Manuscript optometry

Like an optometrist changing lenses and endlessly asking “better or worse?” I’m trying new word combinations and asking myself, “better or worse?”

Here’s one example:

Before:

Like I was unfolding a pile of laundry, I answered her questions about where I was in life, why I was there, how my work was, how I dealt with stress and my beliefs. I no longer had anything to lose, so I was as honest as I could be and, for her part, she was comforting and nonjudgmental.

After:

Like I was unfolding a pile of laundry, I answered her questions about my crossroads in life, my intentions, my work, my coping mechanisms and my beliefs. I no longer had anything to lose, so I was as honest as I would have been in the raw pages of a diary and, for her part, she was comforting and nonjudgmental.

The 6th draft is the hardest part

Maybe the first draft was the most difficult to write, given that it took me five years. But this editing is like removing one's teeth by oneself. With a pliers. And no pain-killer. Draft 6 is killing me softly.


Draft 1: Written in three parts. The first 15,000 words or so were written in 2006, begun at a memoir writing workshop. The second 15,000 words were written in November 2009 during National Novel Writing Month (you've got 57 days to give some thought to your NaNoWriMo effort this year). The final 45,000 words were written in May and June, when my job was disintegrating and my husband challenged me to finally finish the book I had been talking about for five years.


Draft 2: The first draft was a mess of tenses and unfinished thoughts. My husband was my first editor, pushing me to fill in blanks I was too uncomfortable to fill in.

Draft 3: I sent Draft 2 to my mother, my sister, my best friend since eighth grade, a friend with whom I worked for four years and my brother-in-law. Their suggestions and questions formed Draft 3.

Draft 4: My editor took a clinical unbiased view of my manuscript, and he suggested the removal of the words "a lot" and "things" and encouraged more active verbs. These nuances require deep thoughts. What did I really mean by "It was so much better, being real" in Chapter 26?And who knew an epilogue could be so fraught with telling too much and too little at the same time.

Draft 5: While the manuscript was with my editor, my mother-in-law, a friend of a friend and another friend reviewed Draft 3 and offered insightful suggestions not offered by those closest to me.

And here we are at Draft 6, a compilation of my editor's comments, the comments of the friends once removed and the advice from a former agent who suggested I needed more "beauty" in my writing. Like the Richter Scale, each draft number is 10 times harder than the last. I've been stuck in the quagmire of Draft 6 for six weeks, alternately impressed with my writing and appalled by it.

Let's not even discuss Draft 7 at this point. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair

Someone who should know told me today that my manuscript looks "very, very capably written but not with a tremendous amount of beauty." She encouraged me to scour my draft and mine for beauty.

My style is direct and journalistic. My personality style is direct, and I am, or was, a journalist. I appreciate aesthetic writing, but it does not come naturally to me.

Oh, woe, this work of writing is work indeed.

The analyst of my work suggested I look at a memoir like "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt for beautiful writing. Here's a passage from McCourt's Chapter 1:

My father, Malachy McCourt, was born on a farm in Toome, County Antrim. Like his father before, he grew up wild, in trouble with the English, or the Irish, or both. He fought with the Old IRA and for some desperate act he wound up a fugitive with a price on his head.

When I was a child I would look at my father, the thinning hair, the collapsing teeth, and wonder why anyone would give money for a head like that. When I was thirteen my father's mother told me a secret: as a wee lad your poor father was dropped on his head. It was an accident, he was never the same after, and you must remember that people dropped on their heads can be a bit peculiar. 

Because of the price on the head he had been dropped on, he had to be spirited out of Ireland via cargo ship from Galway. In New York, with Prohibition in full swing, he thought he had died and gone to hell for his sins. Then he discovered speakeasies and he rejoiced.

One reviewer describes McCourt's voice as having "originality and immediacy" and another describes his memoir about his poverty-stricken childhood and alcoholic father as having "astounding humor and compassion." McCourt's writing is, of course, superlative; he got a Pulitzer Prize for his work. Pulitzer Prize winners are like that -- with a bit, or a lot, of clever language, they can turn a tale of sorrow into a humorous redemption story, a classic.

"Because of the price on the head he had been dropped on" is both beautiful and funny. McCourt deserves the kudos.

My story is a tale of sorrow -- and redemption -- and my editor said I write "fairly objectively about a highly emotional, subjective experience," which is perhaps compassionate, but I am not astoundingly humorous or even sort of funny. I am the straight man in any skit. Wry maybe. But funny is out. I must aspire to beauty.

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair,
offering us for a minute a glimpse of an eternity that
we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."

~ Albert Camas

Show, don't tell

As a journalist, I have a propensity for telling. But the gold standard advice in storytelling is "show, don't tell."

I found some notes taken while I was at Printer's Row Lit Fest earlier this summer which read, "Not 'my heart was so full I could burst' or 'I was so angry'; put description of my body, mind, jaw, hunger; avoid putting feeling on the page."

Thus, I attempted to follow this advice throughout my manuscript, including this passage:

The revelations in Detective Oxton’s investigation file seemed to go on and on. By now, I had spent a couple of days sifting through the interview transcripts. I curled up in the cushiony upholstered chair in the living room with the big stack of papers on the floor beside me; my shoulders hunched over whatever I was reading, and more than once the leg I tucked under me fell asleep. Colin was almost always nearby, either agreeing with my muttered analyses or scoffing at my accusatory inquiries. Sometimes he would sneak outside for a smoke, to alleviate his stress. I was vaguely aware of his escalating depression, but I was in no position to want to do anything meaningful about it. 

Errors of notorious proportions

Quick! What's wrong with this paragraph?

Colin Lloyd Skorupski. His whole name including middle. Like John Wilkes Booth, President Kennedy’s assassin. People sometimes marveled at how notorious criminals are always known by three names. It was no conspiracy. It was no uncanny coincidence. It was a function of a reporter’s accuracy. By using an accused criminal’s full name, a newspaper avoided accusations of libel from some poor John Booth or Colin Skorupski who had nothing whatsoever to do with assassinations or sexual misconduct.

If you spotted it right away, you're better than the seven people who read my manuscript before my editor. Find it? John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln, not Kennedy. I knew that, but it's not what I wrote. I edited my own work and didn't catch it. This is yet another reason why even great writers need good editors.

My editor changed the paragraph thusly:

Colin Lloyd Skorupski. His whole name including middle. Like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassins of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. People sometimes marvel at how notorious criminals are always known by three names. It’s no conspiracy or uncanny coincidence. It’s a function of a reporter’s accuracy. By using an accused criminal’s full name, a newspaper avoids accusations of libel from some poor John Booth or Colin Skorupski who had nothing whatsoever to do with assassinations or sexual misconduct. 

You'll notice he changed the verb tense, too, which makes perfect sense. 

Well done.

What good editors do

A good editor sees through your hack jobs.

One of the stories in my book features seven characters -- a lot of voices to keep track of. When my husband read that chapter, he was confused. This is an early chapter in the book so I knew confusing the reader that early would be deadly. But rather than rewrite the chapter, as I should have, I just deleted two of the characters and changed a few plural verbs to singular.

But a good editor sees through short cuts like that.

My editor kindly suggested that chapter was one of my weaker chapters. "You kind of lose the reader," he said. "You need to get to the point quicker."

Other readers had mentioned other problems with the chapter, but my editor explained it in a way that convicted me. As he spoke, I knew he had a point because I knew how that chapter got there. And I realized why the other readers struggled with it.

My clumsy fix had been revealed for what it was: Lazy.

This is why even the best writers need good editors. Good editors look at writing the way readers do, but they are able to articulate clearly what's wrong. And very good editors gently point this out in ways that even the most territorial writers concede the point.

Book trailer in the works

In the end, or perhaps in "an" end, I sent the manuscript off to an editor with 77,442 words. The evolution will continue, I expect, to include numerous revisions and cuts and possibly additions, though I feel like I opened my soul with all the revelations in my memoir and I'm not sure how much is left to tell.

This morning, on Independence Day, I filmed a YouTube video to launch this memoir to the world. It combines the book pitch and footage of the author (me) explaining why she wrote it. I couldn't swing the pro videographer, but I have confidence my brother-in-law can put together something fabulous (and he worked for French toast and scrambled eggs). Apparently, book trailers are all the rage nowadays. We'll see.

Stay tuned.