My Many Mistakes
And why they’re okay
In my GLBTQ time travel adventure Ettie Ruiz Rescues the Past, young Ettie sails down the Yangtze River with famed Victorian writer and traveler Isabella Bird. During the research and writing phase, I learned a great deal about Bird, China, and life in the late 1800’s. But I also made some awful mistakes along the way.
And that’s okay. Readers of Annie Lamott’s Bird by Bird know that she encourages the “shitty first draft.” Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” Aside from scatology, both of them emphasize separating the creative mind from the creative brain. This wisdom has carried me far. Mistakes are not only inevitable, they’re an integral part of the creative process.
But goofs and mistakes can be deadly in the finished product. I’m not talking about typos here. I’m thinking about big, huge, honking errors that readers will seize on and eviscerate. I can catch many on my own, and spend many hours trying to hunt them down during the revision stage. I want my work to be excellent when it hits an editor or publisher’s desk.
However, studies have shown that our brains trick us into reading what we expect to find, not what’s on the actual page. Even when I read my work aloud or have my computer read it to me, goofs slip through. I constantly stress to my students that they need to show their work to others and not rely on their own brains. Smart readers and editors are priceless.
For example, editor David Moles saved me from confusing North Korea and South Korea in a long story published in the anthology Twenty Epics. I’d swapped them in just one paragraph, but how awful that was.
At Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Trevor Quachri pointed out that I mixed up Harvey Keitel and Harvey Korman in a story that included references to Blazing Saddles. Of course I knew the difference, but my brain tricked me.
Jed Hartman at Strange Horizons magazine told me that I’d gotten a bar game wrong in the story that became the foundation of my award-winning collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories. He patiently helped me fix the problem. Karen Meisner from Strange Horizons was instrumental in correcting big and small glitches in Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots, one of my most popular stories.
And recently Charles Coleman Finlay, guest-editing for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, pointed out several places where I’d confused my character names. I see this problem often when I conduct writing workshops, but was sure it would never happen to me.
Here are some of my top goofs in Ettie Ruiz. Some I caught, and others my copyeditor or beta readers found.
1. In an early draft, Ettie and her friends travel in a train across China. But research quickly proved that trains in 1896 were scarce, and certainly not like the kind I imagined from the train sequence in of my favorite cheesy movies, the Kathleen Turner/Michael Douglas romance Jewel of the Nile.
2. The Yangtze River is the third longest river on the planet, flowing from the mountains of Tibet in the west to the South China Sea in the east. I’d named a giant spaceship in my debut novel The Outback Stars after the Yangtze, but somehow had it in my head that it ran north-south like the Mississippi. Good thing the internet offers a hundred thousand maps to study.
3. By 1896, China had already lost two Opium Wars with the British and been forced to open up ports and cities for trade. Foreign diplomats lived in the International Settlement in Shanghai. I realized late in the revisions that I’d put it in the wrong part of the city. Also, I’d based my descriptions of the riverfront Bund in Shanghai on pictures that were later than 1896, so I had to go fix that.
4. China is comprised of many different regional languages. But I didn’t understand just how difficult it can be to communicate throughout the land, or how amazingly hard it is to learn Mandarin. Ettie explains some of that in the book, but I got so paranoid about making mistakes with Chinese vocabulary that I ended up deleting several examples. So this is not a goof, but a prevention strategy.
5. Here’s another river goof: I knew that trackers hauled boats upstream when necessary, but at some point I had them hauling boats downstream as well. Which wasn’t necessary. Boats rode the water over the rocks and prayed that they wouldn’t break up. Many vessels foundered, and the sailors drowned or died of injuries.
6. The position of the doomsday comet in the story changed frequently in the draft and was frankly a mess. My friend the physicist and writer Steve Covey, now working at the startup Deep Space Industries, was generous in helping me fix that — thank you, Steve.
7. Let’s not talk about the place where I mixed up Twain and Dickens. Of course I know the difference between them. I have shelves full of books about them. But my brain once again tricked me.
8. Part of the book involves Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii. Not only did I mess up the dates of her trial and house arrest, but I also confused where she was during the timeline of the story. That took longer to fix than I’d hoped, but it’s all good now. I think.
Again, mistakes are a definite part of the creative process. Like Demi Moore throwing clay in Ghost, we have to make a mess before we can shape something clean. Annie Lamott also much to say about perfectionism, which is the enemy of creativity. I’m glad to see Ettie Ruiz Rescues the Past (Amazon, Smashwords) loose in the world, and if there are any mistakes I hope readers will forgive me.
Finally, my favorite quote about mistakes appeared years ago, on the AOL Star Trek discussion boards, when Dean Wesley Smith advised, “Get it down, then get it right.” And right, and right, and write.
