Fiction Checking

Brief Notes on Working With Prose

Beyond some political assassination the term has endured in recent years, fact checking is a generally good and useful tool for any writer. It trades a small amount of extra labor, either by the author of a piece themselves or by a third party, in exchange for a degree of protection from embarrassment and an extra level of professionalism. Getting something wrong can at best be unnoticed (until years later) and at worst be career-ending, so the amount of variance present in the error also usually spurs people to action. Factual mistakes are not kindly tolerated in something as time-lagging and time-intensive as writing; at least, we do not wish for them to be tolerated in the kind of audience we’d like to cultivate.

This idea is most often applied to journalistic and academic writing. But what about fiction? Isn’t fiction the realm where you can pass off anything? I will argue that fiction relies on fact-checking, or at least some basis of reality, to pawn its fictional elements off on an audience, and that a failure to do so results in bad, or mushy, or unbelievable fiction, even when an audience very desperately wants to believe in it.

In fact (detouring briefly here) an audience is actually very easy to “make” “believe” something, as long as they are willing and engaged participants. A black box theater has little in the way of stage setting, lighting, elaborate costuming, etc., but the audience and the theater enter into an agreed-upon pact that they will believe whatever is shown past the limitations of the presentation. I think there’s a separate argument to be made (later) than some degree of artifice, or limitation, makes things more believable, as long as they are appropriate and honest toward the audience (like the rear-projection car driving scene). More and more I am returning to theatre for an association (to me at least) to typography and graphic design for books, since in both cases often the job is to create as much atmosphere as possible with as little as possible. But for now let’s return to more specific examples I have encountered recently.

There is nothing special about editing beyond reading work closely, asking authors the right questions, and knowing when to pester them and leave them alone. Some of these questions may be the following -

Your characters are driving from Point A to Point B. How long does it take for them to get there? Is that correctly stated in the manuscript?
How much did a tank of gas cost in this year of the setting of the story? How poor is the character? How much gas does it make sense for them to buy?
What does the Find My iPhone alarm actually say in Spanish? Is there any way to verify this?

These things obviously relate to some sort of physicality or materiality, which is easy for us to forget, and just as easy for a person to spot when something is a little out of place. It makes an impression when these items are done correctly, too - I have received comments on Utter Goodness both about the exactness of its geography and the specifics of a bone fracture! In both cases, Audrey was creative enough to inject those audience-grabbing hooks into the narrative, and it was my job to do the less exciting stuff (spelling, Google Maps, etc.)

There is also a time to know when to deviate from the specifics, either by intentional nonspecifics or by intentional difference from current reality that nonspecifics allow. This is where the conversation can turn towards abstractions like “Who would be the funniest New York City mayor during this narrative” (a tight race). I also find that is is helpful, behind the scenes, to disambiguate in private what is explainable or unexplainable in the mind of the creator; too often I have found that I assumed some event or person was supernatural in a narrative that the author then had a perfectly reasonable explanation for. Pressuring for answers also causes problems: an “I don’t know” on either side of the author / editor conversation is extremely fruitful.

Finally, since I should connect this back to Rhymes in some way - as many of you are receiving your copies, and many more will buy one when it comes out on the 19th - in collections of poetry there is often a kind of cohesion or world-building in the series of poems themselves. I have talked before about managing and pruning poetry not just in the sense of individual line edits but which poems are and aren’t included in a collection and even in which order they come. This is much more abstract, but step back and consider their overall effect on the reader, and which seem out of place or seem like speed bumps on the way to a unifying conclusion of theme.

In Rhymes specifically Tom was able to unite his roundels - in tenderness, in romance, in width of subject matter - with the chansons of Marot. This is why they bookend a loose assortment of other forms in the middle of Rhymes.

Tom is also a brutal self-editor, meaning that a few of my more humorous favorites (like one in translation called O Tit) didn’t make the cut. You, the editor, should adjust yourself to the disposition of the writer and move with and against the grain as needed. They are people too, despite what some say...

I realize this is all very basic advice and description, but people nowadays seem very cagey or secretive about the role of the “editor”, generating endless pieces about whether they should be abolished, how they should die, how there should be more editors, how desperately we need editing, etc. By documenting these elementary pieces I hope to de-mystify something that is really very soldier-like: long stretches of noble drudgery mixed with unexpected pangs of excitement.

Rhymes comes out May 19th - be sure to grab your copy. Farthest Heaven event in New York City to be announced soon.