Writing - The good and . . . .

In my last post I mentioned how the long period between manuscript submission and publication can cause writing projects to overlap. That is the current situation as I wait for Paul to arrive on Tuesday with the proofs of "The Major League Pennant Races of 1916" while working on the last stages of the New Jersey portion of the Pioneer Project. Once I see the proofs of the former, I need to proofread it one more time and work with Paul on the index.

There is a lot that I like about writing. I especially love both researching and writing. Researching is a lot like detective work, looking for sources, combing the sources for information and looking for little touches that can make a big difference in telling the story. An example of this was when I found two or three paragraphs in a New York newspaper about the moods in the Dodger and Phillies club houses between games of a crucial late season doubleheader. Just those few paragraphs gave me wonderful connections to what came before and after.

The writing itself is also something I enjoy a great deal - the challenge of taking the material weaving it into a story and telling the story in the best way possible - accurate and interesting. As with anything else, there are, of course, some things that I don't enjoy. Probably the least enjoyable thing for me is the final proofreading. Proofreading one's own work multiple times is almost unbearable. Next to final proofreading my least favorite thing is what I am doing now on the Pioneer Project - fact checking.

Fact checking, or the way I do it, is going through the material paragraph by paragraph looking at the facts, looking at the footnotes for the sources and then going to the sources themselves. It is very time consuming, sometimes frustrating and not especially interesting. Unfortunately it is also essential. I have now completed two of the five team histories and found a number of mistakes that I have corrected. Fact checking is also worse with the earlier part of any work - fortunately the last three are relatively short and were written fairly recently so the remaining work shouldn't be that difficult.

I was reminded of the importance of fact checking the other day when I was in a bookstore looking at a copy of Marjorie Garber's new Shakespeare book. Garber is a distinguished professor at Harvard and her book is a series of chapters discussing specific plays and their relationship to today. One of the chapter is about "Henry V," my favorite Shakespeare play so I skimmed what she had to say (without buying the book!). In writing about the famous "Band of Brothers" speech, Garber writes that the speech is first directed towards Warwick and then the entire army.

The only problem with that is that it isn't Warwick, it is Westmorland. And it is not like this is difficult to see - Henry's opening line is something like "Who is he who wishes so, my cousin Westmorland?" and his name is mentioned at least once more in the speech. It reminded me of something I saw in James Shapiro's book, "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599." Writing about this same speech and the brotherhood image, Shapiro writes "Henry refers to his aristocratic kin, Gloucester and Bedford, as brothers." When I read this I felt like screaming - "The reason he refers to them as brothers is because they are his brothers - Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and John, Duke of Beford.

In both of these cases, these are not crucial issues but they are also not obscure issues. First, it is hard for me to believe that a Shakespeare scholar would make such a mistake. But what is even more surprising is that a major publishing house like Harper Collins (in Shapiro's case) could let such a mistake get by. After seeing some of the mistakes in John Feinstein's book, "Living on the Black" last summer, I wonder how much checking some of these publishing houses actually do. IN any event all of this is probably to my benefit, reminding me again that this onerous task is really important - so back I go, now to the Irvington club.