Index, preparation of, tedium of, and author's forswearing of future involvement in
I didn't think it would be that hard. I looked at some book indexes, and they consisted mostly of names. I could write down the names of people Caroline Lockhart interacted with, the names of her books and publishers and places she lived and visited.
I could add the important index entries: the general themes such as women, cowboys, homosexuality, circus freaks, masculinity, dude ranching, gunfights, mining, violence, sex, and fame. (Then I could give someone that list and defy them not to want to read the book.) Write down some page numbers and I'd be done.
Sadly, the process of indexing proved to be much more time-consuming, baffling, and tedious than I had expected. Of course I was too close to the subject: I kept thinking every name mentioned in the book deserved inclusion in the index. (If I hadn't thought they were important, I wouldn't have written about them in the first place. An independent indexer would have been able to cast a more critical eye.) And I discovered that my narrative style, in which my hero faces a recurring set of challenges, proves more difficult to index than a book organized around topics.
Furthermore, because I was working with printed copies of the typeset pages, there was no way to automate any of this. The entire indexing process was manual.
Finally, as the title of this post suggests, I had some trouble wrapping myself around an index's required grammar.
I groaned and cursed until I had it done, wishing I'd hired it out instead.
But I'm happy to report, several weeks later, that it was successful. Hoping to summarize the hilarious story of Caroline Lockhart's interaction with an un-photogenic county commissioner named Sanford Watkins, I looked Watkins up in the book's index. The four pages it sent me to captured the story perfectly.
I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com
I could add the important index entries: the general themes such as women, cowboys, homosexuality, circus freaks, masculinity, dude ranching, gunfights, mining, violence, sex, and fame. (Then I could give someone that list and defy them not to want to read the book.) Write down some page numbers and I'd be done.
Sadly, the process of indexing proved to be much more time-consuming, baffling, and tedious than I had expected. Of course I was too close to the subject: I kept thinking every name mentioned in the book deserved inclusion in the index. (If I hadn't thought they were important, I wouldn't have written about them in the first place. An independent indexer would have been able to cast a more critical eye.) And I discovered that my narrative style, in which my hero faces a recurring set of challenges, proves more difficult to index than a book organized around topics.
Furthermore, because I was working with printed copies of the typeset pages, there was no way to automate any of this. The entire indexing process was manual.
Finally, as the title of this post suggests, I had some trouble wrapping myself around an index's required grammar.
I groaned and cursed until I had it done, wishing I'd hired it out instead.
But I'm happy to report, several weeks later, that it was successful. Hoping to summarize the hilarious story of Caroline Lockhart's interaction with an un-photogenic county commissioner named Sanford Watkins, I looked Watkins up in the book's index. The four pages it sent me to captured the story perfectly.
I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com
