Editing my soon-to-be-published novel, Flipside I have come across a curious thing… the missing moustache. The main character, David Sullivan, has the face of a man I briefly saw about twenty years ago; he was the manager of a garage I had taken my car to and I was struck by the melancholic expression on his face. That expression led me to write about a melancholy man and the reason for his sadness… my character was based on this real man who I had seen for about three or four minutes many, many years ago; this man was handsome, with a dark moustache, receding brown hair, and was tall and well-built. So he became David Sullivan.
The wonders of Word… you can go through and replace words, or change words, Mr Smith can become Mr Jackson at the click of the ‘replace’ button. years ago I heard someone talking about how useful it was but how careful you had to be; it was no good changing someone’s eye colour from blue to green and just click replace blue/green because then you might end up with a green sky, green sea and greenberries, greentits, greenbottles etc.
Going back to David Sullivan, my character with the moustache; for some reason, at some point, I decided he should no longer have a moustache so I replaced ‘moustache’ with ‘ ‘… Why did I do it? I have no idea but when editing I come across these inexplicable blanks where the moustache used to be. I want David’s moustache back, he needs that moustache… a lesson learned, don’t get rid of the moustache unless you are really, really sure!
Lois Elsden 