‘Attention to detail’ my English teacher
used to scrawl in red ink all over my compositions. “Davies,” he’d say, “you
are a school child in Wales, not an avant-garde literary genius. You can play
hard and fast with the rules of punctuation when you live in a converted loft
in Manhattan, but until then, please try to put a comma in the right place now
and again.” But for all his yelling, I didn’t listen to him. Punctuation was
for the swots. I was a rebel, a stream of consciousness writer and punctuation
interrupted my flow.
How I wish I’d listened to him now though.
How I wish I’d studied the rules for commas, learnt about clauses, and
discovered how to use semi-colons instead of sniggering at them. But I didn’t,
and I’m paying the price for that insubordination.
Because of my lack of attention to detail,
everything I write has to be proofread by a sympathetic third party. Someone who
will correct my errors without giving me the full grammar Nazi sneer. And understanding editors are not that easy to
find. Proof-readers tend to be supercilious by nature, believing they were put
on this earth as higher beings, equipped with a red pen ready to put us mere
mortals in our place.
This is where my dad comes in. A writer
himself, he’s a willing and encouraging proof-reader. He’s patient, thorough and
most importantly, he’s cheap; he’ll do anything for a bag of liquorice
all-sorts. It’s a perfect working relationship. Well it was, until now.
You see my latest piece is a steamy, sexy,story; not quite Fifty Shades but maybe twenty-five. I got over the
embarrassment of my parents reading my stories years ago, but there’s a
difference between reading and proof-reading. You can gloss over the sexy parts
when asking your mum if she enjoyed the first draft of your latest novel, but with
a proof-reader you have to get down to the nitty-gritty, dissect every aspect.
Having my dad insert a semi into a sex scene or insist his colon goes into a
steamy moment would be all a bit too much for me to face.
So although I am grateful to my dad for all
the work he has done for me, I hope he understands when I look around for
someone else to proof-read this latest draft.
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