For those who are wondering what kind of instruction that might be, my title today is a quote by the goofy character Hedley Lamarr, in the goofy movie Blazing Saddles .
What made me think of it was a post I saw on Facebook the other day from my friend and former Criminal Brief colleague Melodie Johnson Howe: " Blazing Saddles has just been edited for television. It will air tonight from 8:00-8:07 PM." The point, of course, was that cutting out the offensive parts for network TV did away with most of the movie. And if you doubt there were a lot of those parts, watch it again sometime, intact. Remember, Blazing Saddles came out exactly fifty years ago--I saw it with several buddies during my first class with IBM (a six-week course on the West Coast in '74)--and we thought it was HILARIOUS. I still think so. But that was a far less politically-correct era, back then, and movie directors, like authors, were able to more freely do that voodoo they do so well. We all know that moviemakers and writers have to be more careful these days about what they show or say in the course of the story. Sometimes it's about offensive content, but it's also about plain old mistakes in logic or continuity or geography, etc., which I think were more often forgiven in the past than they are today. Most movie addicts know about the gas canister in Gladiator , the bulletholes in the wall in Pulp Fiction , the hands-over-the-ears before the gunshot in North by Northwest , the snow-capped peaks in Arkansas in True Grit , and many others, and mystery novel fans still complain about Raymond Chandler's chauffeur-murder plot hole in The Big Sleep .
I myself make plenty of mistakes in my stories, in the plot and elsewhere. I've usually been fortunate enough to find and correct those during the writing process, but sometimes the editor discovers them, for which I'm always grateful but always embarrassed. Especially if the editor is also a friend, like Barb Goffman or Josh Pachter or Michael Bracken. I should know better, and they know I should know better. On a very few stories, I've made mistakes and editors did not catch them, and I found out about those screwups only after a reader told me about them or I spotted them myself in the magazines after publication. That's really embarrassing. I hate to admit this, but in one of my stories in the print edition of The Saturday Evening Post , I mentioned that a certain horse was a mare, and then, two thousand words later, said one of the characters "led the horse over to a fencepost and tied him to it." Tied him to it, not her . I can picture Mr. Rogers now, smiling in his sweater and sneakers and saying, "Children, can you say, 'proofread'?"' For those of you who write shorts, have you ever committed that kind of error? (I'm referring mostly here to plot mistakes, factual mistakes, continuity mistakes, switching tenses, switching POVs, etc.--serious flubs, not grammar/style errors or typos.) If so, did the editors catch them? When editors find problems of any kind and recommend changes, do you always welcome their suggestions? Have you ever refused them? Can you list any examples?
In closing, I recall a piece of unrelated advice given to me long ago by an old friend from Alaska. My wife went with me on one of my IBM trips to Anchorage in the 1980s, and while we were there, a co-worker of mine took us with him for a week on his boat to some of the wild and seldom-visited islands in Prince William Sound. As we were trudging through those woods one day after sighting a bear in the distance, he told us there was a rule hunters follow if they're ever in a situation where they're forced to shoot a grizzly to defend themselves. He said, "You shoot him as many times as you can, then shoot him again, and when you're sure he's dead you shoot him again. Then, when you're positively, absolutely sure, beyond all possible doubt, that he's dead, you shoot him one more time. That sounds brutal, but it ensures that you won't be dead, which should be your top priority. And that kind of thinking can also apply, in a far less serious way, to one part of writing. When you finish reading your final manuscript and you're convinced it's free of mistakes, read it again, and then when you're absolutely certain it's free of mistakes, before you submit it anywhere, read it one more time. Now, if only I could make myself do that.
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