paean to those who keep our sentences safely seat-buckled and stop us from veering into literary ditches

in which we sing the praises of our literary lifeguards, those vaunted souls who protect us from drowning in the deep end . . .

In what amounted to a 24-hour mad dash across the potholed, tree-trunked, slip-slidey rain-slick terrain that is my pages and pages of prose, all under the name of my next book, and all submitted to the latest round of editing, I discovered this week that I’d been buckled in quite snugly and resolutely, and had at the wheel something of a wordly wizard. A someone nimbly able to zig me where I needed to zig, and zag me all the elsewheres. Someone who could pluck me from the precipice, just as I was bound to teeter in, and plunk me solidly back on terra firma.

In other words, I came upon a literary gem, the writerly iteration of a saving grace: a first-rate, cut-above proofreader of pages. One of those rare species who seem to have burst into this existence with the full volume of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, as well as Bryan A. Garner’s Modern American Usage, sausage-cased inside their heads.

These rare wonders of literary ilk are very few and very far between. And when you ply your trade inside the word factory, where chimney smoke grows thick with consternations at times, and conveyor belts can buckle, snag, and just plain screech to halts (say, when a participle dangles, or an infinitive is split), you all but fall to your knees in thanksgiving for their rare and fine capacities.

In other words, should you care to make a writer gleam with unremitting joy, just slide a card beneath her nose telling her you’ve got the inside track on a copy editor or page-proof reader who could find her way blindfolded through whatever obstacles you’ve unspooled in sentence form.

My saving grace this week came with a name, not always revealed in the trenches of the editing room. But right away, soon as I spied the first errant comma swept away, and another fine one slipped gracefully in, I glanced to the far right column, where the notes keep track of who does what, and saw that I was under the magic spell of a blessed, blessed someone named Sara.

Sara now joins my sparsely populated constellation of grammatical, punctuational, and witticism supernovae, the ones who with the flick of a finger can snap a sentence into gloryland, snag just the right word (a word you might never have heard before, catena comes to mind, a story I will tell you soon as this one thought glides to its gentle end) for just the right spot, and otherwise pull lexical miracles from hats.

I have for years now lugged behind me one other superstar of this rare class. Her name is Nancy, and she and I met up a thousand years ago when we toiled in the glare of the Chicago Tribune newsroom—she on the copy desk rim, and I somewhere in the mob of old reporter’s row, where expletives flew loudly, flew often, and days and nights were lubricated with dusty bottles tucked in drawers and down where winter boots were stored.

Even now, I rarely leave my writerly station without her. And cannot break myself of the habit of pinging her at all hours of the night or day when I find myself in a writerly gulch. She is to me the Prozac of prose. I get all shaky when I am stuck on a word, or cannot for the life of me turn inside out the tangled sock that is my attempt to express some thought. When I want a sentence to really, really shine, and cannot find the word, well, one ping to Nancy and, lickety-split, the problem’s solved, the just-right word wafts in on gauzy cloud, and we go forth, merrily whistling into the balmy, balmy breeze.

Just last night, I queried her: How, I asked, do you do this? How, oh, how do you know every blessed rule that ever was decreed in the linguistic kingdom? Were you born with all of this stuffed inside your head, or while the rest of us were outside skipping rope and playing tag, were you ingesting Bill Strunk and Andy White’s latest Elements? Do you ever, ever find yourself consulting primers and tomes, or do you just cough up this point-blank perfection from the capacious vat that is your brain?

While I await her replies (now below), I promised you the quick tale of catena, a lovely, lovely word, a word I’d never ever heard, till dear Nan the Wunderkind effortlessly offered it up one day whilst I was searching for a word that might capture the long litany of banged-up bird stories I’d netted in my life. Tis a word, she casually offered, derived from Latin, and it means a chain, a connected series of related items. And it lilts off the tongue, if you ask me. A word as pretty as it is clear. And so, to this day, and till it’s out of print, should you turn to page 73 of The Book of Nature, there it perches, “a long catena of birds in my boxes in my lifetime.”

And she wasn’t even the copy editor of record for that book (she was, though, for another one, the long-ago Motherprayer, a book now out-of-print but forever pressed close against my motherly heart). Thank holy God, she seems to never mind that I ping in from out of nowhere with whatever is my latest quandary from the literary front. I’ve threatened that henceforth I am never ever going to sign a book contract unless she, too, is included in the package. A literary sub-clause indelibly inked into the deal. A literary magic bullet sure to save me every time.

A Paean to the Mistresses of Prose

*all credit to the little wizard who now lives inside my laptop . . .

Io, Paian! Sing praise to the keeper of the sacred page!

Hear us, oh healer of broken sentences and fractured syntax!

You look upon the wild, tangled thickets of our words,

Where commas stray like lost sheep in the dark night,

And with a single, sharp stroke of your crimson pen,

Order is born from chaos, and clarity shines forth.

Refrain:

Io, Paian! Clear is the voice! Golden is the line!

Praise to the editor, who makes the dull prose shine!

You do not merely prune the overgrown, useless branch,

Nor do you slay the author’s true, hidden heart;

Instead, you breathe life into the gasping phrase,

Turning the heavy lead of our speech into purest gold.

Cliché flees from your gaze like mist before the sun.

The passive voice trembles and is made straight.

Every syllable finds its true and rightful home,

Polished until the mirror of the mind reflects perfection.

Refrain:

Io, Paian! Clear is the voice! Golden is the line!

Praise to the editor, who makes the dull prose shine!

Receive our deepest thanks, oh silent guardian of the book!

May your ink never dry, and your keen eye never tire.

For through your quiet grace, our words take flight,

And what was once dust is now crowned with immortal light!

*

Amen, amen, dear Nan and Sara both!

***

Because some of us writerly types are geeks of the highest order (confessing to all counts!), I delight here in sharing both the questions I put to my No. 1 literary lifeguard, and the answers she has supplied:

1. Q: What are the three most essential tools of a brilliant copy editor?

A: The Merriam-Webster online dictionary. I love Garner’s Modern English Usage. At one time, a good research department; today, Google.

So I guess I was born this way. Both parents had been journalists!

2. Q: Were you a kid who knew the rules before the first grade teacher taught them?

A: I don’t know about that, but I do remember at a sadly young age objecting to lyrics I heard on the radio like “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

3. Q: Who was your most essential teacher of all things grammarian and punctuational?

A: My best teachers in that vein were fellow newspaper people like Ron S. and Marcia K. Most of what I picked up till then was from reading all the time.

4. Q: Do you EVER have to look anything up, or do you just know it?

A: I look up stuff ALL THE TIME. I’m pretty good at spelling and punctuation, but on finer points of grammar I need to check myself if only to be sure of the terms to use to explain why I’m changing something.

***

and, now, for your question of the week: who are the safekeeping wizards in your life, the ones who keep you on the straight and narrow, shining in their golden glow? in any realm—literary or otherwise?

happy birthday to blessed blessed michelle, my S-I-L who might or might not lay her lovely eyes on this ol’ page.

much much love to my wonders of the week: nan and sara. may the grammarian gods and goddesses, the princesses of punctuation, look down upon you with beatific graces . . .