copy of the bible, for which I got an almost sobbingly-happy letter of thanks from the copy editor.

Writing a book is hard enough without tripping yourself up on the minutiae. Keep a bible, write down every fact and name as it happens, and your life will become so much easier – and so will your editor’s!