Virginia Ironside

‘Writing is like music and the punctuation is like the notation. Take out all the quavers, rests, sharps and flats and repeat signs and a piece of music is meaningless’

People sometimes send me books they’ve written, either to ask for a quote for the cover or, at very least, to promote on Amazon by posting a kindly review. I usually decline, since I’m so critical I can barely be trusted to promote one of my own books, let alone anyone else’s, but I usually look, at least, at the first few pages just to reassure myself I’m not turning down a work of genius.

But I didn’t have to go further than the first paragraph with the last book I was sent. It started: ‘France; my home nation; is, at heart, a generous one – but try catching an “early morning” train; to any station. Drift, into slumber…’

I mean, could you manage to read any further? No, it’s not the words, though they don’t make a lot of sense, but the punctuation. Reading it is like listening to a record with a scratch in it. You pause, you stop, you rewind, you start again, you trip up, wobble and then retire, a white noise buzzing in your head. However good the writing is, you just can’t continue.

Would you have read further if Tolstoy’s introduction to Anna Karenina had read: ‘All “happy” families are alike each unhappy. “Family” is unhappy. (In its own way!)’

Writing is like music and the punctuation is like the notation. Take out all the quavers, rests, sharps and flats and repeat signs, and a piece of music, even if it’s Beethoven’s Fifth, is completely meaningless.

The person who prevents all this stuttering is an unsung hero. Actually, worse than that – a reviled hero. The word ‘sub-editor’ (for that is what these skilful and under-appreciated maestros and maestresses are called) is almost never referred to without the adjective ‘lowly’ inserted before it. ‘The lowly sub’. And yet they’re a vital part of the writing process (and I’m not just saying this to curry favour with Deborah Maby, our own unsung genius).

Giles Coren once wrote an incredibly funny but cruel letter to a sub who had changed the last line of his copy in a restaurant review. They had removed the indefinite article ‘a’ before the word ‘nosh’. One of his many valid complaints was that, ‘Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed “a” so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong?’

Yes, when a sub alters something you’ve written, the sensitive writer (and we’re all ludicrously sensitive, unfortunately) feels assaulted. I, who never lose my temper, once nearly combusted when I read that the last word in my phrase ‘watch a bit of telly in their jim-jams’ had been changed to ‘pyjamas’. I couldn’t sleep for rage. And as for the sub who changed all the wasn’ts and I’ve’s to was nots and have not’s throughout an entire book, my stomach still churns with rage at the memory.

But on the whole subs slave tirelessly to make our stuff actually look better. They’re like loving mothers who, before we go out, say: ‘Oh, darling, you know you’ve got a funny mark on the back of your skirt/ladder in your tights/label sticking out.’ Maddening sometimes, but actually essential and kindly.

Recently I’ve been home-schooling a twelve-year-old friend of my grandson’s in English and find that not only till now has she been taught virtually no grammar at all, rendering her imaginative essays nearly nonsensical at some points, but that in the GCSE curriculum you are actually awarded marks for the number of semi-colons you put into your work. Semi-colons are in writing like chili powder in cooking. Or vinegar. Fine if they’re used by an expert, but ruinous for anyone who uses them too profusely.

So I apologise to every sub who’s caught my sneering scowl as I pass their desk. Not ‘lowly’ at all. Actually, essential.

(Note to Deborah: ‘Don’t change “maestresses”… no, I know there’s no such word, but it’s meant to be funny ... well, no, it’s not very funny … and yes, I do know that it should be maestri anyway and there’s no feminine plural for the word maestro because … but FOR GOD’S SAKE it was just a bit of fun, lighten up!

‘Woops, sorry. I take it all back. Over to you. Whatever you think. You’re the boss.’)