The Four-Maggie Problem

On the Nature of Successful Writing and How Close It Could Be

“Oh, Maggie, I wished I'd never seen your face,
You made a first-class fool out of me.”
—Rod Stewart

I am sorry to have to tell you that today’s article is not a new work of groundbreaking hard science fiction by Liu Cixin. Neither is it a heartwarming story featuring Maggie Q, Maggie Smith, Maggie Stiefvater, and Maggie Hassan—I wish it were. This article is pretty cool but it’s not Maggie Smith cool.

What I have on offer for you instead is a completely true tale from my publishing industry chronicles that my friend Nilah likes to call:

Margaret: A Novel in Four Maggies

(I’ve changed some names and specifics to protect the real people in this story but I promise you this account is otherwise utterly factual and true.)

The year is 2011 and I am getting ready to relocate to California. In addition to my full-time publishing job, I do editorial odd jobs for a handful of publishers I know and trust. I’m fresh off a laborious comparison proofread of a calculus textbook, which is just as awful as it sounds, when I get an unusual email from a person I don’t know who I shall call Eunice.

A publisher I’ve been working with for years is starting up a romance imprint, and Eunice is at the helm. The freelancer coordinator over at the main house gave Eunice a short list of editorial service providers who might be willing to help her get this baby off the ground. My name is at the top of that list.

My primary focus in freelance work has never been fiction. I read and write fiction for pleasure, so in my work I try my level best to avoid it. I don’t want to make fiction my job as well as my hobby. I’ve never produced fiction and I rarely edit it, although I do know how. Copyediting and proofreading narrative fiction are very different skills than copyediting or proofreading narrative or non-narrative nonfiction. They’re skills I have, but they’re not my sharpest or best.

Still, I’m game. I’m always looking for new opportunities and some extra cash will be welcome as I’m moving 3000 miles away from home. Every little bit helps.

When you copyedit nonfiction, you’re looking for language, grammar, mechanics, style, and sense. All the stuff you probably imagine an editor doing. When you specialize in a certain type of nonfiction there might be additional considerations. For instance, I specialized in cookbooks. When you edit a cookbook you’re looking for all of the above but also things like,

• Are the ingredients listed in the same order as they are used in the recipe?

• Is every single step explained clearly, even the ones you think everyone already knows?

• If the same ingredient is called for twice in the recipe, is that explicit in the ingredient list?

When you’re copyediting narrative fiction, the special considerations can be legion and you’re expected to look out for all kinds of little things like,

• Has somebody gone to school or work for 12 days running without any mention of a weekend? That’s probably an author error.

• What color are everybody’s eyes? Write down characters’ physical characteristics to make sure they don’t change mid-book.

• Did someone mention trench coats in the context of school shootings? You’ve got a problem to resolve if the story takes place in September of 1998 as opposed to September of 1999. Light fact checking is expected.

And so on and so forth. All that is just to give you a little insight into the copyediting process that I think will pay off later down the page.

So it happened that Eunice approached me to assist with her new imprint. Romance is a very specialized and highly competitive fiction genre and it is not easy for a new publisher to break into the space. There are a few publishers out there who completely dominate the market and trying to get even a crumb of their business is like rolling a boulder uphill. The established, big-name authors are not going to take a chance on your operation. If you don’t give the readership what they want—exactly what they want, in exactly the formula they’re used to—they will sink you so utterly you’ll forget what you even set out to do.

Eunice seeks me out because she has heard that I never leave a possible error unexplored, I err on the side of improving the work rather than letting things stand, and above all I work really fast. We talk briefly, reach an agreement on compensation within an hour, and she sends me a manuscript to start editing the very same day.

It’s a story about a lady journalist, let’s say her name is Sarah, who moves to Boston from . . . I don’t know, elsewhere . . . to pursue her career in news media. She meets a local firefighter, we’ll call him Liam, and becomes deeply enmeshed in his Irish American community as they fall in love. My style sheet notation goes something like,

• Sarah, reporter, blonde hair, beauty mark left cheek

• Liam, fireman, black hair, blue eyes, 6’2”

That way if Sarah is later called Sara, or if her beauty mark is mentioned as being on the right cheek, or if someone is described as towering over Liam, I’ll know to raise a red flag for the author to address when they review the copyedited file.

Sarah and Liam first meet when she must interview him for a feature story she’s working on. They get together at a local bar called something like O’Mulligan’s. The bartender is a lovely Irish rose named Maggie.

• Maggie, red hair, bartender

A few scenes later as I’m reading along, I encounter Liam’s sister—Maggie. Naturally this raises a red flag that the author will need to go back and do a little rework of the text around the bar scene, because Liam didn’t introduce his sister, Maggie, to his new friend from out of town, Sarah, who is interviewing him for a feature on the local chapter of the fire brigade. This isn’t a huge issue; it’s easily fixed. The author just needs to adjust the scene to introduce Maggie appropriately. Liam’s dialogue will need to be critically evaluated, because a man speaks to his casual acquaintance the bartender a little differently than he speaks to his sister the bartender.

• Maggie, red hair, bartender, Liam’s sister

I continue deeper into the story. There is a particularly tense scene in which Sarah must reach Liam urgently while he is out answering a call, and the only way to do so is through the emergency services dispatcher, Maggie.

Okay, so Maggie is busy. She’s a professional telecommunicator who moonlights as a bartender and her brother is the most eligible firefighting bachelor in town. It’s teetering toward unbelievable but I can still get behind it. If one sibling is a part of the emergency services community, isn’t the other sibling more likely than average to become part of the same community? I just wish that the author had mentioned this, somehow, earlier. Maybe in some offhand, throwaway dialogue. Perhaps with Liam mentioning to his sister Maggie—perhaps even at the bar she tends as her part-time job—that he’ll talk to her later over the radio when they are both at work? 

I make a note of all this for the author. I have accepted that I will need to do a second read through the manuscript to examine all of these interactions between Maggie, Sarah, and Liam, knowing what I know now, to make sure it doesn’t come as a surprise to the reader late in the book that Maggie has her fingers in pretty much every single pie. That’s fine. I usually read a manuscript two or three times in the course of a copyedit.

• Maggie, red hair, bartender, Liam’s sister, EMS dispatch

By now I have lost interest in the Sarah/Liam romance and I’m honestly more curious about Maggie and how she has so much time and energy to do all this stuff. Is Maggie based on a real person? Can she be my life coach?

I continue until I reach that moment you encounter in every romance novel when the nascent couple’s newfound love is most desperately threatened and it looks as though they may never be able to find their way back to each other and make it work. In this case, that happens with Liam’s ex-wife blows back into town on the crisp autumn breeze, looking to give their relationship one last try.

I bet you already guessed that the ex-wife is none other than . . . Maggie.

At this moment, I experience a paradigm shift in my understanding of the manuscript, the author, and in fact the entire situation.

This is not a novel about Maggie, the busiest woman in the Irish American EMS community in Boston.

This is a novel with four separate, unrelated, minor characters who all happen to be named Maggie because the author could only think of one Irish-sounding name and apparently did not realize that you can’t have four characters with the same name in one novel.

This gives me an entirely different challenge for my second go-round. I spend my next read-through painstakingly identifying each and every Maggie appearance, color coding them according to which Maggie I believe is the one being referenced. Maggie the Bartender gets highlighted in pink; Maggie the Sister in yellow; Maggie the Dispatcher in purple; Maggie the Ex-Wife in blue. 

This results in a complicated letter to the author on how to go through the manuscript and replace three of the four Maggies’s names with literally any other name. Siobhan and Aoife would like an opportunity to shine. As I discussed in my September article What’s in a Name, Irish American women can be named all kinds of things—even things that aren’t Irish stereotypes. A fun fact that many authors do not know, I guess. You could have an Irish American character named Giselle if you wanted. As a writer, editor, and Irish American person, Catherine from Shelf Life is giving this the stamp of approval. 

I write a second letter, this one for the proofreader, imploring them to watch these minor characters carefully to make sure they didn’t get mixed up anywhere in the revision process. Now that copyediting is over, it’s dangerous for the author to implement major changes like these. The book is almost ready to go to press, and no one else is coming behind to check that the author didn’t miss a Maggie during revision. The proofreader is now all that stands between the author and abject humiliation. All I can do is write my little letters and hope.

Why am I telling you this? Well, it’s a funny publishing story and everyone likes funny stories. Beyond that, though, it has a message that I hope you will remember the next time you’re sitting down to write, or reading something you’ve written, and your inner voice is going: “Hey this is trash.”

Never forget that an author sat down and wrote an entire book neither caring nor even apparently noticing that four different characters had the same name. Then a major publishing house that had been in business for more than 100 years came along and read this manuscript and said, “Yep, this is the good stuff!” They signed it to a contract, threw money behind it, put their name on the spine, and published it.

That publishing company has gone out of business now. Is it because of Margaret: A Novel in Four Maggies? There’s just no way we can ever know for sure. 

TL;DR: If you think you’ll never be a good enough writer to get published—think some more.

Coming up on Thursday: Is writing a gift? Is it a talent? Is it a skill? The age-old nature v nurture debate is coming soon to a newsletter near you. Same shelf time, same shelf channel. Don’t miss it!

PS—Ever wanted to try something like NaNoWriMo but felt your project wasn’t a good fit? Wishing you could participate in a writing community challenge in November but not up for the pressure of NaNoWriMo Official? The Shelf Life Discord is hosting a NaNo Club for anyone who wants to participate in any capacity, for any type of writing project. Want to write poems? Songs? Blog posts? Short stories? A non-novel long-form book? Choose your project and then set your own goals, mile markers, and schedule. We would love to have you.   

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