Many fiction writers find they need to hold down some other job to pay the bills. Writers are advised to make it as different as possible, such as waiting on tables, or as related as possible, working at some other kind of writing, perhaps business manuals or advertising copy.
My own 15-year adventure in computer programming—mainframes, big business computers in the years before widespread use of personal computers—proved to be a poor choice as a companion job. It was all-consuming time wise, and also scratched a certain creative itch, not completely, but enough so that writing fell by the wayside.
But when we moved to the northwestern Catskills in the nineties I landed in a perfect situation for me—a part-time job that would also serve as classroom and that intensified the itch that needed to be scratched.
Just seven miles from my house, on a road with two houses on it, pretty much qualifying it as “in the middle of nowhere,” a small Mom and Pop type business specialized in book layout for university presses—UPNE, SUNY, and several others. Do not assume size and location indicate a lack of sophistication or experience. Both partners had spent years at McGraw Hill and the wife had spent further years at Oxford University Press, New York. These were people who knew books.
Initially I was tasked with inputting manuscript corrections, allowing me to see the changes the editor wanted. Lesson number one very quickly became obvious: about 75% of the occurrences of the word “which’ should have been “that”; the reverse is also true. Another thing that seeing hundreds of edited manuscripts teaches you is to be careful to avoid the incomplete change. An author decides to change something in a sentence, but doesn’t notice the effect that change has on some other part of the sentence or a related sentence. Another word should have been deleted or its tense or number should have changed for consistency. It became a game to try to determine what the sentence had said before the change.
Not all of the books were great, but all presented opportunities to read or at least skim through material I might not have otherwise chosen. Some were so great I’ll remember them forever.
The manuscript for one job of correction inputting was so funny I would read bits aloud to my two coworkers, who would almost fall off their chairs laughing while I, choking back laughter, struggled to say the words. A bit over twenty years later, that book, Percival Everett’s Erasure became the movie American Fiction. And while the film stayed fairly close to the book, some of its funniest parts could only exist on the page—little philosophical asides on the nature of language and communication presented as puns and jokes.
Most books came as electronic files, on floppy disks during the first few years, with the corrections marked on a paper copy. But a few books had to be typed. I input hundreds of poems from tear sheets for a collection by an author whose name I didn’t recognize. About halfway through the project I found myself thinking, “This guy can write!” The “About the Author” section at the end of Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 confirmed my assessment—Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa can indeed write.
Eventually I learned how to do layout. That little company is no more, but I still do layout for a few friends and private clients who self-publish. For someone who loves books, the ability to make one is a treasured skill, a gift from lovely people. Considering the depth of their knowledge, I doubt they taught me everything they knew, but they surely taught me everything I know about making a book.
Trace Evidence 