Authors are immersed in their stories for months at a time. And then a strange thing can happen
But a confusion can come almost immediately thanks to layers of writing and editing that mean a writer mightn’t always be sure what made the cut and what didn’t. Several readings of a manuscript will have incorporated notes from one or more editors, and, for the author, a late addition or change mightn’t stick in the mind. When Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote Good Omens it reached a stage where neither was sure who had written which character or come up with what joke.
It’s rare that you’ll find a writer comfortable with rereading their own books, so a story can pretty quickly become more familiar to the reader than to its writer, especially when it’s part of a series that can be read back-to-back years after the first book hit the shelves. What’s brand new to the reader might be ancient history to the author.
However, a writer’s fog can stretch beyond mere details. The entire experience of writing a book can feel something like a half-remembered dream. “With any book you might think, Did I dream that chapter?” Patricia Forde, the children’s writer and recently appointed Laureate na nÓg, says. “And then there are paragraphs where I could tell you exactly where I was, what I was doing when I wrote it. But it’s only to be expected when a novel is 40,000 or 50,000 words.
“In the beginning I used to argue it,” she says, laughing. “Now I’m far cleverer. I just say, ‘Oh, good, I’m so glad you enjoyed that, wherever you made it up in your head.’”When authors find it hard to keep track of their own stories, especially over a long series, publishers will sometimes step in and keep tabs.
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