Zestful Blog Post #151
Sometimes aspiring writers ask if I’ve ever been told by
a publisher to change a manuscript in a way I thought was wrong. Yes, is the
answer, and of course the next question is, well, what did you do? I was planning to write about this sometime soon, when coincidentally this
exact subject came up in a message conversation with a friend on FB this week,
as well as tangentially with a client. Thanks for the nudge, R and B.
In my series of posts (November 20, 2014 to March 12, 2015)
on my publishing history, I recounted how I made significant changes in some of
my manuscripts to satisfy my agent’s or an editor’s request. These happened
because I felt their suggestions would improve the story. Good agents and editors
are worth listening to.
But there’ve been a few times when I’ve said no. One
particular instance was during the editing of On Location, the third in my Rita Farmer series. In that story,
Rita searches the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest for her missing sister
and the sister’s fiancé. After slogging all over the woods and getting closer and
closer, Rita makes a breakthrough when she impersonates a Native American to
find out some information.
A professional actress, Rita uses pigment to darken her
complexion and hair, and puts on makeshift medicine-woman regalia to look
convincing to the non-Indians she’ll be confronting. She carries a hatchet in
her belt. The scene, both scary and funny, is about confidence, disguise, acting
under life-and-death pressure, and the credulousness of an audience unprepared
for a ruse. It is the crux move of the novel, and I crafted the story to lead
smoothly up to that point.
One of my editors at Minotaur told me to cut the stuff about
Rita putting on the disguise. I believe he felt it was grossly politically
incorrect to put brownface on a white character. For sure, it was a risk. I deliberately
take risks in my fiction. For instance, in The
Extra, some of my characters are black, and they live in South L.A., and
not all of them use proper English. That—a white writer portraying black
characters talking ghetto or even slightly ungrammatical English—is considered
offensive by some, and I heard from a couple of them after the book came out. But
if you’ve ever hung out in South Los Angeles, you've heard a lot of
nonstandard English. Is it honest to write all such characters as if they come
from somewhere else? It’s safe, but it’s not honest and moreover, it doesn’t
sound real.
In Rita’s situation in On
Location, I took care to make Rita look somewhat silly, and to make the
white people she deceives dull-witted. I did write a real Native
American character into the book, who wouldn’t have been fooled by Rita’s getup.
Prior to writing Rita’s transformation, I researched the customs, clothing, and
regalia used by the real Indians in the area, where I was living at the time. I
went to the reservation and looked around, and I went to the woods and figured
out how to make the scene work.
If I were to cut that scene, I’d have to rewrite the
majority of the book. I went to some lengths to defend the scene and those
leading up to it. The editor backed off. I suspect he thought I’d made it all
up on the fly, without thinking much about it. And he hadn't fully thought through the scene's relationship to the structure of the novel. My explanations convinced him we
could stand behind the accuracy and spirit of the story.
When the book came out, I heard from many readers—and reviewers—who
thought the Rita-as-Indian scenes were a hoot. One reader, however, wrote me a stern email telling me what a horrible racist I was. “I hope no Indian
reads this book,” she wrote. She particularly objected to Rita’s narrative
sentence, “I worked to project intelligent savagery.” The word ‘savage’ is
considered an insensitive label by Indians, this correspondent told me. She
happened to be local, she said, and she worked at the library near the
reservation. I gathered she was white.
Usually I write back to such readers with a simple, “I’m
sorry the book disappointed you.” No defense, no trying to convince somebody of
something they don’t want to hear.
But I wrote back to this woman asking who was offended by
the book—she, a politically correct white person? Has she met or heard of any
Indian who has read the book and found it offensive? Well, no, she wrote back,
and had to admit that her principles were the ones involved, and she was
speaking for herself. We had a fairly cordial exchange, and that was that.
During the editing of one of my earlier books, I called up
my editor to complain about numerous discretionary changes the copy editor had
made. That is, not things like corrected grammar, spelling, punctuation, or
usage, but things like extra commas, deleted words, and changes that dumbed the
work down. She defended the copy editor, and I said, “Well, then, take my name
off the front and put yours and his. You can be co-authors. Publish it that
way.” She backed off.
My point is this: Your name, in the end, is the one that’s
gonna be on the book jacket. You have to be pretty sure of what you write. If
you’ve done your homework and been honest with yourself and your material, you’re
justified in standing up for your work when the occasion arises.
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