Five Lessons My Editor Taught Me About Writing (and Why My Life Is Not Wasted Waiting So Long to Learn Them).

I set out to write my soon-to-be published novel over 13 years ago when I moved to New England after my mother's second husband passed away.  With no income to speak of, and no friends, I aimed to write a novel after my foray into screen and television writing in California (where I grew up)  foundered.  Don't get me wrong. I've had a great career in movies, television, and even an off Broadway play--just none of it is attributed to me, although my fingerprints are everywhere, even on television series that you are watching today.

But the Play button must be pushed. Life goes on. 

I met my editor, Phyllis, before I knew that I would be using her as an editor. She had written a large cover-article in the Portsmouth Herald about the writing duo my mother and I had become after I realized that we could fill a big void in the area by helping people with their resumes. New England is expensive and the majority of jobs are low-wage.  Most can't afford to pay $400 for a resume, so we provide an alternative.  Phyllis did such a wonderful job that she restored my faith in journalism. Everything was written well.  The only problem? The Portsmouth Herald didn't put the information of where people could contact us! It wasn't Phyllis's fault and she felt terrible about it.  But I was still grateful for her work then, for reasons I'm sharing now. 

The Black community here has known for some time that I have been writing this novel; and when I was invited to speak about my process, Phyllis was there, listening intently. I was grateful she took the time to attend. I was not a keynote speaker, mind you, as there were more illustrious, accomplished writers who had more to say than I.  After I had read an excerpt, Phyllis approached me, lauding the visuals of the scene that I had written.  That was great news for me; I was buoyed by her comments, she being a legitimate writer, in my eyes.

Years earlier, I had finished my novel, when it was much longer and not as "finished," but had an offer from a publisher to publish it--without his having even finished reading it.  I could be on my 8th novel by now, of course. Maybe it was my low self-esteem, but I didn't trust that the novel was ready, and declined.  That publisher has since moved on to greener pastures. Still, I was right in my decision. 


I needed someone who could help me make the novel better.

I wanted to publish something about which I can be proud, and just speaking the Queen's English wasn't enough. I know that I sound fairly educated when I write, but that wasn't my goal. I wanted to tell a story: an intricate story with layers, about real personalities that we all know exist--not stereotypes, especially when it came to my Black protagonist, Dr. Lula Logan. When another esteemed critic gave me feedback about my novel's shortcomings in 2007, I went back to the drawing board and "re-thunk" everything.  I returned to Phyllis when I thought I was ready, and asked her, last year, to edit my novel.  And this is what she taught me:


1. Recording what you see is not writing.

I am visual.  When my characters speak to me, I see them. I see their gestures, like a camera closes in on a subject in a film. I had verbatim descriptions of what my characters were doing. If someone picked up a glass, I explained how they did it, when they sipped, and how they set it down again.  If they refilled the glass, I talked about how they did it.  Mind you, there was likely a conversation going on during the pantomime of action, but the description of the visuals tended to get in the way of the story.

2.  Just because the sentence is written doesn't mean it's the final sentence.

Because I write what I see, I didn't realize that, notwithstanding putting ink on paper, I still wasn't writing. My sentences were complete, but still very "incomplete," because I was being too graphic. Sometimes the reader needs a more holistic view of what the writer is trying to say.  For me, I never detached myself from what I had written to actually study the sentence--to make it better.  The only time I did that kind of introspection was while writing descriptions.

3.  Narration by itself is useless if it doesn't advance the story.

The most humbling part of my editing experience was realizing that one paragraph that I had spent hours crafting would end up on the cutting-room floor because it didn't advance the story.  My story is about rural America, whose pace is necessarily slower than that of the big city.  I live in a rural state, so I know of what I speak. There is much beauty to living in a rural area, one being that one can take more time to appreciate the bucolic atmosphere that it affords--but it can be incongruent when you're trying to build suspense. So, gone are the paragraphs describing the countryside that I spent time in Louisiana studying to lend authenticity to my novel. That part hurt the most, I believe. But when I took out those paragraphs that she crossed out in pencil, I had to admit that the story moved more quickly. When writing suspense, the author wants to create anticipation,  not wanting the reader to skip whole pages in order to cut to the chase.

4.  Using too many adjectives mitigates what you're trying to achieve.

"Hot and muggy". "Ecstatic and jubilated". These aren't phrases I actually used, but you get the point. One must have confidence in one's language. By using more than one adjective to describe an object, what I was actually showing was indecision. Own your words. Just choose them wisely. Again, I was seeing, not thinking. Now, I will ponder which word to use, using more introspection than just throwing a word out there that describes what I see.

5.  Too many points of view spoil the story. 

I'm cinematic.  I tend to show and tell.  But as an author, I tended to not only show and tell, but I would give you some insights into the characters' thoughts  That's not a problem if you have a few characters.  But, as Phyllis commented, my novel rivals "Gone with the Wind" in its plethora of personalities. This might be the problem of having listened to the one critic who told me that I needed more back story for my characters, and, being the literal person that I am, by golly, I did that.  Showing the points of view of every person can get crowded.  We can't read the minds of every person we encounter, so I learned that I have to be more careful about entering the minds of every peripheral character in the story.

It will take me another month or two to finish this novel, because I still have some thinking to do. Phyllis cautioned me that some characters have too much screen time, as it were, and I have to figure out what to do about that without sacrificing the plot. I'm trying to weave characters together who have nearly incestuous relationships, in a rural town where lives constantly intersect.  In small towns, that's what happens, and I can attest to it, over and over again.

Just recently, I attended my squash "daughter," Ellie Hayes,' graduation (UNH) dinner and was leaving early to return to my editing. While saying my goodbyes, I realized that I had met the woman at the other end of the table, as we had played squash together in Portland, Maine.  Her husband was the man sitting next to me at the dinner table. Again, coincidentally, he was becoming a Unitarian Universalist the next day (I am Unitarian), at a church whose pastor had visited our Fellowship in New Hampshire a year or two ago, and who had given the most thoughtful and beautiful speech I had ever heard, which had reduced me to quiet tears.  It's a small world.  It's that world that I wanted to write about, albeit removed in place--for me--to  Louisiana, instead of New Hampshire (In the first draft of my novel, New Hampshire did figure prominently, but I followed the advice of someone who told me to keep the mystery in one locale).

Phyllis' novel, Snow Fence Road, about small town life in coastal Maine, convinced me that she had the chops to tackle my subject.  Apparently, my novel is quite a bit more complex than hers, however, and she admitted that it was a challenge to edit it. Based upon what I've learned from her edits, not only was she up to the task, but she taught me how never again make another editor go through the pains she so willingly undertook on my behalf.

This novel will have a sequel, but thanks to Phyllis, it won't take years to write it. 







 

Sucks My Grammar....

This kinda sums me up

I don't get my writing.

Sometimes words I don't even think I know find their way into my writing vocabulary, and I am puzzled as to how they got there. When I'm in doubt as to their source I find my dictionary and marvel that I actually knew the word I had to look up. I give myself a self-congratulatory nod and thank the literary Gods for throwing me a bone, giving me the fleeting feeling that I am a writer.

Then I am reminded of my core belief that big words are for people who really, really, really know how to write. Only those who have mastered the art of sentence construction have the right to play canonical games with their intellectual brethren--of choosing those hard to pronounce words used to puzzle their "known" readers for whom they show their prowess.  I stand aside for those writers, and let them pass. It's taken me most of my life to realize that, even to me, English is my second language, though it is my one and only native one, too.

As a Black American with no known contemporary cultural ties with my ancestors in Africa, or Native-Americans, or other non-English speaking Europeans in my bloodline--I've only had occasion to learn English.  That was until I became fascinated with the languages of other people, and started learning "theirs." As a child, I could not fathom why I didn't have a separate language to speak with my parents, like my Japanese, Mexican, Samoan, German, and Portuguese childhood playmates, whose parents spoke in either broken English or with a heavy accent. Their languages fascinated me. I even made up my own to speak with my sister, a gobbledegook of gibberish interspersed with English words that allowed us to actually understand each other (Example: "kudosudomapalogo-go-to-the-store?").

When I had the opportunity to learn Spanish in junior high school, I jumped at it, and found an ease of learning languages that has informed my career choices and my general interests as a human being. I speak a modicum of French and can wind my way around Italian and Portuguese, falteringly. However, two of the languages I actually learned to speak, Cambodian and Cebuano, do not rely on the same sentence structure as English, which made them much easier for me to learn. All I had to do was figure out the meaning of the words, and somehow, string them together, and I could get the message across.  But I can't say that knowing more languages has helped my writing.


Even before my travels, my shortcomings had been pointed out to me by two professors:  one who admonished me that my ideas were brilliant, but not capable of comprehension; the other who scolded me about using words I didn't understand (I used "blitzerig" for blitzkrieg in a term paper :P).


Another problem for me is that I hear words like I hear music, and I get into a rhythm of writing where sounds are more important than content, at times. Don't ask me where this comes from--although I have romanticized that it is remnants of my forgotten African ancestral language, somehow laying dormant in my DNA that has surfaced to destroy my ability to convey English appropriately.  It has taken me over ten years of writing my novel to realize that I never learned how to write, and I recognize that writing well will be my cudgel to bear for the rest of my life.

What has helped me throughout my life in my travels has hurt me immeasurably as a writer, but my deficiencies really hit home after years of working on my novel with my mother, my unofficial editor. I wish everyone had a mother as intelligent as mine, and who has the patience to explain over and over and over and over again why my sentence structure was less than desirable. My grammar has improved, but, I guarantee you, it will likely never meet my mother's standards.  She is a much more voracious reader than I'll ever be (thank you, law school). Also, she is a classically trained pianist with an ability to break music down to its core elements.  She was also trained to speak and read in German, a necessary linguistic skill when analyzing classical music, particularly, Beethoven, the King of classical music. English being a [half] Germanic language, the strict rules of German grammar have rooted themselves into our English language, but without true understanding by many of us, educated or not. 

I recommend that every writer should find someone in their eighties to edit his or her work.  Someone in that age range likely has a better understanding of grammar, frequented libraries (instead of malls) when younger, and whose education predated the ascendancy of movies and its obliteration of our English language.  Most likely, someone in their eighties and nineties also understands how to diagram a sentence.  My grandmother, who did not attend college, but who did graduate from high school, used to sit down with us and show us how to diagram sentences. When I complained about my difficulties writing, my mother reminded me about diagramming sentences, and to my amazement, I came across a diagram sentence website: Grammar Revolution.

I cannot speak more highly about Grammar-Revolution, and I encourage people to support the website by purchasing materials and spreading the site's gospel. So much of the site has free information to which one can return often, but please consider supporting the site by purchasing, at a minimum, the $19 Diagramming Reference Manual. I think Elizabeth O'Brien has done such a brilliant job of trying to save the English language, at least here, in the USA.  Everyone should spread the word about this website and every writer should be referring to it to assist his or her writing endeavor.  Note that I have never spoken to Ms. O'Brien, and at least as of this writing, she has never heard of me (I'll diagram the whole blog and make corrections before she gets word of me - LOL).  Watch the trailer of their 80-minute film, independently produced and directed by Elizabeth and company: http://www.grammarrevolutionmovie.com/

My quest for improvement, introspection, and perseverance is ongoing.  That's what my writing journey has been about, all along, I believe.  By sharing this blog with you and giving you information to help you along your journey, as readers of my upcoming novel (and present, past and future writers) I hope you are able to take the short-cuts I couldn't take because, I didn't take the time to learn that I knew so little about my native language.

Big words are merely big words. Conveying ideas is what writing is all about. When my novel does surface, you'll see the pains I went through to say what I wanted to say. Thanks to my mother and hired editor, it should all make sense.

Well, hope springs eternal. Whatever that means.

P.S.  Here are some other grammar-related websites and blogs:
http://blogs.kansas.com/grammar/  also known as @GrammarMonkeys
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl also known as @GrammarGirl
http://www.grammarly.com

Grasping at Grief While Researching Death for My Mystery Novel

I'm not proud of the fact that it's taken me 13 years to write a novel. I wish I could say that it was an epic James Michener piece of sprawling historical landscape, or a Tolkien world of other civilizations that would justify a length of time usually reserved to writing a tome. My novel, "Severed," is no tome.  It's what is called a "cozy," with no significant amount of sex or violence to assault the senses, and it will likely be well under 350 printed pages, and/or whatever its eBook page equivalent turns out to be.

drawing source unknown

So what took me so long to write it?

The idea of my protagonist was born after I moved to New Hampshire (and where I have stayed ever since) in 2001 to tend to my mother after she lost her second husband of four years.  My birth parents had been divorced at least seven years by the time my father died in 1988, and I was an adult of 30 years at the time my father's body was found in his apartment, after family members had been trying to reach him.  Had he given any of his children a key to his apartment, there's a chance he would still be alive.  Anyway, on or about the time of my father's death, my youngest sister had visited him, knocking on the door, turning around after no one answered, and I, three thousand miles away, had called him out of the blue, I believe, at about the time he was dying--alone, of a heart attack.

I know enough about death to understand that when it comes, it comes.  End of story.  And as aggrieved as I am about my father's death, I understand that it is a part of life.  We are born.  And then we die. But, perhaps, subconsciously, in researching my novel, I wanted to know a bit more about what happens to the body when someone expires alone and exposed to the elements around him or her.  In my case, I wrote about what I learned what happens to our bodies when we die. Literally. I was not concerned with cosmos, parallel universes, airy-fairy hocus-pocus musings about the after-life.  I was focused upon what happens to our bodies' remains when we are no longer physically able to inhabit this corporeal world. Only years later did I realize that the universe was playing a role in teaching me what happens after death so that I could come to grips with my own father's untimely demise.

It also took me 13 years to write my novel because I had no idea how difficult it is to write. I had no idea that just because words are on paper doesn't mean that they belonged in print. +Marie Brown, a celebrated agent in New York, a close friend of a friend of mine (because, generally, being a friend of a friend is  the only way someone can get an agent's attention), was kind enough to read my manuscript and politely exposed my novel's shortcomings, suggesting that I do more work on my characters' back story, then focus on the plot logistics, which was the nuts and bolts of my novel.

Originally, I had three separate locations for my novel: Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Washington, D.C., and New Hampshire.  A logistical nightmare.  I chose Baton Rouge because I didn't want to have to conjure the stereotypes of Louisiana to give the readers what they are used to reading about the often-storied colorful people in that state.  My novel was not about perpetuating stereotypes, but breaking them.  However, after Marie Brown's wise counsel, it had become apparent that it was also not logistically feasible for Lula to live in Baton Rouge, but work in Cane River country.  I was also concerned that a state-by-state manhunt for a serial killer, although feasible (see my blog post of last week), didn't make sense in mine.  My characters needed to be in one place so their back story, and therefore, place in the mystery novel, could unfold.

Marie Brown critiqued my novel in 2006 or 2007 (I'll have to dig through mounds of research to find her letter to me), and it's taken me this long to re-write it. I dare not burden her with reading it again, as I'm ready for the baby to be born, now, however good or bad it might be.  Truly, I have written the equivalent of three novels, when it is all said and done. Writing is easy for a lawyer.  I can write an emergency motion or a brief within hours.

Writing well? That's another story.

Just because the words are on paper does not mean they are ready. I would have finished years earlier if I hadn't made that ego-driven faux pas of believing that because I could typewrite.


Another reason my novel took so long to write was because, as I explained above, I was writing about alien topics about which I had no knowledge, and I wanted there to be some semblance of authenticity, which required research.  I harangued different forensic anthropologists, relying mostly on Dr. Midori Albert, a professor at the University of North Carolina, in Wilmington, who let me tour her office, and who graciously gave me a book that could answer most of my questions when I became too big a pest. Another consult was +Dr. Jeffrey K. Tomberlin, a forensic entomologist, who divined the clue to my mystery's resolution.  We have never met, although I owe him a debt of thanks. I am certain that my blanket email inquiry to all of the members of the +American Board of Forensic Anthropology, so far back, inspired those with better knowledge of the field to beat me to the chase, as I had promised to hire any consultant in the event that any television series might germinate from my novel. Within 2 years of my inquiry, "Bones," was on television, characters not inspired by me, that's for sure, but I'm sure I was a catalyst to jump starting the idea.  I didn't care. I was still doing my research.

I'm okay with the pace it has taken to write my novel. It's been a learning experience; I understand what happened to my father, which is more important than meeting any self-imposed deadline.  I guess I have held on to my father's tragedy for some time, and now that I understand what happened to him, I feel I can let go.