Typomania

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Like all writers, I have a system for creating my books. First of course comes the idea. Then I start to think about location and characters. I then fill notebooks describing the lives of my characters. This is so I can get to know them. Only about 5% of this stuff reaches the pages of the finished book. Next, I write and write and I don’t read what I’ve written. Only after months of writing do I print it out and read it. And read it. And read it. I’ve done this with my three Michael White novels, Equinox, THE MEDICI SECRET and THE BORGIA RING. I did it for my first pseudonymous Sam Fisher novel, STATE OF EMERGENCY, and I’m currently doing it for my second Sam Fisher, AFTERSHOCK.

This stage is actually my favourite. I can sit all day and read all the material I had forgotten I had written. But then it becomes a bit of a slog. The first draft is barely visible through the red ink. Gradually, as draft after draft appears, the red diminishes, until finally I have something I can show my agent, my editor, and perhaps most importantly, my wife, Lisa.

What staggers me about this process is that I can still leave in the most ridiculous typos even after reading the manuscript a dozen times. I have two favourites. Both from quite late drafts of THE MEDICI SECRET, both spotted by my eagle-eyed wife.

1. My intrepid group of renaissance travellers led by Cosimo de Medici are making their way towards a lost monastery in Macedonia when they stumble upon a deserted village of… stone nuts.
2. The second is perhaps a little more subtle. The same group of travellers are in Venice during the worst plague in the city’s history. Cosimo decides they have to leave and instructs a friend to find them a ship…with a skeleton crew.

Mind you, to be fair to myself, typos can appear in the finished product that had nothing to do with me. These are maddening because they are out there for good. But you have to see the funny side. The worst one was my biography of the renaissance thinker Machiavelli, whom many misunderstood to be some sort of evil schemer (when in fact he was simply a writer who wrote about evil schemers). Anyway, the book appeared and I proudly glanced through the first few pages, and there it was on page 2, a sentence in which I tell the reader that Machiavelli is often wrongly considered to have been a depot. Have the ‘s’ in the word and you have a tyrannical dictator. Leave it out and you have a large warehouse.

But, my all time favourite, and one that luckily was caught just before going to press was a typo for the blurb on the inside flap of my biography of Isaac Newton, The Last Sorcerer. Halfway through a rundown of Newton’s life and achievements, the blurb writer goes on to talk about Newton’s fiends in the Royal Society.

Read the next article in the series here >

Read more about Michael White here >

Read about latest novel THE BORGIA RING here >