The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023 and Saturday, April 29, 2023. Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
The fourth session on Friday, Mapping Words: A Writer on the Mysterious World of Indexing, was presented by June Sawyers, who is both a writer and an indexer. She focused her talk on writers who are also indexers, such as Virginia Woolf, as well as the traits writers and indexers need to possess in order to be successful.
Virginia Woolf wrote an index for her book, Orlando, with sub-entries for the character showing cross-dressing and his arch of life. She and her husband started a literary press, Hogarth Press, to publish literary works by friends, and so she wrote indexes for these books.
Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, was also a writer and an indexer. He wrote an index for his last novel, Sylvie and Bruno. His entries were humorous and whimsical, she said, with such subject headings as the following:
- bed, reasons for never going to
- sobriety, extreme inconvenience of
A contemporary writer and indexer is Larry Sweazy, who writes the murder mystery series, which includes See Also Murder.
The traits of a successful writer include:
- read quickly and carefully
- good communication skills
- commitment and perseverance
- self-motivation
- empathy with the reader
- work alone for long periods of time
- detail-oriented
- good spelling
- grammar skills
- good organization skills
- think theoretically
- wide general knowledge
- passion for reading
- independent
The traits of an indexer are much the same as that of a writer, except that an indexer is usually anonymous. A novel also might take years to write, and an index has a much shorter deadline.
In the next blog posting, I will discuss the first Saturday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.
Tags: American Society for Indexing, book indexing, indexers, Virtual Conference, writers