I have a book to finish. It’s been waiting for me to finish it for months. OK, years.
I’m talking about the memoir in essays first published as columns in the Oakland Tribune when my kids were little and I was trying to have it all — husband, kids, career.
What’s up? Why is it taking me so long to knuckle down and finish that book?
I don’t have a deadline, that’s why.
Why no deadline? I don’t have an editor.
Without an editor and publisher breathing down my neck, waiting for a manuscript, the days and weeks pass merrily along, dotted with visits to the grandchildren and emails with the bathroom contractor. Which sink? Which switch for the overhead fan?
Something That Can Pass for an Editor
What this manuscript needs is a deadline — and something or someone that can pass for an editor.
And so, a few months ago, I took myself in hand and signed up for a writing retreat up in redwood country — a retreat that will require me to set some deadlines.
Very soon I will have two retreat leaders — and a dozen or so fellow retreatants — breathing down my neck for pages. Pages to be completed before I head north to the redwoods. More pages to be completed once I’m there.
Will it work? I’ll let you know.
Editors Can Keep You From Looking Like an Idiot
Editors are good for setting deadlines; they also help with other writing challenges.
John Osmundson, whose secretary I was back in my 1960s Look magazine days, found a typo in a piece I’d written for a local New York newspaper. The piece had not been copy edited, and the paper had run my story, word for word.
Writers need editors, John told me. Editors find typos. They also keep you from looking like an idiot. They keep you from falling through the holes you’ve left in your manuscript, the whopping omissions that everyone can see, plain as day, except you.
‘The Bachelors Are Back With Their Wonderful Balls’
Editors are also good for tapping you on the shoulder when you’re about to commit a gaffe. Like writing a newspaper headline that reads, “The Bachelors Are Back With Their Wonderful Balls.”
I’m not kidding. You could slip up and write such a headline. That one actually once appeared, I’m told, in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Bachelors were a club of tony San Francisco single guys who threw big parties – balls. The club had faded from the scene for a time, and when the Bachelors made a comeback, the Chronicle society pages – accidentally? — greeted them with that raunchy headline.
The copy editor responsible for letting that headline get into the paper was gone, gone, gone by the time I arrived at the Chronicle, but the story lived on around the newsroom with groans and titters.
(Update: My San Francisco Chronicle colleagues are emailing me to say that the Bachelors Balls headline probably never made it into the paper. By the time I arrived at the Chronicle and heard the story, it had become fact — in my mind at least.)
Headline gaffes abound. It’s a hazard of the profession.
Here’s another one. It ran in the Houston Chronicle a few years ago:
Police: St. Louis officers kill suspect with knife.
The Fine Art of Writerly Procrastination
Oops. I see that my mind has wandered. I’m telling old stories and passing on helpful writing tips. Anything to avoid settling down to the manuscript waiting to be finished.
No more excuses. I’ve researched the fan switch and the bathroom sink. It’s time to sit down and finish that book.
Read about the toys in that Tribune photo at “I’ve Got a Dirty Little Secret — I Can’t Say No to Toys.” It’s true, I’ve spent a lot of what could have been writing time house and garden garden projects, including “Fixing Up That Homely Old Side Yard — At Last.”