Precious About Your Art

Zoë Sharp

Next year, 2018, will be an anniversary year for me. I will have been earning my living as a writer for thirty years.

Hundreds of thousands of published words of nonfiction, and close to two million published in novel and short story form. Not a bad achievement. (Although perhaps the biggest achievement of all is not having had a ‘proper’ job since 1988.)

While I can’t take myself seriously at all, I do take my work very seriously indeed. When someone asked me only yesterday what I had planned for the day, my reply was “scribbling.” I tend to treat panels at events and festivals as stand-up comedy, on the grounds that most people want to be entertained as they’re educated.

I learned years ago, while writing nonfiction for magazines, not to be precious about it. If a sub editor wants to get your copy into a set amount of space around the pictures, then they’ll lop off your carefully thought-out closing paragraph without a second thought, and the first time you’ll know about it is when you see it appear in print.

Writing fiction tends to be different. Because it’s your story that you’re telling, the way you tell it—the voice you use—tends to be a lot more important. Moving the commas around, let alone changing the words, can have a real effect on the tone of the piece.

Fortunately, It’s rare that fiction gets mucked about with. Not without giving the author a chance to comment and accept or reject the changes, anyway. And over the last few years the only time I’ve been asked to write nonfiction has been for publications or blogs that deal with writing or writers, so they don’t tend to edit your work just for the sake of it.

But I was asked recently to write a short piece for a club newsletter about my experiences of taking the Advanced Driving Test. I did so, and submitted the piece with a request for the editor to get back to me if they wanted any alterations making.

I confess that I assumed the only reason they might need to edit it might be for length, as I hadn’t been given a brief about word-count. When I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t give it any further thought.

Until the newsletter came out.

I was surprised to see that my piece had suddenly sprouted exclamation marks, and appeared to make less sense than I remembered. When I went back to my original file, I discovered the editor had rearranged sentences within my paragraphs, and occasionally removed paragraph breaks altogether, for no apparent reason. The piece still seems to be the same length as before, but it looks terrible, reads badly … and worst of all it has my name on it.

Now, I know this is only a small-circulation club newsletter, but that’s not the point. I dislike doing things badly, and dislike even more being made to appear to have done things badly when that wasn’t the case.

Imagine if you’re a keen gardener who plants up your neighbours’ garden only to have them replant weeds instead of roses, and then tell everyone you were responsible.

I should imagine everyone has been through this experience, in one form or another, but hearing about a few right now would make me feel so much better about it …

This week’s Word of the Week is alibi, from the Latin for ‘elsewhere’. It has been used from the 17^th century to mean an assertion by a person that they were elsewhere, although in the last century it has also been used (some maintain, incorrectly) to mean an excuse.