Politickles

Creative Duplantiers at home in St. Louis, Going up the stairs: Max, Ria, Audrey, Crozet, Ida, Izzy, Bob & Evann

Graphic design, writing, editing. Duplantier Creative does it all.
Three generations. A communications dynasty.

Bob Duplantier is a writer and editor with 35 years’ experience in journalism, advertising, and publishing. Both of his parents were writers and editors, too.

Evann (Tolhurst) Duplantier is a graphic artist with 30 years’ experience. She’s also the product of two press people.

Bob and Evann met at an advertising agency in New Orleans in 1982 and were married in 1986. The six Duplantier kids have inherited their parents’ art and writing skills.

If you need help with an art or writing project, why not use our imagination?

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Creative Duplantiers at home in St. Louis, L to R: Evann, Isabel, Maxine, Audrey, Ria, Crozet, Ida, Bob

Graphic design, writing, editing. Duplantier Creative does it all.
Three generations. A communications dynasty.

Bob Duplantier is a writer and editor with 35 years’ experience in journalism, advertising, and publishing. Both of his parents were writers and editors, too.

Evann (Tolhurst) Duplantier is a graphic artist with 30 years’ experience. She’s also the product of two press people.

Bob and Evann met at an advertising agency in New Orleans in 1982 and were married in 1986. The six Duplantier kids have inherited their parents’ art and writing skills.

If you need help with an art or writing project, why not use our imagination?

website

Creative Duplantiers at home in St. Louis, L to R: Evann, Isabel, Maxine, Audrey, Ria, Crozet, Ida, Bob

Graphic design, writing, editing. Duplantier Creative does it all.
Three generations. A communications dynasty.

Bob Duplantier is a writer and editor with 35 years’ experience in journalism, advertising, and publishing. Both of his parents were writers and editors, too.

Evann (Tolhurst) Duplantier is a graphic artist with 30 years’ experience. She’s also the product of two press people.

Bob and Evann met at an advertising agency in New Orleans in 1982 and were married in 1986. The six Duplantier kids have inherited their parents’ art and writing skills.

If you need help with an art or writing project, why not use our imagination?

website

Editor Declares War on Illiterate Writers

. . . Burris admits that he did have contact with Blagojevich’s brother, and — low and behold — during those conversations . . .

Low and behold?!!! Okay, that’s it! I’ve had enough. Last week, I read a news article that reported a judge’s order being evacuated. Granted, a judicial decree can wreak havoc on the bowels, but it’s safe to assume that the illiterate reporter meant vacated. The low for lo substitution was committed today by a political blogger, who, I’m sure, would be the first to admit that he is no stylist. And it’s quite possible that the mistake was due to carelessness rather than ignorance — a typographical error, in effect — and eluded spell-checking because it was, in fact, a legitimate word.

We all make typographical errors like these, typing one word when we really mean another, or getting lost in an overheard conversation and transcribing pieces of that instead — then, going back over our text and wondering, how the heck did that get in there? Maybe the political blogger was listening to a weather report about a low-pressure system headed his way; maybe the court reporter was constipated last week. Who knows? But why didn’t either one review his work and catch the egregious error? Doesn’t either have an editor?

I’m beginning to wonder if there even are any editors out there. I spot unbelievably stupid mistakes in major publications all the time, as do friends and relatives. They interpret the errors as signs of job opportunities: “Boy, they could use a good editor! You should apply there.” I see them as reflections of the general degradation of language in a culture committed to mediocrity: “If they cared about accuracy and felicity, they’d have a good editor.”

Whatever the reason, I’ve had enough — and, from now on, I’m going to post the atrocities.

Picked up some work the other day. A guy who’s written a techno-thriller happened to spot, on an online writing site, the resume I’d posted there eight years ago! First inquiry in all that time. A real lesson in patience. I’m editing the manuscript for him, and having some interesting conversations with him about the process. He’s asked about point of view, double-spacing after periods, how to handle a character’s thoughts as opposed to his spoken words, the use of obscenities, the value of an editor, etc. My responses:

Point of view
You can tell the story from multiple perspectives, but you have to do it well or it will be confusing/irritating to the reader. You can also use the third-person omniscient throughout, but then you lose the personal touch that a character-narrator provides. If one of the characters can tell the whole story, that might be best, but you will have to explain how that character is able to recount portions of the story in which he was not personally involved. This could be easily resolved in the case of a character like O–, who, as a reporter, could plausibly have compiled other portions through interviews, research, etc.

Period piece
My dad was with the occupation troops in Japan. If not for the dropping of the A-bombs, he’d have been with the invasion troops and almost certainly would have been killed — and I wouldn’t be here. Nor would I have inherited the old manual typewriter he carried with him throughout the war as a correspondent for the Corps. One of the toughest habits I ever had to break was double-spacing after periods, which became obsolete with the advent of personal computers, which are, essentially, typesetting machines (with automatic kerning). Adding an extra space after a period on a PC throws the kerning off and makes a mess of things.

Thoughts vs. quotes
An inner monologue is not really a quote and does not require quotation marks. You could treat it as though it were, and I imagine lots of people do, but I prefer to distinguish between the two. The goofy thing about questions is that they end in question marks, for which commas can’t really substitute — as they do in declarative sentences that are quotes or internal thoughts. This has always disturbed me, but putting a comma after the question mark — which I’ve seen people do (How crazy is that?, he wondered) — is even more disconcerting.

Obscenity
Lots of best sellers are full of obscenities; lots aren’t. Do obscenities help or hurt a book’s sale? I have no idea. The question I ask myself is, Are they necessary? In real life, there are occasions when nothing but a four-letter word will do — and many more occasions when they’re simply gratuitous. The problem with a book, or a movie, is that it’s a concentrated slice of life — and all the pieces, including the obscenities, are, in effect, magnified. Also, overuse undermines their impact.

(I’m not a big fan of Steven Spielberg, but I have to admit that ET would be an undeniable film classic, except for one thing: the scene when Elliot’s older brother calls him “P– Breath.” Where did that come from? It’s the only thing like that in the whole movie. Did it add anything? I don’t see how. Did it subtract? I think so. What was the point?)

Who needs an editor?
Does an author even need an editor before submitting his manuscript to a publisher? If he wants to produce the best manuscript he can, as a matter of pride, then hiring an editor makes sense. But, if he just wants to get a book published and make some money, an editor’s services are probably unnecessary. (This assumes, of course, that the author is not completely incompetent, in which case no editor could help him anyway.)

Fortunately, my client has high standards and and has decided to continue with our arrangement. His writing is very clean. Mostly what I’m doing is substituting active for passive constructions, eliminating deadwood, inserting a better word when I can, and making sure that he shows rather than tells. But the American reader, nowadays, is not very demanding — and, judging from the books that get published, the editors at most of the fiction houses aren’t either. All they want is a big story, well-written or not.

Over the last [35] years, I’ve written dozens of poems, plays, and short stories; hundreds of newspaper articles, commentaries, and comic strips; and thousands of billboards, bumper stickers, brochures, and commercials. Occasionally, I’ve even been paid for my services. — F.R. Duplantier, “Behind The Headlines”

In 1997, the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies announced that it would “award three 20-year sample tax rebates to three families who can best explain how a $1000 a month ‘raise’ would improve their lives and help them build a brighter future.” Given the modest salary I received as editorial director of America’s Future, I was coming up $10-15,000 short every year, so I figured I’d take a stab at the ISS “contest.” I submitted an 80-line poem in rhyming couplets called “What I Would Do with an Extra Twelve Grand” and made it to the “second round.” The article excerpted above, entitled “Dad Believes in Competition, and Providence,” was part of my second-round submission. The stipends, alas, went to three other families — and I continued to come up short year after year, always managing to make up the difference with the assistance of relatives kind enough to pass away in my hours of need.

In keeping with the spirit of the article, I revised the poem, retitled it “Taxpayer’s Lament,” and included it my first collection of Politickles. The article itself, I also retitled (“My Unshakeable Faith in Providence”) and distributed as a Behind The Headlines commentary. So, you see, nothing went to waste;  and, once again, I demonstrated that there’s no such thing as a pointless exercise.