Book Doctors
 

 

          Some people say that book doctors are editors for hire, but the four I’ve worked with were definitely not editors.  One of them called herself an editor, one called herself a writing teacher, and the other two described themselves as book doctors.  All four were very different from the editors I’ve known.  None of the four edited; instead, they went through the manuscript, and wrote comments or questions in the margins or in an appendix (“How old is he?”), but they didn’t remove a question when they saw it had been answered, or maybe they didn’t see the answer.  From one of them, I received pages of questions, all answered in my book, sometimes on the very page she queried.  “You should describe your hero,” she wrote on page six, when on page six my hero was described in detail.  (She and Jack Slick, the agent I met at the writers’ conference, should get together—she doesn’t know a description when she reads it, and he sees one when it isn’t there).

          The first book doctor I consulted—a famous one—didn’t recognize or understand literary allusions.  Okay, so not everyone reads mysteries, but even if you never heard of Sherlock Holmes, the expression “trout in the milk” should be self-explanatory, like “smoking gun.”  (If you find a trout in the milk, you know someone put water in the milk.  Exaggerated?  Yes, but so is “smoking gun.”)

          Another book doctor had no idea how anything works.  She argued that “rich people” don’t ride subways.  How does she think all those high-income people get to Wall Street?  If they all took limousines, New York City traffic would be

 

 
 

in a permanent state of paralysis.  Even Mayor Bloomberg, a billionaire, rides the subway.  She also thinks that all billionaires own or charter private jets, and don’t fly commercial, even transatlantic.  Nonsense!  I’ve seen Donald Trump, S.I. Newhouse, and many other rich people on commercial flights to and from Europe.  The author of an article in The New York Times (April 29, 2005) wrote, “most celebrities fly commercial and the idea that everybody flies on private jets come from the ‘Fabulous Life’ show on VH1.”  She also mentioned having recently seen Nicky Hilton on a LA-NY flight.

          Still another book doctor (who, incidentally, was forced upon me by an agent, who described her accomplice as an editor) kept questioning my knowledge: “You should check to see if a magazine works like that,” she wrote on my manuscript (a character in my book is the editor of an art magazine) even though she’d seen my résumé, and knew I’d worked for both art and financial magazines.  She also advised me to show two of my characters examining a work of art at an auction, which, of course, isn’t permitted.  (Auction houses provide opportunities several days before the auction for prospective buyers to examine art, but not at the auction.)  Obviously, she’d never been to an art auction, and since she hadn’t, she shouldn’t have given advice about how a character should behave at one.

          The “writing teacher” combined some of the worst elements of the others with a major memory problem.  (I think the two essential qualities for a book doctor should be the ability to read carefully, and a good memory.)

One of the more bizarre manifestations of her memory lapses was the inability to keep in mind any character in my book, even for a few pages.  Example:  In my first novel I introduced on page one a character named Bethany (fairly unusual name, right?).  At that introduction, the reader learns that Bethany has a job in the art world, may be looking for another job, has insomnia, and is reading a book she hopes will put her to sleep.  On page 14, she appears for the second time; she’s still named Bethany; she’s working in an art gallery; she tells her boss she has to look for another job; and that she has insomnia, and hardly slept the night before.  The writing teacher’s comment:  “I had forgotten the name ‘Bethany’ from the start of the book.  You could make it more obvious that this is the same character; perhaps show her yawning; or with a copy of the same book she had been reading…”

          Another comment: “I started to become aware (by page 18) that I had no idea what anyone looked like…” But by page 18, the reader has been given partial or total descriptions of seven of the book’s main characters.

          Her most tiresome bits of advice were her recommendations that I add information, characters, etc., to the book that were already there, like “consider a thread from inside the police department that makes sense of the investigation.”  There are two people in the book close to the investigation who keep the protagonists informed on its progress.  Apparently, she hadn’t noticed.

          In fact, not one of the four book doctors I consulted added to my knowledge, or helped improve the quality of the writing, or contributed to the intricacies of the plot.  Book doctors are not required to have any training or qualifications; they can simply set themselves up in business, and announce that they can help improve your manuscript, whether they can or not.  The four who worked for me could not.  Still, hope springs eternal; perhaps a book doctor who knows what he or she is doing is lurking out there somewhere.  I doubt if I’ll ever employ one again, but then, two of the four times I hired book doctors, I thought they were something else.  I’d urge anyone considering hiring a book doctor to ask for credentials—education, experience, references.  (Yes, I had references of a sort, but I didn’t check them as thoroughly as I should have.)

          And listen to this: an “expert” on one of the most prominent websites devoted to the topics of editing, book doctors, and the like, wrote: “You should find out whether you can get a verbal response to the manuscript, not just a written response…the editor will not want to write down some comments…it is easier to soothe the writer verbally.”  In both cases, when the writer uses “verbal,” she means “oral.”  (Oral means “uttered by the mouth in words”; verbal means “relating to, or consisting of words.”)  This is a common error, but not an error anyone who sets herself up as an expert on writing should make.  Beware of false experts!