Obession is the better part of valor.

I have just spent two hours.  Changing one line for another in one paragraph. A line of five to seven words in a manuscript of over 84,000 words.

In Version One, Peter says, "You want me to go . . . "

In Version Two Peter says, "I'm just going to head out ..."

I change it. I change it back. I change it back again. I change it. ... I eat lunch.  I change it.

I leave it as Version Two. We need to see this character with a little spine. He needs to take a little control.  We will respect him more.  We will not love him any less.

Peter is just going to head out.  He'll be back.

Moving Through: The Phases of Writing Feedback

I recently signed up for a class with a firm that provides a variety of services to aspiring authors, including those with an idea who can take online classes augmented with over the phone coaching to start their project off right, all the way through to a class designed to help those who have completed writing a novel or memoir and need to learn all about the publishing process.  I fell into the latter category. 

I had met the founder of the company at a writing conference a little less than a year ago, and liked her enthusiasm and confidence and her commitment to helping writers.  I had finished my first novel, and thought I was ready to pitch it, and did.  It’s now in a drawer, and surprisingly, it is not shouting out for my help right now.  Instead, I embarked on my second novel, a story that I had carried around for a while, and that came onto the page with relatively little angst.  It had its moments, no doubt, but the story seemed more ready for me somehow than the first had been.

I signed up for the class to ready my pitch to agents, and back-timed the completion date. I would be ready by September.  I worked through ten weeks of exercises.  The class prepared me well for the hardest parts, providing encouragement and plenty of links to editors, coaches and writers who all lamented and advised on the query letter and the synopsis.  Still, even with all the advice and preparation, cutting my novel of 83,476 words to two pages of the most salient part of the story, and then further to just a two paragraph query, was just as painful as they all said it would be, but at least I knew I was not alone.  I spent more than one week on each, and another two weeks on researching agents and agencies. 

Finally, I submitted my work to the reviewer tasked with giving me feedback.  She filled my pages with questions and comments, and she made sure to point out three killer paragraphs in my writing that she loved.  Here is what I remember from my first reading of her feedback.  “You are not ready.”  That’s it.  Over the next week, I took a ride on the following roller coaster:

1.     Day One: Deny

Obviously, you did not understand my work. In fact, you changed a few words in the synopsis that changed the whole story, and your comments from that point on were just based on something other than the reality of my novel.  Maybe I should ask you to re-read again?

2.     Day Two: Ignore

I need to work today.  I will deal with you later.

3.     Day Three: Shut Down

There are three themes to my book. Not one. How simple-minded a reader would only want one? I read all the comments again.  I tweak a few words in my synopsis.

4.     Day Four: Dim Light Shines

Okay, I thought about it. The book is about the third theme you pointed out.  I attack the synopsis with this in mind to see what might happen, and it changes.  I re-read the blogs and the other links provided about writing a synopsis for the class.  I edit mine to two pages, and the two other themes now present as sub-plots, I think.  Interesting result.

5.     Day Five: Illumination

I see how where I started my book, page one, might be an issue. And I knew that info dump in the first chapter was questionable.  You clarified. It wasn't just questionable, it was wrong. I rewrite without all that, shorten things, move sentences, edit them down, edit them out.  That page long conversation that went nowhere. You thought it was clever, too, but called it as extraneous.  I knew, but I loved it.  So funny and so true.  I pared it to what was important.  It’s only a paragraph now, but the point is made.

6.     Day Six: Experiment

I write a new beginning.  I edit the rest of the first chapter again.  I take my dog for a walk. I edit it again.

7.     Day Seven: Awaken

 I wake to read what I have written.  I think.  I close the file and hope that I do not open it again for one week.  I think it just might be better after all.

In three weeks, I will resubmit it all to you, my dear and wise reviewer.  Sit tight.  Perhaps I will be more ready.

Last Night I Learned of Skinny Scarfs and Cynicism

See that silvery light breaking through the trees?  See how the dark green leaves of the Oregon grape along the trail twinkle?   It is the first sunny day in the most dreary winter of my many years in Portland, and ahead of me, sunbeams, beside me, thoughts of Colum McCann's talk to a packed house at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall last night.

This morning, Forest Park, Portland Oregon

Most fitting, Mr. McCann's scheduled talk had been postponed due to the what we are now referring to as the "Snowpocalypse" in Portland.  He arrived this time to a city poised for a weather breakthrough.

Colum spoke for nearly an hour with us, painted a word and gesture canvas covered in humor and passion and the threads in his life -  of people, and work, and words that pull him through, and propel him forward, and move him past what is not good, what makes it hard to go on, what might stop him from telling another story in his life.  It was difficult to imagine this energetic man reaching the end of any rope.  He reveled in his own conviction, in the quote from Samuel Beckett he shared, that he read to us twice and repeated later in the talk.  He convinced me.  He could be drained, and then he revives, with the odd and energizing connections that he finds in his work.

“You must go on

I can’t go on

I’ll go on.”

-Samuel Beckett, The UnNameable

By the time he finished, I knew Colum as an Irishman, as a son, as a brother, a New Yorker, a father, a husband, and as a citizen of the world.  He told of his visit to a local high school just that morning, and thanked us, his audience, for the opportunity to meet the amazing teachers, and the students, and a librarian there who gave him a gift, a skinny scarf.  Truly a man with grace.  He invited us in, and after this night, I am inspired by his call to arms to me, and writers, storytellers and to other humans who are seeking ground when their world is filled with turbulance. 

"Refuse cynicism. Find the dignified, anonymous corners of the human experiment."

I see that shaft of light this morning, and its reflections on moss.  I see it.

On Reading

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.

Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."  -William Faulkner

If you write, or study writing, you know of this quote.  I love the intent of these words, so simple an instruction from Faulkner, even the part about throwing writing out the window.   The more I read, the more I know what belongs there.  The more I read, the more I notice sentences, and those verbs.  What a good writer does with verbs can amaze.  Sometimes the most unusual combination of words will jump from the page, and make me smile.  I'm not sure of the recent notion of right brain and left brain, and all the spirit and science of that argument, but I know this.  There is a center of delight and creativity that awakes and deepens as I now read not just for amusement and entertainment, but as a writer.  My wish for you - find that place, and explore it.  Poise your fingers over the keyboard and write, write, write.  Then read, read, read.  You'll feel it.