A Hundred Times Over

Have you ever looked at a manuscript, or even a novel you've had published and is now in print before you and a glaring typo just leaps up from the page. You sit there mind-boggled. You know you read that thing a hundred times over in the writing stage, then a hundred times more in the editing stage. Your editor looked it over, printers hopefully, although I've found in my experience they rarely pay attention, it goes on the page exactly as they get it no matter what... sort of. One exception to that is the crunch that putting the manuscript into templates causes. It creates typos of its very own... but that's why you get to read the galley. To check for that sort of things... and you did, right? Of course right. A hundred times over.

How could you, your editor, and then you again have missed such things?

Easy. It's the optical illusion your mind creates as it reads. It's the same reason optical illusion games work, the same reason magic tricks work... it's easy to trick the mind.

The mind is a lazy machine if you let it be. It will take as much for granted as you allow. It assumes certain things are as they should be. It WANTS them to be. It will assume that if you are reading a sentence with the word 'behave' in it that all the letters will be in order. It just sees them like that so that even if it's 'beehave' it will just take for granted that all the eees were right where they were supposed to beeeee.

There are tricks. Some writers read their manuscript backwards. That actually is a very effective way to break the illusion. It's also one of the most aggrivating ways. That's probably why it's so effective. It's aggravating because the 'lazy' mind gets mad because it can not assume anything when things are in the wrong order to begin with. It takes patience though. I can take up to four times as long to read even a short manuscript from back to front. Even then, you better be sure to do it again when it comes back from galleys... don't assume that everything will be where it was just because the original manuscript was clean. Read a copy of the printed/published novel 'The Road To Paradise' if you ever get a chance for MY lesson on that issue. LOL First books are quite the learning experience--a hundred times over.