I first saw the movie Stranger Than Fiction over two years ago, before I decided to enter Ryerson’s publishing program; at that point I didn’t know then how books were made, or how authors got professionally published. However, I did know how writers wrote. I didn’t consider myself a good writer, but I knew enough to know that the whole “suffering artist” stereotype that the movie presented was bull. This aspect of the film has niggled at me for years (funnily enough, the movie has also informed how I handle my bookkeeping – that is, very assiduously).

So I watched it a second time yesterday evening, mainly to provide fodder for here.

My overall esteem for the film has not changed upon watching it again; it’s charming and filled with actors gamely servicing the needs of an original plot. The scenes between Will Ferrell and Dustin Hoffman are clever, and the budding romance between Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhall has believable chemistry. However, I find that the scenes involving the author, played by Emma Thompson, mostly fall flat. What really irks me is that the movie seems to have no conception of how writers write, or of how manuscripts are actually made and processed.

The end of the movie states that the weird events depicted within took place over a period of four weeks. The movie (and the author’s narration) takes place over this period, from beginning to end. Prior to this, the author narrating Harold’s life, and thus narrating the book, experienced writer’s block for ten years – despite this, her previous books were critically acclaimed. When her draft of Harold’s life and death is complete, the literature professor who reads the manuscript pronounces it a masterpiece, precisely because of the emotional impact that Harold’s death provides.

Unfortunately, I find several things wrong with this scenario.

First, I find it hard to believe that anyone, even a highly-accomplished author, could crank out a literary masterpiece in a single month. The operating word is masterpiece; can any professional author instantly write one after having not written a single publishable thing for a decade?

Second, I find it hard to believe the book could be publishable without heavy substantive editing. I like to think that this is the true purpose of Queen Latifah’s character in the movie – that she nudges the book along towards birth by providing editorial feedback – but her part is so perfunctory that she contributes little to the plot. Literary masterpiece or no, you need to get an editor to look at that text before it’s ready for the press, and there was no discussion of the quality of the work beyond “Oh My God, It’s Art!”

Third, the writing in question is atrocious. It’s self-conscious and uses a twee, grating gimmick (Oh look! Harold’s watch is sentient and has feelings!) to introduce us to our hero. More importantly, it commits the cardinal sin of telling, not showing: Harold did this and Harold thought that. Most of all, Harold is aware of the author’s narration and rebelling against it, but although his self-awareness is actually incorporated into the story, it’s never explained within the context of the story that the author herself is writing. Let’s take one of the scenes where Harold Crick hears the author’s voice, is exasperated, and cries out in public:

Harold Crick: SHUT UP!
Kay Eiffel: [voice only] Cursing the heavens in futility.
Harold Crick: [extremely annoyed] No I’m not! I cursing you, you stupid voice so SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE!

Harold is cursing to the sky because he doesn’t know how to make The Voice stop. His action, although desperate, makes sense within the context of what the audience sees and hears onscreen. However, what has Kay written in her own book that motivates her written interpretation of Harold to scream? Why does Book Harold curse the heavens? Except for a general feeling of malaise and loneliness, Book Harold’s scream is not explained within the context of the novel. What is he feeling futile in comparison to, when the author is unaware that Real Harold can hear The Voice? If I were reading this book, I would feel that the author tried to indicate her main character’s sense of desperation using the laziest method possible.

Finally, I have a hard time believing that Emma Thompson’s character, in and of herself, could write anything considered a masterpiece. She’s a bundle of nerves and sunken-in eye sockets. I think this is what stuck in my craw the most upon both viewings. Kay Eiffel is a big huge bag of artistic stereotypes. Compulsive smoker? Check. Dismissive of others who don’t understand her particular artistic process? Check. Tortured? Check and check.

I know a lot of writers. I have the privilege of meeting many of them on a monthly basis as part of working with the WCDR. And none of them, none, are as self-absorbed or willfully hermetic as Kay Eiffel is. When I go to the WCDR’s breakfast  meetings, I meet people who smile, are interested in each other, and are generous with their time and attention. I meet people who laugh and make jokes. I meet people who are willing to discuss their latest writing projects in detail, and support others who are doing the same. In short, I see a kindness and generosity of heart that I have been hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

To believe that a writer has to be tortured or cynical or somehow larger-than-life to write successfully submits to Byronic myth-making of the worst order. We can leave that posturing to angsty high school students, right? Presumably, the screenplay itself was written by someone who understands both “the writer’s life” in general, and how to write something that will sell. Moody artists may look sexy, but they’re generally not fun to work with, and people that aren’t fun to work with don’t get very far. So why should a movie about writing perpetuate this?

Evidently, attending the conference was a big tax upon my resources – I didn’t post anything at all in June.

Even so, I still had lots of ideas for content swirling around in my head.  To get the ball rolling again, I’ll start talking about something small: ligatures in typography.

In typography, ligatures are when two letters written in sequence fuse together to appear as one character. Typically, the use of ligatures in English is restricted to letters following a lower-case “F” and even then, they don’t occur in many common typefaces. However, I do have some examples to show you, using that ever-trusty typeface Caslon:

In the image above, the “F” and “L” merge together in fly, and we see an interesting example of a double ligature in waffle. Perhaps the most unusual example I’ve provided is the third word. What is Umuofia?

Umuofia is a word that was the bane of my first year in University. As part of my introductory course in International Development Studies (one of the fields I eventually chose to major in) at Trent University, my class had to read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe – Umuofia was the village that the story took place in.

And why was that word the bane of my studies? Because of that goddamned ligature – how on Earth was that last set of characters supposed to be pronounced? Feee-ah? Feee-yah? Fyah? I was convinced that the ligature was not simply a convenient way of typesetting the letters “F” and “I”, but that it was a special diacritical mark affecting the entire pronunciation of the name – was the second “U” silent? Where did the emphasis fall? It drove me to distraction.

So, ligatures. As I found out in my book production course at Ryerson, they are not in fact some fancy literary device – at most, they are a fancy aesthetic device, and that makes all the difference.

As an editor, my goal is to make writing better and more concrete – and my responsibility is to make those changes in a reasonable, consistent, and justifiable manner.

How appropriate, then, that the seminar I took today was all about explaining editing to professional editors – it helped me clarify some approaches to text that I was already using instinctively, but hadn’t been able to put into words.

Other EAC members will know exactly what I’m talking about: Eight-Step Editing.

Eight-Step Editing doesn’t teach you about grammar. It doesn’t teach you about punctuation. It doesn’t even teach you about spelling. Instead, it teaches you about how to look at a piece of writing, and how to make it clearer by applying a number of steps in sequence, thus streamlining the editing process while keeping the author’s voice in mind. Each step, applied in sequence, progressively shifts the balance of the writing voice away from the author to the editor; the goal is to minimize this shift during each step.

In short, the eight steps are:

1. Shorten sentences:  break longer, run-on sentences into shorter, more compact sentences. Each sentence should contain one individual idea.
2. Remove useless words: get rid of verbal filler – text that doesn’t further the point of the writing. The reason to do this is because if you write too many useless words like I am writing about at this point in time, your sentences will sound unnecessary and redundant, and your audience will get bored as they will lose interest in what you are taking so much time to talk about.
3. Use positives instead of negatives: you should never not try for clarity, because not doing so will not make your writing easy for your audience to read.
4. Avoid unnecessary complexity: reduce words with lots of prefixes and suffixes down to their root words, and recast the sentence accordingly. Antidisestablishmentarianism, anyone? Alternately, recast sentences containing three or more long, obscuring words in a row. Because it is your job to eschew superfluous obfuscation.
5. Reduce the use of linking verbs: especially variations on “to be.”
6. Reduce the use of the passive voice: it is used by too many authors to inflate their word counts.
7. Start with strength: place your most important or attention-grabbing piece of information first in writing. I can only wonder in the irony of having this step placed seventh in the list.
8. Structure your paragraphs: make each paragraph start with a strong topic sentence, and give each shift or alteration in the topic at hand its own paragraph. Ideally, each individual topic sentence, read in sequence, should tell the reader all they need to know.

What’s really interesting is that I was doing a lot of the higher-level (parts 4-7) in my own editing projects. Sometimes the big, important steps, like making new sentences out of longer ones, is so obvious you forget to think about it.

(Edit, March 12, 2011: Jim Taylor originally developed the framework of concepts behind Eight-Step Editing in 1971. Many thanks to Elizabeth d’Anjou, the person who ran the seminar I attended, for pointing out that I needed to acknowledge the man behind it all. Thanks, Jim Taylor!)