Doesn't my work speak for me? Do you really want to read "between the pages?" After all, the Shop Talk section of this site collects my lectures on writing, so you've already got my two cents on the author's craft and art. Why, then, this series of shots across the bow?
Perhaps for the same reason that I always ask my students to send me a letter along with their manuscripts. It can be a short update, I tell them, but it needs to include something about their non-writing life, about the world they move in when they're not butt to chair. Time and again, I find it revelatory to compare the voice in thier personal letters with the one in their "work." And sometimes I can use this contrast to show them the difference between self-conscious, watch-me-write language, and the easy, fluid voice of their own open hearts. The latter may not always be publication-ready, but it usually has something to teach the ego that worries about the right word, making a mistake, creating an impression. Besides, it's just plain fun to feel as if we're having a conversation, an ongoing dialogue.
So here's the first installment of ours. And in honor of letting my writing hair down and opening hearts, it features an ancient blooper and a reader who's just embarrassed me by pointing it out! You've heard Yours Truly and every other writing mentor on the planet yap endlessly about the fictional dream, right? How it's important not to yank your readers out of it with inconsistencies or emotionally illogical moments? I had this lesson brought forcibly home recently when a male reader of my first YA novel, Rosey in the Present Tense, wrote to tell me that an old Jeep of the kind my ghost/girl character Rosey drives in the book, doesn't have a transmission that can be put in "park." He loved the novel, but that detail that I botched had given him pause, had taken him right out of my story into his own head, where he knew such a thing just wasn't possible.
I'm grateful that this reader found his way back into the book, and grateful that he took the time to write. Not that I'm liable to have the chance to correct a book that's been out in hard cover and paper back editions for years now. But it's wonderful that folks, after all this time, are still reading my first novel. And it's also nifty that I can use his critique as a reminder to all of us how important it is to remember research, not to shortchange those seemingly small nits that can build or destroy credibility. I'm working right now on a novel set in the first century CE, so it's unlikely I'll have anyone correcting such details from first-hand experience. But I'm bound to find readers who love the era, who know history, who want to slip effortlessly into the time stream it opens up. Oh, sure, I'll make mistakes, I'm not an expert in the period. But I'll do my best to stay inside my characters' bodies and experiences, and to ask all the questions I can --even about little, picky details. Because the devil is, indeed, in the detail. But only If you get it wrong!