He Said, She Said

     Polishing one of my novels, I reflect on the idea that novelists are probably the only writers who find "he said she said" essential and time-consuming aspects of editing novels. Most people wouldn't realize how much time I spend adding the attributions of conversations in my novels, tightening the prose, and making the final copy as legible and close to my intentions as possible.

     I'm readying "Finer Spirits" for publication, have had it officially edited, and am doing yet another editing to delete needless repetitions.  Connecting words ease flow and make reading easier and more enjoyable. I edit countless times. And with computers it's far easier to make revisions than it used to be on paper. Some authors still use paper, as Danielle Steel said on her blog. But that's not me. I learned how to type when I went to England from Canada years ago, as someone recently asked me on facebook. 

     My cohort in high school and university in Canada didn't learn typing if they were going to take Liberal Arts. Turns out that was a mistake. I spent needless hours in university agonizing about the quality of my essays typed on a manual, with mistakes whited out and typed over (sometimes causing me to anxiously retype an entire page under a deadline if the White-out burned through a delicate piece of paper). I worried what the professor would think of my product, in comparison to those of other students. If only I'd learned how to type before university, I would've been better served.  If only someone had told me how much I'd eventually use it, I would've focused on its' importance.

     But learning to type wasn't the fashion, or any priority, when I graduated from University in 1977. Women were facing the world, supposedly heading for executive positions, and didn't need to learn how to type. Reality, of course, soon hit, and I decided to head to England to learn to type, and more importantly live and try to support myself in the exciting City of London on a temporary visa. It served as a great excuse to escape the long cold Canadian winter, live near my new English friends, and learn a marketable skill. But I didn't use my new skill for awhile. I began freelancing and my speed picked up, went back to graduate classes in Canada, then to live and work in England, and later moved to America with a green card.

    So that's how I learned to type. Children are learning it, in some schools, at the preschool level now, and that's excellent. It's one of the most useful skills they can learn in school. 

     It used to be, circa 1980, that just getting ideas out on the internet was important. Good grammar and spelling weren't cool. Fortunately, English majors like me have flooded broadband, and shamed illiterates. Well, maybe not completely illiterate. They were super-nerdy, they just couldn't spell. I guess we've shown 'em!

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