Editors seem to be a thing of the past

The Reader

Since I’ve been staying off the Internet I’ve turned instead to reading novels, as many as two a day, and I’ve noticed that many of them, especially those published in the past two decades, have numerous plot errors. I’m speaking not of awkward sentences, or inapt phrasing, but errors in detail: a character sets a meeting for “ten to one” on one page, and three pages later the meeting is conducted at ‘ten to five”. Or, coming to the door to answer his murderer’s knock he reflects on his two grown children, out west. The poor guy is murdered, and the investigator comments, “well, at least he had no children we’ll have to notify.”

Minor, but annoying, and it occurs to me that, just as publishers have savagely cut their editorial staff, they seem to extended those budget cuts to mere copywriters, too. I was the victim of the first type of cut; I had two editors at Viking who were championing one of my manuscripts and talking of a two-book contract until Viking’s German parent threw them and dozens of others out of work and no one left had any interest in a new novelist; in fact, I doubt anyone at Viking even picked up the manuscript ever again. But copywriters are so poorly paid that it’s hard to see what their demise contributes to the bottom line.

They aren’t necessarily essential, of course. I had one earnest young woman, probably a freshly minted English major, point out that my claim that the term “au pair” was “just an anagram for nanny, used by placement firms to hike their fee” was technically incorrect, and she proceeded to explain to me what an anagram was. So okay, she didn’t add much to the effort, but when continuity errors are disruptive, forcing the reader to stop and go back, or stop where they are and consider whether, as one author I just read had it, Memorial Day really falls on the 30th of June. A novel, like all fiction, depends on the suspension of disbelief, and errors like these break the spell.

So harrumph.