Mistakes Authors Make

Authors are people.

I know that may come as a shock to some of you, especially considering how…un-humble…some authors seem. But like the rest of us, and despite their best efforts, they make mistakes, whether it’s as simple as a misused word or something with more impact. Things fall through the cracks and, as a result, the reader is pulled out of the story. Whether fact or fiction, sci-fi or self-help, missteps on the author’s part can make the difference between a bestseller and finding their books on the remainder table marked down to $1.99.

Editors, copyeditors and proofreaders exist to patch the cracks, plug literary holes, clean up the timeline, and provide clarity to the reader (and in novels, to do so without giving away the plot too soon).

Here are some examples of common authorial “bugs”—how many have you seen recently?

1. Material details change without explanation: A character originally described as brown-eyed in Chapter 4 is suddenly green-eyed in Chapter 16—and not due to jealousy. If this occurs only once, the reader may be able to mentally write it off; too often, however, and the annoyance factor is likely to grow past a reader’s ability to suspend disbelief.
2. Errors of fact: A history of the Civil War mentions the importance of abolitionist John Brown, but a few paragraphs later, John Brown has become Dan Brown!
3. Important appearances and disappearances: An event is referred to early in the book as absolutely vital to the occurrence of Situation X, which will take place later—but Situation X comes and goes without a single reference to the big important thing mentioned earlier. If you make something seem very important and don’t pay it off later, your readers are going to be disappointed at best. In the theater, this is the basis of the maxim, “If you show a gun on stage in Act One, you have to fire the gun in Act Three.”
4. Lack of foundation: A technique mentioned for the first time in Chapter 6 needs background information that either never appears or comes up in a later chapter. Fiction can be more forgiving of this, as long as the necessary background comes up sometime before the end of the book. But in a step-by-step list or similar text, lack of foundation can lead to real-world errors—and some very unhappy readers.

What do editors, and the rest of the editorial staff, do about these mistakes?

At every level of service, we will keep track of first mentions, descriptions, etc., to ensure consistency. We act as fact-checkers to ensure the author doesn’t unintentionally misinform readers; in a work of fiction, however, the editor will check with the author to make sure it isn’t intentional (it may illustrate a character trait or set up a plot point). If an author mentions something early that needs a payoff later, we let him/her know, and editors will rearrange text to avoid giving important data too late.

Writers write, and if their readers are lucky, writers write well. Editors help make writers better.