--How I Affirmed my Attitude toward Adverbs--
One might suppose that an English teacher with twenty-five years’ experience grading college essays—a type of “manuscript,” granting the term a liberal interpretation—can muster the aesthetic sense necessary to guide a book-length project from draft to completion. The supposition presumes situational similarities that actual experience reveals as illusory. Books, artistic works intended for a marketplace, differ in fundamental ways from essays written for a grade, and the gatekeeper role played by an editor entails a level of involvement that professors, for practical reasons, rarely embrace. An editor has a vested interest in the success of a book, even a book with narrow audience appeal. An English teacher, by contrast, rarely feels personal failure when students submit disappointing work, and in the interest of university standards, may relish the opportunity to disparage a paper’s “errors.”
I bring this up not to praise editors, who for all their efforts frequently release crappy books into the marketplace, nor to criticize English teachers, who despite their red-ink raptures frequently inflate grades, but to provide a context for my recent foray into manuscript editing, an experience which gave me a new perspective on the creative process.
First, a bit of background. . . as newbie authors often do with a freshly published book, I regaled friends and acquaintances with copies of my travel memoir, Islands on the Fringe. One such friend, Rancroft Beachley, whom I met in graduate school in 1995, took the gesture as an invitation to divulge that he too had a book in the works. Would I mind taking a look at the manuscript, he wondered? A communications director with a long list of technical writing credits, Rancroft boasts an impressive curriculum vitae and I felt genuine curiosity about his creative endeavors. Expecting a polished product in little need of critique, I agreed, hardly suspecting what might transpire.
The work he proffered diverged so much from my expectation that I initially considered it a practical joke. The “manuscript” consisted of random scribblings, tangent-prone expositions, and experimental blends of poetry and prose. Collectively the mad missives recorded the insights and opinions of an investment club that Rancroft belonged to. Income investing, the conceptual ribbon that bound the bundle, provided the common denominator for the haphazard contents.
An English teacher by trade and an adventure traveler by passion, I felt unsuited for the project. I lacked both subject matter expertise and fluency with finance genre jargon. Eclectic and esoteric, the manuscript included academic explications on subjects like permanent capital equivalence (the amount of capital required to purchase something from dividends alone) to a bizarre musing on the merits of Sandra Bullock as a pin-up girl for a dividend campaign. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, something about the subject intrigued me, and the more I read the more I encountered fascinating passages that convinced me of the work’s potential. On this point Rancroft injected a dose of realism: “most people don’t have a clue about income investing. . .don’t expect anybody to actually read this stuff.”
If this backstory explains my involvement with the project, it glosses over an important detail—why I wanted to take a detour from my own creative projects to wordsmith a document that Rancroft assured me was destined for obscurity and would do little to boost my budding literary ambitions. An honest answer to this question probably requires the insight of a psychotherapist. Given to procrastination, I perhaps saw manuscript editing as a chance to toy with the writing process without really writing, in effect delaying the dirty work of starting my next book. Perhaps I believed the project could serve as a low-impact training exercise: applying an editor’s eye to Rancroft’s work would further hone my own revision process. Continuing the “training exercise” theme, I rationalized that just as athletes take to the golf course during off-season, so might a writer between books take to manuscript editing.
OK, so much for background. Mostly I recall what resulted from this low-impact training exercise. And here I feel more certain about the answer: I re-affirmed my attitude toward adverbs.
If writers consider their chief obligation the “truth” of their characters or subject matter, editors face the task of refining that truth into a consistently presentable form. Put another way, blissfully ignoring postmodern discourse theory, the writer pledges allegiance to the message, while the editor pledges allegiance to the medium. Frequently, this means relieving a text of the abuses heaped upon it by the author’s vanity. At times, I discovered it meant invoking the shield of conventionalism against Rancroft’s blurs of prose and poetry--while creative, these seemed too idiosyncratic for a finance text. At times, I discovered it meant deleting entire passages, the product of Rancroft’s enthusiasm for single malt scotch as a tool for philosophical insight (having utilized the tool somewhat excessively, he’d followed his muse a bit too far into conceptual back-alleys). For his part, Rancroft regarded these efforts with a bemused disinterest. But when I dared to critique an adverb, he grew indignant. He called me a member of the “Word Police,” an accusation with Orwellian overtones no doubt meant to insult me and my generally liberal politics.
The word at the center of this dispute was unprecedentedly. A multi-syllable menace festering at the core of the sentence “The 2008 financial crisis was unprecedentedly disruptive to retirement plans,” I found this word choice troubling. Really, a writer has no justification to inflict such six-syllable sadism on an unsuspecting reader.
“What’s wrong with that word?” Rancroft asked. “The 2008 financial crisis was unprecedentedly disruptive!”
“That word,” I explained, summoning a patient professorial tone, “bombards the reader with a barrage of prefixes and suffixes that obscure the root meaning. Think about the linguistic machinations! From the verb precede, you’ve created a noun, precedent, which you then transform into the adjective precedented through the suffix “ed.” Then you add the prefix “un” to signal a negation of the adjective, and end the affair with another suffix, “ly,” engineering yet another transformation, this time into an adverb. It’s a multi-syllable mess unsuited to the short attention spans of today’s reader.”
“I don’t think it’s a big deal,” he insisted.
“Say it five times in rapid succession.”
“Unprecedentedly, unprecedentally, unprethedenly. . .”
His pronunciation pummeled by spittle and lisps, Rancroft began to see my point.
Creative writing teachers have a saying, “no discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader.” By this they mean that a good text grows organically, evolving in ways unforeseen during the writer’s initial drafting process. Writers who know the progression of a manuscript from its first to last sentence and try to fit everything into a pre-planned outline will likely create an unremarkable text. By contrast, writers who follow the muse into regions of uncertainty may well discover something remarkable among the shadows (they’ll also discover a lot of trash, but that’s just how it goes). On a different level, I found this idea applicable to the editing process. Matters of sentence style I might normally overlook emerged as troublesome thorns. The organizational template I initially thought sensible later proved inadequate. Intriguingly, the emerging product differed from the initial vision. But most importantly, the process reaffirmed my aesthetic sense. For writers between projects, I recommend a foray into manuscript editing. If nothing else, it offers the potential to clarify one’s attitude toward adverbs. . .
(CA$H CRAFT: The Musings and Meditations of an Income Investor, by Rancroft Beachley, currently retails in paperback via Amazon)
