Adventures in the Written Word
With Danny Williams

(Updated 11-5-24)

 

 




 
 

November 2024 Adventures in the Written Word

 

Well, I’m still plodding along in this NYU novel writing class. You’re tired of hearing about it? Talk to my wife.

These past few days, I’ve been pondering stuff I’m not supposed to be pondering yet. If you run into Professor Willis around campus, do not tell her. She seems to think that having written a couple dozen published novels means she knows more about it than I do, and she says you ought to get a whole draft in place before fiddling with the line-by-line stuff. I’m a rebellious type student. In Miss Perry’s senior English class, 1969-1970, I would write first and make an outline later. So now I’m going ahead and thinking about how to differentiate people’s dialogue (easy) without making it sound contrived and stupid (hard).

My primary setting is Appalachian urban, modeled on Cumberland, Maryland. If you’ve ever driven along the quite short extent of I-68 from Hancock to Morgantown, you know that’s about as Appalacian as it gets. The city setting affords a range of dialect shades, much like my native Huntington, West Virginia area, with townies looking down on the “hick” speech just a couple miles up the ridge, and ridge people looking down on the “uppity” speech of the phony urbanes. Here’s a snippet of where I’m trying to go with a conversation between my narrator, whose speech eerily resembles my own, and a cousin, who eerily resembles my own cousin Julia. (Second cousin, consanguinically speaking.) We’ve ducked out of my father’s funeral doings to hit the tavern next door. The Napier thing is real.

 

I asked, “When are you due?”

Delia lit up, and blew smoke toward the floor. “Sorry. I know you don’t smoke. You always was smart. End of August, but the doctors never get it right. This is my fifth.”

“Well, congratulations. I hope everything goes smooth and easy.”

“Thanks,” she said. “People talk about the cigarettes and drinks, but the four babies I’ve already birthed came out fat as little butterballs. Everett’s eighteen now. You ought to come see us, you his name papa and all. It’s been since last summer.”

Delie said there were nineteen people at the farm these days, in the big house, two trailers, and a school bus. She and her four had a trailer to themselves, a double-wide. “That’s the way it’s going to stay, too. I’m not sharing my place with no man. Ever again. Five will be a plenty. More than a plenty.”

Besides the hogs, they had started keeping goats, for the meat, milk, and cheese. “People think goats are cute, so they think goat milk is better somehow. Stupid city assholes. It’s just milk, is all. And they buy the kids right after they’re weaned. They think it will be like a dog or some shit. They raise the kids a while, then when they see what goats is really like they give them back for free, after they paid for them. Easiest money we ever get. Besides Jamie’s weed, anyway. Oh, I got something for you.”

She pulled a quart canning jar of pale purple liquid out of the shopping bag.

“It’s not ours. Daddy gave that up. This is from some of them Napiers up toward Harveytown. Rye, then they let it set a while with damson plums. Daddy says it’s the best in the county, but there’s others would argue that. Them Maynards has been at it a long time.”

I laughed and asked, “What kind of Napiers?” The unreformed backwoods ones, of course.

It was a joke to outsiders, but dead serious to people Out Wayne, the ones that rhyme with “Crapper” and the ones that rhyme with “rapier.” Like a big part of the plot in all those vast 19th-century Russian novels. On one hand, the vodka-swilling, serf-farming, wild-bearded Asian Cossacks like Daddy Karamazov. On the other hand, the wine-bibbing, French novel-reading, trim-moustached, scientific agricultural Europeans like Levin. There’s still friction between the two tribes Out Wayne, and still people collecting and treasuring czarist memorabilia in Russia. When I was about 12, our across-the-street neighbor came over and said he and his family were switching.

I asked about Delia’s sister Ginny, just a couple years younger than us. “Jail. Sixty days this time. It’s almost over. She was taking in sewing, too, bringing in some money. Her and her man was taking copper wires out of the old mine at Fort Gay. That mine’s been closed since you and me was little. We used to play in there, remember? Play with each other’s privates, mostly. Back before we even had any hair down there. Who’s that singer, sings about going down in a mine with a radio?”

I held up two fingers for the waitress. “Van Morrison. ‘Blue-Eyed Girl.’ Which you certainly are.”

“Yeah, Van Morrison. Ignorant prick. Radio conks out about three steps in, remember? They talk about we ought to recycle stuff, then they want people to leave all that wire down there while some factory makes new. Prick politicians can’t make up their minds which way they want things. Except screwing the little people.”

We drank a little more, ate some truly disgusting bar food, talked about fun times back then in her woods or down by the Ohio in my neighborhood. Then she had to go. “Hogs and goats don’t know nothing about people needing to sleep of a morning. Why don’t you come for the night? Get a real farm breakfast. You might could use a little more weight. It’s not like you could knock me up any worse than I already am.”

There’s a lot going on there. Several well-documented (accurately documented!) features of Appalacian speech: of a morning, might could, double negative, non-standard use of irregular verb forms and personal pronouns. Plus (I hope) some semantic and cultural markers. Copper theft is one of the common crimes in the region, and often from abandoned sources. Putting on weight is often seen as a positive in communities not far removed from times of undernourishment. My mother used to joke that if she spent time with the more rural branches of the family and they all went on about how good she looks, she knew it was time to go on a diet. The same sensibility would value butterballesque babies.

That stuff’s easy for me, having studied it and taught it some in college, plus living it for 72 years (and counting.) A couple other idiolect ideas don’t come so easy, and I’m needing to ponder some.

I have an intelligent high-school dropout in her early 20s, with plans to get her GED and go to college. I aim to have her sometimes use a secondary, non-obvious word, but without veering into parody like poor Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s fabulous play The Rivals. She might call an expensive dinner exquisite or lovely, rather than delicious, or sometimes say “quite” instead of “very.”

A male character’s speech will be modeled on my friend Wally, who often repeats a couple words. We’re all familiar with this practice in reinforcing a point. “And miles to go before I sleep” and all that. But some people practice this casually. “I believe it’s going to be pretty cold tonight. Pretty cold.” “I’ll take one more beer, please. One more.” Like with GED lady, the challenge will be to establish an individual voice without overdoing. (Though at times, Wally really does overdo.) I’ll likely mess that up, but that’s okay. I’m the only one who will ever read this novel. The only one.

One of my closest friends, and really one of the sweetest people I know, spent 30 years on a roofing crew, and uses some form of “fuck” about twice in every sentence. Or did until his grandchildren got old enough to imitate him, anyway. That particular speech pattern and its cousins are easily accessible.

I’ll give an old hippie (no, not me) some “for sure,” and maybe even a “right on,” but I’ll not go so far as “groovy.”

An immigrant from India, like many people for whom English is not their first language, will speak a little more “correctly” than most of us, and use noticeably fewer contractions.

My narrator works for a social service agency, and I’m going to choose one of the main-office professionals to sprinkle psych-speech into his or her conversation. “Let’s dialogue.” “Win-win situation.” “How do you feel about that?” And hypersyllabification, like “preventative” and “interpretative.” (Back in the mid-1700s or before, when every educated person knew classical languages, some wag took four Latin words for useless or worthless, added a noun-forming suffix, and coined “floccinausinihilipilification,” the practice of estimating things as worthless. It remainst the longest non-technical word in most dictionaries. Today’s social science authors can only sigh and dream.)

 

 

Anybody want to read any of this drivel? I’ve got about 45,000 words so far. I’ll dump on you if you like. And as always, I really want to read what you’re working on, or hear about what you’re thinking about working on. In the past couple of weeks I’ve enjoyed one of each. A classmate has answered my plea and allowed me to read and react to a substantial piece of her work, and a Facebook buddy from way back home in Wayne County has shared her quite surprising story idea.

 

In other news, I’ve taken on the task of editing an 850-page biography of a poet. I’m not at all familiar with the lady or her work, but in a few months I’ll be possibly the world’s number two authority. More on this later, whether you ask for it or not. (Editing stokes my “Jeopardy” fantasies. A category devoted to this poet. Or to the impact of petroleum production on the environment of 1920s southern California. Or current scientific knowledge of stuttering. Or the European political scene in the 1520s. Or . . . )

 

 

Watch your Language

“I’m writing a book about all the things I should have done in my life. I’m calling it my oughtabiography.” (Facebook quip from somewhere.)

 

“Don’t touch yourself. Ask the staff.” (Sign on a jewelry display.)

 

It’s official. Most dictionary editors now admit that “literally” can mean “figuratively.” (Jimi Hedrix: “If six turn out to be nine, I don’t mind. I don’t mind.” (Another example of Wally-reduplication.))

 

 
New—to me anyway—words and usages:

(The first one is for us writers and readers.)

 

 

Hopepunk — A subgenre of speculative or dystopian fiction in which optimism, kindness, and collaboration can effectively create a better future.

 

Jawn – An unspecified object, like thingamajig or whatsis. Hand me that jawn. Used in the Philadelphia area for 20 years, and now becoming more generalized. A counterpart, and maybe variant, of “joint,” used in the New York urban are, as in “a Spike Jonze joint,” a something or other from Spike Jonze. Not weed.

 

Greenwashing – Back-formed from “whitewashing.” The practice of promoting a brand, movement, etc. with environmentalism as a ploy to divert attention from policies and practices which are in fact anti-environmental.

 

Churn rate – The percentage of employees which leave a company in a given time, usually a year.

 

Golden handcuffs – Back-formed from “golden parachute.” Bonuses, insurance plans, flexible hours, child care, in-house cafeterias, and other benefits which tend to discourage employees leaving a position. A ploy to reduce the churn rate.

 

Lavender ceiling – Back-formed from “glass ceiling.” An unacknowledged upper limit to professional advancement for LGBTQ+ people.

 

Hostile architecture – Design elements intended to prevent or discourage unwanted public behavior, like sleeping or loitering.

 

Here’s me: Danny Williams editorwv@hotmail.com

 

 

 

October 2024 Adventures in the Written Word

 

Well, I’m still into this novel writing thing. You may be sick of hearing about it, it’s been going on so long, but you didn’t pay anything to get in here, so you probably have no legal recourse. Who would have thought writing a novel would be so time-consuming? I was figuring a month, one of those 31-day months. Write 2,000 words a day for 30 days, then on the 31st clean up any typos. It’s not working out that way. But with all this time I’m putting in, I think I’m learning some things.

Learned Thing One: Get as many people as you can to read what you write, as soon as possible after you write it. I’m in this online novel writing class out of New York University (Go, Fighting Violets!), so in the past couple of days I’ve shared ten pages of my work with the other students, and some of their comments are coming in. One excellent one: The first third of the book parallels my life from about 1983-1986. My narrator told another person about going off for a couple of years with a woman. I included the woman’s (fictionalized) name, location, and place of employment. Those things are important fragments of my past, but I’m supposed to be writing for other people, not myself, and nobody else would care where I went and with whom. (Unless I like, went to Antarctica with Tina Turner or something.)

Another comment from more than one reader was that they had trouble following the time shift as my narrator shifted from 1983 to 1976 and back in telling a story. I looked back over my writing, and the whole thing is perfectly clear if you read it carefully. So I need to find a way to either make my writing clearer, or make everybody in the world read more carefully. I’m still debating which way to go with this.

Another reader wants some conflict in my novel. Well, there kind of is some, but it’s unfolding over a span of years. My narrator is living two lives. In one, he’s an old child, an aimless, rootless 30-something lurching from high to high and bed to bed. In the other, he’s a loving, conscientious live-in caregiver to a group of disabled adults. That’s a conflict, obviously, and the arc of the novel is the guy ending up choosing a side, or having one chosen for him. On a computer I had about 20 years ago, my daughter and I played a volleyball game—a conflict--where a cute little animal would hit the ball, and the ball would go up . . . and up . . . and up . . . then down . . . The ball would hang in the air for 15 seconds. We thought that was pretty funny, but I’m not counting on my readers to be so easily amused. I’ll add a fight with a lover, or a personal conflict at work, or a tornado, or something.

Then last night my classmates commented during our class time. I got so much great feedback, I can’t even sort it out to summarize it. I do know I need to tear down a section about pages three through twelve and reassemble the bits in a way that potentially makes sense. All these people are writers, so they have more understanding of the process than the average person. But get a variety of people to sample your work, if you can. Presumably, you want your writing to appeal to a wider audience than the literary elites who are taking a college class in novel writing. Some of them will have reactions which are not useful, but that’s okay. Move on.

How about you? Would you be willing to read something I’ve written (besides this, I mean) and possibly comment? Just tell me how much you want.

 

Good Stuff for Free: I’m still offering two hours of my work, which at times I’ve been paid for, gratis. Send me something you’re working on. Or tell me about something you’d like to work on but can’t decide on which way to get started. I’ll look at it and send you some encouragement for sure, and some potentially helpful suggestions if I can think of any. Minimum wage in West Virginia is 8.50, so you’re saving 17 dollars.

But Wait! There’s more!

 

I’ll also send you a book from my attic. I’d like to send you 50, but that many stamps won’t fit on the box.

 

 

Watch Your Language

 

“Random,” a word the meaning of which has been generally misunderstood, is now moving toward having essentially no meaning at all. Ask someone to make ten dots at random on a sheet of paper, and they’ll probably hit all four quadrants. That’s not randomness, but it nods toward the idea. Now suddenly, as far as I can tell, “random” has shifted into unrelated meanings, like “surprising,” or “unexpected.” And just in the past weeks, I’ve read or heard about a person being random. Used this way, random seems to apply to a person somewhere on the unconventional-odd-quirky-flaky-weird continuum.

 

Headline: Local church is ending donations to help hurricane Helene victims

First sentence: The hampton road baptist church in Fairmont is holding a donation drive for the victims of hurricane helene in North Carolina. – WDTV News

Leaving the “s” off “sending” is a simple mistake, but it’s still there, uncorrected, four days later. And yes, someone at the place apparently believes capital letters cost more.

 

About capital letters: In architecture, the “capital” is the horizontal piece on top of the columns. The classical Greeks, who built a lot of columniferous structures, invented a parallel alphabet—capital letter—-to help out the poor shmoes who had to carve inscriptions on the capitals of buildings. And the idea persists. If you’re writing with a hammer and chisel, you’d much rather deal with ABCDEFGH than abcdefgh.

 

“[Somebody], 47, of Suffolk, Va., has been charged with second murder in the shooting of [Somebody Else], of Charleston, at the . . . ” – WV Metronews

Another simple, understandable mistake, left uncorrected. I did newspaper work back when, once something is published, it might as well be chiseled in stone. (Maybe in capital letters.) There was nothing to do about mistakes but wait until tomorrow and apologize. I can’t figure out people having the ability to make mistakes disappear, and not using it.

 

 

 

September 2024 Adventures in the Written Word

 

I know, I know, I keep jerking you around with the name of this trifle. It started out as “ . . . Editing,” because I call myself an editor, but then all this other stuff started sneaking in. Nobody’s forcing you to read it, though Meredith Sue Willis highly recommends it. (She also highly recommends me to work with you on your book, or edit it after you’ve got a draft. See the bottom of this column.)

 Dreama Frisk’s “Before We Left the Land” continues its sinuous way through the publication process at Moonshine Cove. Tidying up little details, planning publicity and sales, and all like that. From my standpoint, the publishers could be a lot more helpful without straining their workload too heavily. We want to know the cover price, and we want to be able to point readers to Moonshine Cove to pre-order the book. Dreama’s lining up speaking opportunities, and telling people how to buy the book and how much it costs seems like basic information. As an editor I’m smooth, efficient, and confident. As a whatever it is I’m trying to help Dreama with now, not so much, as she could attest.

 Still working on my own novel. You’re probably wondering how it could take so long. Well, it’s because I apparently do not prioritize doing it. But that’s about to change. I’ve enrolled in Meredith Sue’s New York University novel writing class. It’s going to be enlightening and fun, plus I paid money for it—two incentives to straighten up and get to work. In fact, I’m leaving tomorrow morning for three days alone at a cabin near Romney, and I’m taking only one book and no musical instruments. And there’s no internet. I have about 20,000 words integrated into the novel’s structure, and another 10,000 I’ve not yet put into the sequence. I’ll come out of my brief self-sequestration with much more.

Also, as an official tuition-paying New York University student, I’m happy to see that our athletic teams are known as the Violets.

 

One little technique in this novel. It’s first person, and the narrator speaks in clipped language, leaving out words which aren’t necessary for communicating the essential information. Like this, when a guy goes home after work and the FBI, state police, and city police are in front of his building.

I wrote, “There were three other units in the place, but no doubt he figured, what are the odds?” and in revision clipped it to, “Three other units in the place, but no doubt he figured, what are the odds?”

Then I’ll be sure to turn this voice off when I’m supplying dialogue for another character.

 

Another before and after.

“She quit after she was in Kroger once, and saw a man crouching down talking to his five-year-old and pointing at her.”

“She quit after she saw a man in Kroger crouching down, whispering to his five-year-old boy and pointing at her.”

(And it’s “Kroger.” No “S.”)

 

Editing “she was in Kroger and she saw a man,” to “she saw a man in Kroger” does a couple of things I like. It’s shorter, punchier, in keeping with the narrator’s diction, it eliminates having two clauses with the same subject, and it disappears the wimpy verb “was.” (She quit stripping, in case you wondered.)

A couple times (not “A couple of times.” See what I did there?) I’ve written about problems with names. Mostly, too many names, and names of characters who are just passing through. Here’s an episode with the manager of a store where the narrator worked. Just seemed like I had to name him. I started with “On my first day at the mall, Boyd, the store manager, said . . . ” On revision, I tucked the name lower in the episode. I hope this makes it more forgettable. Took out “on,” too, in keeping with the diction.

           

My first day at the mall, the manager said, “Let’s go to Pappy’s. I’ll buy pizza and beer.” Okay, I do know how to drink a beer, so we went down the hall, past a new kiosk selling nothing but bicentennial-themed cheap goods—red, white and blue sunglasses, bandanas, ball-point pens, lighters, shoelaces, and stuff.

We took a booth, and Boyd said, “How about a pitcher of Miller,” went to the counter, and came back with two pitchers and two glasses.

 

 

Watch your Language

Chattanooga Times Free Press

“ ‘The suicide began on the bridge and was completed upon the person hitting the ground,’ police spokesperson Sgt. Victor Miller said in an email.”

 

An article mentions the golden lancehead viper, and asserts,

“It only exists in Brazil’s Snake Island and the island now has the highest concentration of the venomous snakes in the world.”

Can’t argue with that logic.

 

Last sentence of a WDTV Web story about a guy who ran off into the woods when police came to arrest him:

“It wasn’t clear why he ran from police.”

 

“Among those arrested in the big media drug bust yesterday were Speedy Legg and Crystal Cook.” (Morgantown Dominion-Post)

The constables might want to take another look at those IDs before accepting any bail money.

 

A good one from ten years ago, which I just found in a cobwebby corner of my cloud. We all know that newspapers are doing anything they can to attract readers.

What happened: The Governor was preparing to take off in his small airplane, noticed he had a flat tire, and taxied off the runway so he wouldn't hold up other traffic.

The headline: Plane with Manchins Aboard Blows Tire, Runs Off Runway

(Charleston Gazette)

 

By the way, before I forget: I’m a book editor, and I really want to at least take a look at what y’all are working on. Send me whatever, from a book idea you’ve been nursing to a complete manuscript, and I’ll put a couple hours into looking it over and thinking about it, and give you some feedback. For Free!

 

Danny Williams

editorwv@hotmail.com

 

 

August 2024 Adventures in Editing (reading, writing, whatever)

 

Not really much editing going on these days. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: If people don’t want to ask for my help, nobody can stop them.

I did have some people take me up on my shockingly generous TWO FREE HOURS OF WORK offer, and we talked some about the small-town history they’re writing. They’re in the fact-gathering stage, shuttling down to the archives in Charleston to look through old newspapers. They’ll organize the book chronologically, so it’ll actually be a scrapbook, not a history, and I think that’s more appropriate, since they’re not historians. I did tell them that one distraction I’ve seen in similar books was interrupting the narrative with long lists of names or data—election winners, school sports athletes, soldiers going to war. Some of this can go into an appendix, like year-by-year lists of town council members. There are plenty of similar projects out there, and I’m sure these nice folks will do a fine job.

It's a mere two months now until Dream Frisk’s “Before We Left the Land” is loosed upon the world, and we’ve been doing a few things. We want to use the cover image in pre-publication publicity, but the publisher, Moonshine Cove, says that the design is the last thing they do, a week or two ahead. So we’re having a freelancer do the cover, a North Carolina guy whose work I know and admire. That way we can share the cover with libraries, bookstores, and the like. The Moonshiners are a little miffed, but they’ll get over it.

(Email me if you want to get hooked up with the designer. He says he’s open to chatting about what you need or want, and figuring out if it’s something he can do.)

Promoting the novel is kind of a sticky subject. It’s the Moonshine Cove people, not Dreama, who have a real stake in selling it. They need to recoup their expense and earn a little profit, of course, and until that happens Dreama will be getting a mere trickle of royalties. And she can’t sell directly to bookstores herself. She can buy as many copies as she wants for half price—a typical arrangement with a small publisher—and bookstores expect to buy at 40 percent off. That ten percent won’t pay us to communicate with the stores and ship them the books, so it’ll be Moonshine Cove’s fulfillment department handling that.

One way Dreama can promote the book and make a few dollars, or at least not lose many, is by selling copies directly to readers at public readings and appearances, and that’s why I’m lining up all the state’s bookstores, libraries, historical societies, and such. (I’m sort of ripping Dreama off on this. She’s paying me to do it, then I’ll have the information to include in the billable “work” I do for other authors of state- and regional-interest works. If you see Dreama, don’t tell her.)

As you’re no doubt tired of hearing, I’m sort of writing a novel myself. I’m still not loving it the way I do writing nonfiction stuff like magazine articles, music documentation, and trifles like this one, but it’s getting better. I wrote many disconnected bits, planning to organize them “later.” A couple weeks ago I simply listed every month from April 1983 through January 1990, so now I have specific spots to jam things into. Sort of an outline, but not like the format we learned in sixth grade. My fellow geezers and geezettes will remember: I. A. B. 1. 2. a. b. 3. C. 1.

I don’t spend nearly enough time writing (exercising, cleaning, woodworking, flossing . . . ), but it no longer feels like torture. Sometimes I take the notebook computer and write at the Blue Moose coffee shop or my daughter’s little restaurant, and other times I get to it late at night. I write 500 words an hour, an easy pace which allows time to stop and ponder once in a while, or go back and reword. I’m still doing that too often, stopping or retreating instead of going full-steam ahead and leaving the revisions for later. Here’s about 500 words out of a thousand I wrote yesterday evening, and I swear I am going to share this and move on, not read it again and start fiddling with it. It fictitiously conflates two experiences from my resident disability service days, helping a low-functioning fragile diabetic lose weight and tone up a little, and deviously interfering with the director of another facility. The excerpt is abrupt because it’s excised from the middle of a chapter and, as Gordon Ramsay loves to shout into the face of a contestant on a cooking show, it’s raw.

Thing one, I decided, was to make Jorge’s mealtimes enjoyable, and not an occasion for lusting after everyone else’s food. The nutritionist sent over some sample 1,800-calorie menus, but I already had a pretty good idea from losing and gaining five pounds repeatedly myself. He had a Three Stooges videotape he enjoyed—the one where they’re making fun of Hitler—so my plan was to feed him in the living room in front of the TV, watching the silliness, then keep him occupied and out of the dining room until the table was cleared. Caitlyn volunteered to sit with him and chat, and pretty soon latched onto Jorge ad a special buddy. There were some murmurs at first from the other seven about wanting to eat in front of the television, but pretty soon it was all just part of the day.

Jorge rode his exercise bike every day,and stretched his big fitness rubber bands. He really got a kick out of walking down the lane to look at the cows, and Caitlyn invented a brilliant game. She and Jorge got down on all fours and mooed, then got back up. Then did it again. At first Jorge had to crawl to the couch to pull himself up, but by the end of the first month’s record-keeping he could laboriously get up with just a little bit of a helping hand.

But he still was not losing weight. In fact, he gained two pounds in his first month. I began to see some tarnish on my problem-solving medal. It was the middle of the night when the light bulb went on. For seven hours every day, he was at his day program in the old mall.

I made some excuse to go there and chat with Beverly, the director, at lunch time. There were about 15 clients, sitting around two long tables with the lunches they brought from their homes. Jorge bolted his PBJ, pretzels, juice, and apple slices, then started gathering in everything left behind by the ones with low appetites.

“I know that’s bad,” Beverly said when I pointed this out. “But what can I do about it? We can’t physically restrain him.”

“I don’t know. One way would be to have one of your workers walk down the mall with him, maybe to the tables where the Subway used to be, and chat with him while he eats. That’s kind of what we do at the house.”

“All well and good for you to say, but I don’t have any extra people. And I don’t think any of the workers would want to do that, anyway.”

Sherry Fieldstone’s door was half open. I knocked, stepped in, and said, “Got a minute or two?”

I presented the problem as a case of Beverly needing one more worker at the day program. Of course Sherry knew what I was doing, ratting out a coworker, but she stuck to the script. It’s a rotten thing to do, but this was literally a matter of like and death for Jorge, so fuck Beverly and her feelings.

Sherry just said, “I’ll see that something is worked out.”

And apparently she did. Jorge started losing two or three pounds a month, and turning some fat into muscle with his cow game and other fun exercises my brilliant staff invented. When he looked like he could handle it, I moved him to an upstairs bed, and started making him empty all the little wastebaskets into a big bag every day. And I bought another Three Stooges tape, one with Margaret Dumont catching a lot of cream pie to the face,

 

The New York Times published a list of the best 100 books of the century so far. I have a problem with “best.” All high jumpers are trying to jump as high as they can, so the best is the one who jumps the highest. But writers are not all trying to do the same thing, so it’s like saying this high jumper is better than that violin bow rehair technician. But “best of” lists get clicks, so what I think doesn’t matter.

The books are good ones, as far as I can say. I’ve read 14 of them, and may read a couple more after seeing them. But it’s very much a New York Times-ish list, and that’s a severe limitation. Heaviosity reigns. Mostly it’s novels, which is okay, but novels you would read to better understand the human condition or something, nothing you would read for diversion or joy. No Stephen King or Elmore Leonard. Nothing which might make a reader (gasp!) laugh. The Road, truly a fine novel, but none of McCarthy’s also-fine un-grim work. Nonfiction is dominated by current affairs, memoirs or biographies of important people, and books aimed at a better understanding of the human condition or something. Almost no science, and none of it with any hint of fun. No Mary Roach! Really! No Bill Bryson, not even the impudently ambitious and staggeringly successful A Short History of Nearly Everything.

But it’s a list of books some highly literate people think are worth reading, so check it out (easy to find with a couple of obvious search terms) and maybe find another tome or two to add to the tower next to your chair.

 

 

Watch Your Language

“Data” can now be singular. “A disturbing new data.” Okay by me. I’m actually good enough at Latin to read it for enjoyment—or for a better understanding of the classical or medieval human condition—but “a disturbing new datum” just sounds, as Tim Walz might put it, weird.

 

 

Headline and first sentence about the same story from two news sources.

Marshal Service offers reward for capture of wanted man

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The U.S. Marshal Service has offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a Rand, W.Va. man wanted for violent crimes. (WV Metronews)

 

Man Wanted Out of Rand

Rand, W,Va.

A man is wanted out of Rand, West Virginia. (WBOY-TV)

 

NYT headline:

Elon Musk endorses Trump, moments after shooting at his rally

 

 

“Synchronized swimming” has been redubbed “artistic swimming.” Another tough blow to the definition of “art.” Search the internet for “Spain swim stairway.”

 

 

Bogus review on an internet ad: “This literally decimated my bedbug infestation.” – W. F.

 

Well goody. If he had 100,000 bedbugs, now he’s got only 90,000. “Decimation” means killing one in ten. Romans decimated opposing armies that refused to surrender, or the men in rebellious territories. Rome’s power was colonial. They needed their tributary states to remain healthy and productive, and keep the goods rolling in to Rome, so no way were they going to totally cripple a population. Presumably, “W. F.” does not want a healthy and productive bedbug colony.

These reviews, with the commenter identified by initials, are of course fake. At a small publisher where I worked, the boss insisted on putting a lot of these on the back covers of our books. “Couldn’t put it down. – D. W.” I never believed these things could be much of an influence on a buyer’s decision. As a writer, I always agitated for giving me more room to entice readers with my subtly manipulative prose.

 

 

Some new or new-ish words and usages. New to me, anyway, but it’s people about 15 to 25 generating most of the neologisms, and I’m quite a bit past that. You dig? Far out!

 

grammable – memorable, interesting, worthy of sharing on a social media platform like Instagram.

Blursday – a day indistinguishable from others, or one in which you’re not sure what day it is.

underboob – the underside of a breast when exposed by a crop top or other revealing garment.

doomscroll – to spend excessive time viewing and reading online content that makes one sad, angry, or apprehensive.

kiss-and-cry – the area adjacent to an ice rink where figure skaters wait to see their scores.

 

 

Watching my own language: I no longer use “ghetto” in referring to a place where people live in crowded conditions. Melvin Goldman, whose Holocaust survival memoir I worked on, was bothered when he heard the word used that way. “My God, we had electric fences and machine guns, and daily beatings.” And after five years in the ghetto, his next home was Auschwitz.

 

Danny Williams, editorwv@hotmail.com

 

That’s where to get hold of me for things like my two hours of work for free, where you send me what you’ve got—an idea for something you think you might want to write, a completed manuscript, or something in between—and I look at it a while and give you some comments on where I think it is and where I think it might go. Or ask me or tell me anything. I have a well-reasoned and insightful opinion on every topic.

 

 

Adventures in Editing, July 2024

 

I just got back from a week at one of my favorite places, a cabin in the woods at Middle Ridge Campground, near Romney, West Virginia. I’ve been treating myself to this every year for a while now, and usually I spend a lot of time there on one activity. Last year it was fiddling, and by the end of the week I was almost an average fiddler. (But this is West Virginia, the beating heart of old-time (pre-Bluegrass) music. “Average fiddler” here is a distinction, like “average surfer” in Hawai’i, or “average nice person” in Canada.)

This year it was writing, mostly on one of the embryonic novels spawned in Meredith Sue’s writing class this spring. Like playing fiddle—and probably like surfing, or being nice—it gets more complex and challenging the deeper you go into it.

It’s first-person, informed by a period 40 or so years back when I was heavily drinking, drugging, and generally screwing up, and also doing an excellent job as a live-in caretaker for three severely developmentally disabled men. My experiences form the background of the story, and some episodes are drawn directly from history, but this is not a memoir or a roman à clef. Like me, the protagonist will muddle along and eventually find a better way to be, but he is not going to end up 40 years later sitting in my living room, drinking lemonade, and writing this column.

I’ve drafted several episodes, without knowing clearly where they will fit into the finished work. Probably this is the wrong way, but I don’t really hold my fiddle bow properly, either. The wasted-life characters will come into the story and, as in real life, over a few years they will one by one die, go to prison or a care institution, or move on with their lives. The three clients and the setting will be quite close to literal history. Then the story shifts to total fiction as the narrator moves to an eight-person house, which I experienced only as an occasional substitute.

Last month I shared a couple of lessons I learned from Meredith Sue’s class: Don’t overload the reader with names, and let people do little bits of business during a conversation. A challenge I recognized this month is mixing summaries of conversations with transcriptions. Dialogue is the backbone of fiction, and all that*, but there’s a reason people don’t much read books of plays. Sometimes you need to take the reader by the hand and say, “Okay, let’s move along now.”

Here’s one of the bits from the week. First is the raw text as I wrote it, then I’ll show the results of my initial editing the next day. The episode is factual. Except for names, it’s told just as I remember it. (The doll kind of creeped me out.)

 

[raw]

Christmas morning, 1987, about 10, I was just cruising around the empty streets. I needed to get out of the group home because staff kept asking questions, like when to put the turkey in the oven (11:30, as I’d said many times) and whether I thought Emily would throw up at the table (depends on whether the worker next to her could keep her from overloading her mouth and cheeks.) I saw Drake’s car at the Tap House. He and Linda were drinking Busch Lite from cans (they claimed they never got sick, as long as they stuck to that), playing with a large doll. When somebody spoke, the doll would turn its face in that direction. I decided to have a draft and hear the story.

Linda had a daughter, Amanda, three years old. Or maybe four. Amanda lived with her father, and Linda could only see her by visiting them. So she just didn’t visit much, because it would confuse the girl. She couldn’t remember if she had gone there on Amanda’s birthday or not, but she was sure the birthday was in April. So they were having a few, then Drake would drive to Amanda’s and wait in the car while Linda went in for her visit.

“That’s cool as shit!” Drake was really into the doll by this point.

Linda said, “Is it slowing down? I think it’s slowing down.”

Drake said, “Shit! Fucking Japanese batteries. What does it take? Oh, it’s two C cells. Everett, could you spare a couple dollars for batteries?”

I threw a five on the table, said, “Merry Christmas, you two. And tell Amanda Merry Christmas, too.” Then I left, because I didn’t want to watch them take the five to the bar.

 

[with initial edits]

Christmas morning, 1987, about 10, I was just cruising around the empty streets and smoking a bowl. I needed to get out because staff kept asking questions, like when to put the turkey in the oven (11:30, as I’d said many times) and whether I thought Emily would throw up at the table (depends on whether the worker next to her could keep her from gorging.) I saw Drake’s car at the Double Vision. Christmas morning, the only places to get a drink were high-end hotel bars and places like Double Vision or Meda’s. Drake and Linda were drinking Busch Lite from cans (they claimed they never got sick, as long as they stuck to that), and playing with a large doll. When somebody spoke, the doll would turn its face in that direction. I got a draft and sat down.

It turns out Linda had a daughter, Amanda, three years old. Or maybe four. Amanda lived with her father, and Linda could only see her by visiting them. (“Damn CPS cunt says I can’t even take my own daughter out.”) So she didn’t visit much, because it would confuse the girl. She couldn’t remember if she had gone there on Amanda’s birthday, but she was sure the birthday was in April, and she was definitely going to be there this time. So they were having a few, then Drake would drive to Amanda’s and wait in the car while Linda went in for her visit.

“That’s cool as shit!” Drake was really into the doll by this point.

Linda said, “Is it slowing down? I think it’s slowing down.”

Drake said, “Shit! Fucking Japanese batteries. What does it take? Oh, it’s two C cells. Everett, could you spare a couple dollars for batteries?”

I threw a five on the table. Then I realized they were waiting for me to leave so they could take the five to the bar. I drained the rest of my beer, buttoned my coat and said, “Merry Christmas, you two. And tell Amanda Merry Christmas, too.”

 

Comments on some of the edits:

“Smoking a bowl.” I probably was.

Deleted “group home,” because that was clearly my setting.

“Gorging” is more economical, and has a sort of onomatopoeic aptness. G-g-g.

“Tap House” sounds too nice. The actual place is still open, so I did not name it.

“…just didn’t visit…” “Just” is usually meaningless clutter. I always search a finished piece for it (and others, as you know from my article on using the Search feature).

Visit rules needed specification, plus Linda had that c-word handy at all times.

“…and playing with…” Going for a terse, clipped voice, I am omitting things like “and,” but I decided to insert this one. Don’t ask why.

End is better. They would not have taken my money to the bar with me sitting there.

I’m pretty well happy with this bit, and expect to keep it.

 

[Epilogue: Both are long dead. Drake OD’ed. Linda killed a woman in a bar fight, and died in prison.]

 

Another raw piece. This is from 20 years later, when I was doing day programming in a different city, so I need to find a way to wedge it into the 1980s, because I really want Guy there.

 

Guy Schaffer. His IQ is down to where it doesn’t matter anymore. Fifteen, thirty, it’s all pretty much the same. Below some level, maybe about fifty, the relevant tests are adaptive behavior assessments. “Uses tableware properly/eats with a spoon/eats with fingers/must be fed.” Stuff like that. Toileting and bathing. And an oddball or two. “Sits beside anything which vibrates.” “Is afraid of a particular color.”

Guy has puzzling verbal abilities, and he shows a wide but spotty awareness of the world. He calls me “Ben Franklin,” presumably because of my hair. Grace, a round-figured worker who wears loose tops and maxi-skirts, is “Mama Cass.” Skip Johnson, my supervisor, is “the warden.” Guy exhibits very slight pill-rolling behavior from his long use of psychotropics, rubbing his thumb and index finger together almost imperceptibly. I asked him once what he had there, and he said, “a molecule.”

In a waiting room once, I handed him a Sports Illustrated basketball story, and he read it aloud flawlessly, not hesitating on “incomprehensible.” When I asked him what it was about, he said, “peanut butter fudge.” I read everything I can find on the mystery of disabled brains—which I wish were called nonconforming brains or something—and I’m grateful for the work of researchers, but I much prefer observing these miracles from the perspective of a friend and roommate.

 

[Epilogue: Guy had a fragile-looking neck--long, slender, and curved forward like a swan. At the annual IPP, his outside-the-agency social worker brought up bed rails, but actually signing off on the expenditure and getting it done never happened. He fell out of bed one night and died.]

 

I’ve got more examples, but I’m taking up your time on Meredith Sue’s site, and I don’t want to over-stay my welcome. Email me, and I’ll give you more than you want, probably. And as always, tell me about your own work.

 

Danny Williams

editorwv@hotmail.com

 

***

Having trouble finding a publisher? Let me try to help. Or publish yourself. Needing to do this doesn’t mean your work is unworthy, it means acquisition editors are not infallible. Beatrix Potter financed printing Peter Cottontail herself, after giving up finding a publisher.

***

Watch Your Language

 

RIP “Healthful.” A headline, “Are Avocados Healthy?” reminded me of the useful word “healthful,” which had nearly disappeared. Before the word’s demise, the adjective “healthy” referred to an organism itself, and “healthful” to its effect on another organism, usually people. An avocado tree with some sort of blight might not be healthy, but its fruit could still be healthful. A healthy virus might be the opposite of healthful. Seems to me like a useful distinction, but apparently it’s one the hive mind of our language decided we can do without.

 

The slick magazine "WV Living" said that on Friday evening at the Folk Festival there are "more than 50" banjo and fiddle contests. Apparently, they saw that there are "over-50" contests, as in open to those above 50 years old. If they had looked a little farther down the schedule, they’d have seen that Saturday there would be “under 50” contests. All these glossy local "lifestyle" mags seem to lavish resources on production, then not make even a pretense of reading over their stories before publishing them. Grrrr.

 

From a news story about a couple of guys arrested for shooting at each other: "Detectives believe the incident resulted from a disagreement between the two men." [Dominion-Post]

 

“This match will be Southgate’s 100th in charge of England. Of the previous games, he has used a back three or a back five in exactly a third of them - 33.” [BBC]

 

Unfortunate headline typo: “Julia Roberts Finds Her Life And Her Holes Get Better With Age.” [Jamestown, N.Y. Post-Journal.]

 

Check out this guy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter

  ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,……………..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!,,,,,,,,,,;;;;;;;;;;;???????????

 

Best book dedication ever. “To my wife Marganit and my children Ella Rose and Daniel Adam, without whom this book would have been completed two years earlier.”  Joseph J. Rotman, An Introduction to Algebraic Topology.

 

I wax somewhat obsessive about ambiguous statements, even those where the secondary meaning is unlikely. Reading the headline "Time Flies In the Workshop," I imagined “time” as an imperative, and pictured myself with a stopwatch and a clipboard.

 

Anything groovy or grody happening in language where you are? Share, please.

 

Danny Williams

editorwv@hotmail.com

 

 

 

 

Adventures in Editing, June 2024



Here’s about the most exciting news an editor can report: We’re getting published!
For the past few months, I’ve been working with author Dreama Wyant Frisk on her manuscript “Before We Left the Land,” a novel set in rural West Virginia in the pivotal early 1940s. I’ve alluded to the project before, and now I have Ms. Frisk’s permission to tell you about the process and the result.

It was a strong, nearly-complete work when she brought it to me. I had very little to say about her plot, setting, characters, or pacing. After the zillion hours a writer spends on a book-length project, their eyes are so close to the page that they’re not able to see the big picture clearly. A good editor—and yes, I am one—can always find a few spots where a little polish could be applied and buffed. And as with every good writer I’ve edited, a lot of my work consisted of just repeating, “You are good at this. Your work is good. Trust yourself. Do not go back and try to make anything clearer. Take a break. Try to set this completely aside for a week while I look at it, and when you pick it up again you’ll see that it’s a damn fine piece of work.” And I get paid for this.

Finally, I wrestled the thing away from Ms. Frisk and set about finding and wooing a publisher. As usual, she was still contemplating making some changes. I understand. I build musical instruments, primarily the Appalachian dulcimer. One time I looked at one of my dulcimers hanging on the wall, and decided it would have sounded better if I had used a different kind of wood for the top. So I took it down, picked up a chisel, and gouged out the top. It’s got a different top now and sounds pretty good, but I’ll never know if it’s actually better than it was. So yeah, I totally get that humans have a sometimes counterproductive urge to second-guess ourselves.

But I persevered with Ms. Frisk, and prepared submissions for publishers. Somewhere in Meredith Sue’s ocean of information, there’s a piece I wrote on producing a generic proposal for a publisher. Of course they all have their own requirements, so thing one is to read these requirements, read them again, prepare your package according to the instructions, then read the instructions again. Most publishers want the first ten pages, or the first chapter, or the first chapter plus one other chapter of the submitter’s choice. Some don’t want to see anything of the manuscript. All of them need a pitch, an assurance that it’s a good manuscript, that it fits well with what they do, and that they won’t lose money publishing it.
In late April, I submitted “Before We Left the Land” to a publisher I felt sure would be especially interested. They replied, and said that some of their people were professors, so they planned to meet and discuss proposals after the college semester was over. Through some combination of over-confidence and laziness, I did not appeal to any other publishers.

When I had not heard from them by May 20, two weeks after the semester was over, I sent a proposal to Moonshine Cove, a small company which had published some Appalachian-set novels in the past. Their submission requirements were quite detailed, which meant more work for me but in a sense made the task easier. I didn’t have to make any guesses about exactly what they wanted. Typeface, indentations, a paragraph-by paragraph outline of an ideal proposal, it was all there. Good advice in any situation: Make the proposal some of your best writing, but don’t try to be cute. They ask for the proposal letter plus the first ten pages of the manuscript. Here’s a key paragraph from the plea I composed:

In the Prologue to “Before We Left the Land,” a Sunday afternoon football broadcast is interrupted by the announcement that Pearl Harbor has been bombed. This is one more portent that the generations-old ways of living are about to end. Modern times have already touched McCann’s Run, a very real place near Weston, West Virginia. There’s electricity. One neighbor has a telephone. Another has a car, in addition to the mandatory pickup truck. More importantly for the Bancroft family, Will and his family have moved away for factory work. Along with the early passing of Will’s brother, there’s a generation missing, leaving teenagers Carl and Junior as the only working males in the household. When Carl enlists, June and his sisters shoulder the load of operating the farm, while trying to hold on to a bit of their personal lives. By the end of the novel, the Bancrofts and their neighbors—like all of America—face a future for which no lessons from the past have prepared them.


I told you “Before We Left the Land” was a strong manuscript, didn’t I? The Moonshine Cove people replied the next day, May 21, that they wanted to see the whole thing. I sent it, and they said that they hoped to begin reading it in a few days. May 30, they wrote, “I am pleased to inform you . . . ” and attached a contract! Woo-Hoo! I’m so thrilled and excited myself, I can’t imagine how Ms. Frisk—okay, Dreama—how Dreama is even managing to breathe.

The contract is straightforward, as legal documents go. When I was editor at West Virginia University Press, our contracts were generated by the university’s legal office, and were amusingly recondite. I don’t recall if they addressed the possibility of the book eventually becoming the basis for a board game, but some of the clauses were along those lines. The main thing Moonshine Cove contract provides for is, of course, Moonshine Cove recouping their investment. Dreama will get very little money from sales of the book until after that. She would get a bigger cut only after the book sells a lot of copies, which, frankly, is not likely. She will be able to make money by buying copies of the book at half price and reselling them. This is a real possibility, as she is active in writing groups, and has already done readings and book signings in support of a previously published book of poetry. I know a few things about the book market around here, too. But of course money’s not the point. Dreama’s a smart lady. If she badly needed money, she would not plan on getting it from writing. As a colleague in the Appalachian traditional music community once said, there are literally dozens of dollars to be made in this business.

[Legal disclaimer: The above does not constitute a guarantee that I can help get your book into print. I do have a pretty good record, but all I can guarantee is that, if you let me help with your baby, I’ll put everything I have into whatever small or large role you assign me.]


In other editing news, an author took me up on my offer of two hours of work for free. It was a novel, with a female protagonist who accomplishes some great and good things. The author wanted to talk about making her more human, less thoroughly lovable. We ended up Zooming. The author’s going to make the heroine sharply judgmental of people’s superficial attributes, mentally criticizing everybody’s clothes, hair, posture, vocal tone, vocabulary, and such. I don’t know which of us came up with this, it just sprang from our chat. Now the author says she plans to get four more hours of my help. Goody! I want to know more about what happens in the book, and four hours of pay will be almost precisely the amount of our water, sewage, and trash collection bill this month. So you don’t need to practically live with me for months, the way Dreama Frisk did. I’ll do as little or as much as you think you need. And we can start with those two free hours of me reading your work and chatting about it with you.

Danny Williams, editorwv@hotmail.com


Watch your language.

I get a real tickle out of police talk. In my own novel, which I may or may not be writing, I’m putting a cop in the protagonist’s monthly poker game, just so he can say things like, “You have been found to have large portions of my money upon your person.”

In a local crime story, the bad guys made sure their getaway cars were pointed in the right direction, i.e., the cars were “pre-positioned outside the residence in a manner that would facilitate an expedited departure from the residence.” I seriously wish I could have a job at a police academy, teaching the cadets to write like this.


In other news:

A Fairmont man was arrested Thursday after he reportedly kicked in the door of a home with a gun.


John Means made history on Wednesday as the first Baltimore Oriole to throw a complete game no-hitter when he notched 12 strikeouts to beat the Seattle Mariners on the road since 1969. (Remember the little plastic puzzles with 15 numbered squares in a 4x4 frame, and you move the numbers this way and that to place them in order? I want to do that with the phrases in this sentence.)

Headline of the Month, from the Charleston Gazette:  Man Shot in West Side

(I hope he was facing south, so his west side is the one away from his heart.)



ABC News headline, apparently about the coming zombie apocalypse:


Two Skiers Dead in Utah Avalanche, One Digs Himself Out


I notice that somewhere in the electronisphere between West Virginia and New Jersey, all the formatting disappears from these treatises—spacing, boldface, italics, underlining, and the like. Just assume that it’s all perfect and beautiful, then dial back that vision a few notches, and you’ll be there.


And speaking of formatting: One convention which I picked up while editing an academic press is that unpublished manuscripts get set in quotation marks, and published books get italics. So next month, when I mention [quote] Before We Left the Land [unquote], it will be [ital] Before We Left the Land [noital].






Adventures in Editing, May, 2024

The six-week Meredith Sue Willis novel writing class is over. It went a lot faster than the six-
week Jillian Michaels tone your abs class. Another difference between the two educational
ventures is that I’m likely to continue to apply what I learned from the former.
I’m now back to my original novel idea, which I set aside because the first-person
narrator kept wandering off the path. I’ve fired that guy, and brought in a third-person narrator.

So far, he’s a lot easier to work with.

It’s the story of a disabled engineer, 62 years old. Four years after a car crash killed his
wife and severely bunged up his leg, he’s cynical, bitter, and reclusive. The arc involves him
opening up a little, and tentatively re-engaging with the world.

I have no intention of finishing the thing, much less trying to get it published. But the
wise authors who engage me to look at their work do have these intentions, so I’m pretending.
The lessons I learn ought to make me even more equipped to help my writers.
Here’s one of those lessons: Consider rooting your story more firmly in its time and
place. A fellow student is working on a cool-sounding fantasy novel. The setup is a familiar one,
a rather ordinary character discovering there’s another reality paralleling ours, and they are
something different in that reality than in this one. It’s a starting point rich with possibilities.
Think Harry Potter, and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I haven’t
seen enough of my classmate’s work to know where they’re going with it, but their advice from
the class was to localize. Include a tie to Appalachia as often as it reasonably fits. That’s a strong
distinctive element, and an important selling point when a reader—or more importantly, a
publisher—needs convincing that this story is different and special. In their cover letter to the
right publisher, “readers of Appalachian fiction” will be a point in favor of taking a closer look.

I have my engineer living in South Point, Ohio. You can probably imagine about where
that is. Across the Ohio River are the two cities of Ashland, Kentucky, and Huntington, West
Virginia. It’s a reasonable place to have an engineer make his home and career. The Big Sandy
River, between Kentucky and West Virginia, is lined with chemical plants and associated
industries. The shipping facilities shared by the three states comprise America’s largest river
port. Lots of work for engineers.

Problem is, the Ohio River is a severe cultural divider in the minds of many. Mention
eastern Kentucky or southwestern West Virginia, and people think “Appalachia.” Mention
southern Ohio, and they think “Huh?” So I’m going to move Mr. Weatherholt across the river to
a small city a half hour away, like Grayson, Kentucky or Wayne, West Virginia. Then I’ll give
him Appalachian-type stuff. Maybe make him a native of the region, with cousins to interact
with, or put some guys from farther out in the hills in his poker group. I think I can write these
people. I grew up with them. And in my imaginary cover letter, “readers of Appalachian fiction”
will look better than “readers of southern Ohio (or disabled engineer) fiction.”

Meredith Sue herself pointed out another weakness in the small sample I shared with her.
I wrote a conversation between Mr. Weatherholt and a neighbor who was using his washer and
dryer, consisting entirely of quotations. Twenty-three of them, like I was writing a radio play or
something. The guy’s got a dose of his beloved single-malt. I could let him take a sip. And the
woman could fold her clothes while they talk. Maybe the man will comment on some of her
garments. The conversation goes on for several minutes, so most likely one or both of them will
look at their phone, reject a spam call, and curse a little. And in a lesson learned from an in-class
exercise, I’ll use sounds or smells, not just visual details. Maybe the peaty aroma of the Scotch,
or the sound of the dryer. A little bit of stuff like this will add a lot to the reality of the scene.

I will act on these two pieces of advice, and some others from the class, and do my best
job of amending my manuscript. That will plant the ideas firmly in my already terrific editing
brain. (“Terrific” is Meredith Sue’s word for the job I did on one of her novels.) That’s two more
tools I’ll have in my kit when I work with you on your undertaking.

Totally Irrelevant Aside. You can skip this paragraph. Researching for a book a few years ago, I
learned the story of “Tokyo Rose.” Iva Toguri, a native-born American of Japanese heritage, had
the immense bad luck of being in Japan on family business when World War II started. Unable to
return home, and unable to get a food ration card because she would not renounce her
citizenship, she supported herself by broadcasting American music over a radio station listened
to by many of the American sailors and Marines in the Pacific. After the war, General
MacArthur’s investigators examined her work, and found that she had never belittled America,
called on sailors to surrender, or in any way done anything detrimental to the country or the war
effort. On the contrary, she sometimes slyly ridiculed the Japanese government and military on
air, and she risked prison by smuggling food to Americans in POW camps. But in the US, there
was a tremendously influential radio commentator who built his reputation on sensationalism and
falsehoods. (Imagine that!) This was Walter Winchell, and he targeted Toguri, labeling her a
traitor. The country got stirred up, and somebody bribed two Japanese men to testify against her.
She was convicted of treason, and served six years in the federal women’s prison at Huttonsville,
West Virginia. In 1976, the investigative TV show Sixty Minutes pieced together the story, and
even found the two witnesses, who admitted they had been bribed to testify falsely. President
Ford pardoned her, a veterans’ organization gave her a citizenship award, and she should have
enjoyed thirty years of life without the cloud over her head. Sadly, plain truth is no match for
spectacular lies, and many still think of her as a traitor. It’s just a story I believe needs telling. If
you’ve read this far, remember, I said you don’t need to.


Watch your Language

From the “Manifesto” of a group calling itself the “Patriotic Front”: After a sentence maintaining
that Black people are not Americans, “The same rule applies to others who are not of the
founding stock of our people as well as those who do not share the common unconscious that
permeates throughout our greater civilization, and the European diaspora.”
(And presumably, this is by one of the better masters of English in the outfit.)

After fleeing from officers, the vehicle was later located in the 200 block of Oney Avenue.-
WVMetronews

(FOX40.COM) — Over 70 grams of methamphetamine, hundreds of counterfeit pills, goats and
chickens were seized from a stolen vehicle in Dunnigan, according to the Yolo County Sheriff’s
Office.

“[name] confessed to strangling [name] after her body was found.” – WVMetronews
That’s harsh.

And remember, unless it’s a quotation by a particularly unimaginative character, “taking the
world by storm” is never the right phrase. I found it twice in the NYT.

GOOD STUFF FOR FREE! Send me a piece of what you’re working on, and I’ll spend a
couple hours with it and give some feedback, at no charge. For real, not like those offers where
you have to give them your credit card number up front, then they hope you forget to cancel
whatever it is and they can take your money without you noticing. I’m doing this because I love
my work and want more of it. And if you don’t end up hiring me, I’ll still have had the sneaky
little thrill of reading something the rest of the world can’t.
editorwv@hotmail.com



Adventures In Editing. April, 2024 with Danny Williams

The adventure around here lately is that I’ve had the opportunity to show a little of my novel idea to a bunch of other writers, and to get a peek at what they’re doing.
It’s Meredith Sue Willis’s novel writing class, six action-packed Zoom sessions. I don’t believe any of us actually wrote a novel in six weeks, but I’m pretty sure we all got at least a little more clarity on where we are going and how to get there.

As you no doubt recall from last month’s treatise, my novel is actually my Plan B, hastily moved to the front of the queue when my original plan hit a wall. Some other students are also nursing infant projects, some are farther along in their journey, and one guy says he has a complete manuscript and is on his seventh draft.

We all shared one page at the beginning of the class, and about five pages later on. Because of the small sample size, most of our initial recommendations have been on the line and sentence level. Tighten the dialog, examine all pronouns, and the like. Then we got into a brief discussion of each piece, and the real stuff happened. In my own teaching, from kindergarten to college, answering students’ questions was always a real education for me. Putting what I knew into words distilled a clear picture from a foggy idea. And thus it was for some of us. Will there be any flashbacks or fast-forwards? Is this character really an asshole? What age are these people? Is it present-day, past, future, none of the above?

My novel (working title “My Novel”) draws on my experiences in the 1980s, when I worked for an agency which cared for developmentally disabled people, and also drank heavily and smoked a lot of weed. I worked in a three-client house in a family neighborhood, but in the excerpt I submitted for the class I imagined supervising one of the big eight-client houses outside of town.

In one truly lovely paragraph, I described the scene in the great room, naming each of the eight ladies and saying what she was doing—pacing, laughing, looking out the window, playing with spit, whatever. The idea was to convey that the place was a lively circus of activity. “No,” came a chorus from the other authors. “Too much.” Somewhere on meredithsuewillis.com there’s an article on naming characters, and cautioning writers to hand out names sparingly. Okay, I wrote it. So according to me, whenever we learn someone’s name, we believe we ought to try and remember it. And here I was introducing eight names in one paragraph. Meredith Sue thought this might be from my background in non-fiction writing. I want to give complete information, because complete information is an ideal, and also because I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by leaving her out. So I replaced the paragraph with one describing the scene, but naming only two clients. Less lovely, more readable. I’m aiming for 60,000 words, so there’s plenty of time to introduce the others later on.

Lesson learned—again. If I ever submit any fiction for publication, I will certainly work with a professional editor.

In each Zoom session, Meredith Sue asked us to spend a few minutes writing from a prompt. One time it was to place a weapon—any kind of weapon—in our novel. I had my protagonist sitting in a particularly dull training session, imagining holding an invisible Nerf gun and zapping the presenter with an invisible dart once in a while. Lots of fun, and I wish I had thought of that fantasy back when I had jobs and went to meetings. So far, I have not found a good place to insert it. But another exercise was to write about sounds and smells (we get so caught up in sight), and that led me to a major improvement in My Novel. I imagined the protagonist on his first day at the eight-client rural house. He smelled fresh air and tilled earth, and heard a far-off tractor and an occasional “moo.” I liked what I wrote, and later I decided to place the guy in a three-person city site for a while, then transfer him to the large house. He could compare the new place with the street noise and artificial air of the old one. This led to shifting a couple chapters around, and I believe the manuscript is better for it.

The action takes place about 1983-1989, so I Googled around and came up with way too many potentially useful bits, including these:

The Madonna lace craze
Rubik’s Cube
“Where’s the Beef?”
Parachute pants
Return of the Jedi
The Police, Culture Club, Men at Work
The Mists of Avalon, Pet Sematary, The Little Drummer Girl
gnarly, grody, radical, chill, gag me with a spoon
Reagan was President, 1981-1989
Challenger disaster, January 1986

Without forcing the issue, I’ll use some of this. For one thing, many workers in the residential-care field were young women, so there will be opportunities to mention some clothing and music trends.

Euphemism of the Month, from WV Metronews, (with the mug shot of a beat-up guy):  "According to court documents, during the arrest, police 'had to give compliance strikes to Mr. [name] in order to gain control.'”

Let me know about your own writing. Now that I’ve shown a little of mine, it’s only fair.
editorwv@hotmail.com




March 2024 Adventures in Editing with Danny Williams

In some police departments, trainees are required to zap themselves with a Taser. The idea is that, if they are going to be carrying this thing and potentially inflicting it on people, they ought to be aware of what it feels like.

With similar reasoning, I am now writing a novel and editing it myself. It’s only fair that I experience firsthand the kind of grief I visit upon my authors. (Expect a giant plot twist in this column, nine paragraphs down.)

The story comes from a character I developed for an author about 10 years ago. One of his people needed a lot more substance, so I gave the writer an example of a detailed backstory and personality. He didn’t like my idea at all, and he wrote his own. That’s a fine example of me succeeding at my job. I don’t know if he appreciates how my failure at improving his work led to improvement in his work. I kind of hope not. It’s fun to feel sneaky.

That left me with an unbooked character, somewhat fleshed out and ready to go. He’s an engineer in his early 60s. A car accident a few years back killed his wife and severely bunged up his left leg. Now he’s cynical and withdrawn. The “action” will be him making a few modest steps toward re-engaging with life.

I always overthink stuff. I enjoy it, and it’s harmless as long as I step back after all the thinking, and use the necessary parts and let the rest go. Now on to the timeline. I want the guy—Chris Weatherholt—to be an undergrad in the days when all the science majors carried 20-inch slide rules on their belts. The first scientific calculator was introduced in 1972, meaning the slide rules would have been necessary before that, and probably for a year or two after. I birthed Chris in in 1949, and enrolled him at Sandusky Polytechnic in 1967.

Location will not be a large factor, and maybe won’t even be mentioned, but I’m going with Ironton, Ohio. It’s not far from my boyhood home, so I know the territory. I can have a large-ish hospital, rolling hills, a river, a university 20 minutes away, and whatever other details I find useful, without needing to double-check everything for consistency. I’m not going to goof up and have the university an hour away in one scene, because I know it isn’t.*

Then a classic overthink, deciding how to deal with Vietnam. Chris turns 18 at the height of the war. Did he serve a couple of years? Join ROTC? What? When my brain returned to reality, I realized it doesn’t matter now.

After I got 1949 as a beginning, the rest of the timeline was not that difficult. If he’s early 60s, 2012 works. I gave him a grown daughter, and decided she’s 28, and living and working in Minneapolis, making her a 1984 baby, when Chris was 35. That works out. There’s room for an older child, or even more, if I decide that would be helpful. He could also refer to a previous marriage. Plenty of time to get out of marriage one, recover a bit, remarry, and become a dad at 35. I’m putting the fatal and crippling car crash four years previous. I believe his daughter and friends would be telling him it’s time to let it go a little. I want him to be able to drive a car despite his injury, but have a quite difficult time walking or climbing stairs, and I want his mobility impairment to worsen with time. Sadly, I have a dear friend I can model this on. (About the most cheerful, positive guy in the world. Working together at a playground, we used walkie-talkies. He called his a limpie-talkie.)

Some stuff is still not resolved. I want the story to occupy about one year, so at some point I’ll probably want snow, school graduation, fresh tomatoes, or something, and the months will fall into place. (I’m a stickler for that. Long ago one of my victims authors tried making ironweed bloom too early in the year. Count on me to spot details like that, Sometimes I’m saving an author from an embarrassing goof, and other times I’m being an obsessive buttache.)

Now for a fatal self-inflicted wound. Inspired by the inspired writing of Love Palace, I decided to give my guy a voice kind of like Martha’s—cynically playful, self-consciously inventive and erudite—and let him narrate his own story. Reading Meredith Sue Willis’s work, it seemed like a pretty easy way to go. Yeah, and Joe DiMaggio famously made center field look pretty easy, too. He never had to run or dive, all the balls came right to him. A couple thousand words in, I realized I’m not a DiMaggio or Willis, and I would not be capable of controlling Chris’s language for 90,000 words. I asked him to look on life with ironic amusement, but he kept drifting into flat-out comedy.

I’ve begun an alternative novel instead. Stupid, maybe, but the family I was visiting with in Florida the past couple of weeks said that their previous house guests went tent camping in the Everglades, so I’m not way out there on the right-hand limit of the stupid spectrum. My new plan is to work this other novel to completion or near it then bring back Chris, but let an anonymous narrator relate the story. I’ve written a few episodes of the relief novel  already, and made notes toward a few more. By this time next month, I will have 30,000-plus words on imaginary paper. Maybe.


*Check out Naked Came the Stranger, a 1969 literary hoax in novel form. As a spoof of what they perceived as an American appetite for over-the-top sex in a novel and no concern for literary merit, a group of writers created an intentionally bad but sexually explicit work and published it under the name of a single author. The writers agreed on the names of characters and little else, and wrote chapters without collaborating. The result was a ludicrous mess of writing. For example, one woman’s nude body was bronze in one chapter and alabaster in another. But it was nude, that’s what mattered. The book validated the authors’ point. Sales were brisk, and readers apparently did not know or care that they were being made fun of.



Watch your language!


Electronic Arts, a maker of video games, miscalculated, and needed to can about 670 of their workers. In the press release announcing this, the company said the “streamlining” would “deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans.”

The PR term for this is “spin,” but we all know the correct word is “crap.” And not even amusing crap. The father (maybe grandfather) of a character in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God was publicly hanged for murder. Telling about his father’s death later, the guy would say his father “was taking part in a public occasion, and the platform gave way.”

“ . . . while a soaring lobby across the top will house restaurants, bars, an art gallery a glass-floored (and glass-ceilinged) viewing platform and — should a license be granted — a subterranean casino.” ‘(nyt)

No, the soaring lobby across the top will not house a subterranean casino.


Headline of the month:

Trump Lawyer Argues ‘Appearance of Impropriety’

Is Enough to Disqualify Prosecutor – (nyt)

We don’t want any appearance of impropriety here, do we?


“She didn’t believe it until she found the $600 bill on the table.”

From a news story about a waitress receiving a huge tip.


“Payl Feig and his baroquely profane star, Melissa McCarthy . . . ” nyt

Brilliant! Baroquely profane. Mating two words which people don’t usually expect to see together can create so much more meaning. I once wrote that a festival which celebrates Appalachian music and strictly prohibits bluegrass and other modern genres was “aggressively traditional,” and had to arm-wrestle the magazine editor to prevent him altering it to “steadfastly traditional.” My way says a lot more.


One current speech habit which mildly irritates or amuses me is beginning every locution with “So,…” So I searched, and found I had used “so” 26. Too many times in 1,500 words, I believe. So I fixed it, got it down to 6. In my old typewriter days, I would almost certainly not have noticed, and if I had, I would have groaned and left it rather than retyping. Also caught a redundancy, “about 120 or so,” and deleted “or so.” Sometimes this job really is easy.


“Watch Your Language” book review. Edwin Newman, Strictly Speaking, 1974. A roundly condemned book, and rightly so. It’s prescriptive grammar, lamenting that people nowadays don’t talk right, and urging them to start. In my mind, I totally agree. My late lamented Sally Ann, best dog ever, would bark and snarl if anyone told her to “lay down.” If you wanted her to lie down, you needed to tell her that. I practice a great many bygone “correct” language conventions. But I know better than to publicly urge others to do so. Language is a living thing, and there’s no cryogenic lab large enough to freeze it. But Newman made a second point, that news people, in particular, are prey to adopting and spreading lazy or pompous habits. Written and verbal news reports invariably referred to the president of Argentina as “Juan D. Peron.” “Presumably,” Newman writes, “this is to avoid confusion with Juan Q. Peron, who is also the president of Argentina.” Newman proposed creating a special award for news people who manage to not, after a major triumph of some sort, ask the winner, “How does it feel.” (Like we need to hear some athlete, pulse still racing, try to piece together synonyms for “good.”) Or entertainment reporters who go a week without using the phrase “taking . . . by storm.” That’s still a phrase most often used automatically and thoughtlessly, and these days we have the related “go viral.” In both his misguided appeal to “save” the language and his eternally valid appeal to avoid mindless writing, Newman’s adjuration is simple: Watch your language.


Attempt at a pickup line

Want to see some examples of Chris Weatherholt going off track with his narrative voice and wrecking my embryonic novel, or a page or two from my hastily substituted alternate novel (warning: contains graphic stupidity), or a completely crafted scene or two which might or might not fit somewhere into something some day, or a currently in-process short story which I intend to be highly humorous? Show me a little of yours, and I’ll show you mine.


Danny Williams, editorwv@hotmail.com



Adventures in Editing, February, 2024

It's a great time to be me right now. I've been actually editing an actual manuscript, for an actual author, who sends actual money. Despite my plus rep in the business, including Meredith Sue calling me her Featured Editor and saying the work I did as editor of one of her novels was Terrific, traffic has been slow. But this one author has hired me, and the job will go a ways toward filling the money hole left by our new furnace.

The novel is one I would choose to read. Not that it matters. I'm providing a service, like a house painter. I'll take pride in doing a beautiful job on your house, whether I personally would like to live there or not. I probably would not choose a big, fat, intricately detailed corporate history of a pioneering high-tech business from my Boring Book Club monthly flyer, but it was a blast to edit, and it added to my already-fearsome trove of useless knowledge. But, on to my job.

"Before We Left the Land" is a simple story. Not necessarily as a reader, but as an editor. It's America in the 1940s, with no flashbacks, fast-forwarding, foreshadowing, or supernatural creatures or events. There are no words or concepts I needed to look up (though I enjoy that).

It is a multi-generational family in their  semi-rural ancestral home. Semi-rural because there's a modest city a half-hour away, and the road to their house is passable most of the year--to beat-up farm trucks, anyway. The house has electricity and a refrigerator, one neighbor has a telephone, and another has a non-truck car. The winds of change have begun wafting into their century-old lifestyle, and--and this is the book--a tornado is coming. As in most aspects of American life, 1950 will be beyond the imagination of 1940.

I couldn't think of one major large-scale thing to recommend to the author. The structure and pacing are sound, the dialogue crisp and natural (unnaturally natural in one masterful scene of a few friends getting drunk and ragging on each other). My most substantial edit to the narrative was in the account of a baseball game. The game was important to the tale, but the author is apparently not a fan.

I place commas by ear. I read a manuscript aloud to myself--away from my wife--and I can hear the commas. In the sentence above, I do not hear "apparently [comma] not a fan." So suck on that, auto-suggest.

If you know my work (and you really ought to) [comma] you can predict I got all over the pronouns. If there's any way the reader could misattribute a pronoun, I want the antecedent there. A favorite from an IMDB summary: "A naked man with a gun points it (the gun) at a woman." Some wise editor inserted the reference to the gun because a reader could possibly be confused about what the naked man was pointing at the woman. I get somewhat obsessive about this, and authors quite rightly reject many or most of my edits. That's a win for the author, being prompted to take one more look.

Many of my edits are to my edits. Two characters take a car trip from north-central West Virginia to Tampa. The author doesn't say enough about it, just kind of says they were one place then they were the other. I found out that US Route 19 was open by this time, and went all the way. It would have been a trying journey, with town and city stop signs and traffic lights, gravel sections of road, poorly-marked changes from the route being constantly shifted, livestock crossing the road, and such. I wrote a couple paragraphs worthy of the delightful Bad Trips, a sampling of amusing or terrifying travel-gone-wrong writing. When I stepped back and looked, I had tilted the chapter out of balance. So I took it back, and with a sentence here and a phrase there, the author simply made sure the reader understood that the two arrived in Tampa tired, sweaty, and thoroughly sick of each other.

An aside, in praise of the author: The men received sobering news in Tampa. On the trip home, the two long-time antagonists came to some small understanding and appreciation of each other. Nicely done, unnamed author!

I also trim unnecessary words, even though a lot of unnecessary words are in fact necessary. Nobody wants to read a book consisting of telegrams. [Un-old people, ask a grayback what a telegram was.] But, like with the pronouns, it's a good thing when the author looks at an excision and decides I am wrong. Somewhere above in this missive, I wrote "one of the neighbors has a phone," then tried "one neighbor has a phone," and decided I liked the shorter version better. If you like the longer one, that's cool. Really.

Also--and here's a clue to my level of business acumen--I'll share some steps you can take to lessen the amount of work you need to pay me for. Somewhere on Meredith Sue's site, I've placed a suite of "Search and Replace" maneuvers. This One Weird Trick! will expose the bones of a manuscript, and let you quickly make some editing decisions I might have really soaked you for. And there are others.

So, a fun month for me, but now it's over. Get hold of me and let's talk about your baby. Even if it's a big, fat, intricately detailed corporate history of a pioneering high-tech business.

Notes.

According to The Chicago Manual of Style, which costs so bleeping much we feel like we ought to follow it, a published book gets set in italic, and an unpublished manuscript gets quotation marks. Why? Because Chicago, that's why.

Keath Fraser, editor. Bad Trips: A Sometimes Terrifying, Sometimes Hilarious Collection of Writing on the Perils of the Road. (various editions) Passages from works by Umberto Eco, Anita Desai, Jonathan Raban, David Mamet, Martin Amis, John Updike, and others.




***
Fun exercise for writers, from an NYT article:
Wasn't billed as about writing, but we know everything anywhere is about writing. For a short period, like 10 or 15 minutes, just write down what you see, hear, smell, or feel, in a barebones way. So here's my unedited scrawl from 10 minutes in the Blue Moose downtown.
Sweatshirt: I Look Better Bent Over.
Big, athletic-looking lady, maybe 20-something, much piercing. Shaved head except long, straight hair in back and a blue tuft and a pink tuft in front of ear, poofed over glasses arm. Pink and blue swirly-colored Crocs.
Mild house music.
Four teenage girls chatting happily.
Hot water in the hand sink is very, very hot.
Two-tone orange paint in bathroom.
Large, maybe 3x5 feet, blackboard with detailed, artfully-done menu.
Occasional ice-in-the-blender sound.
4 men in a Mustang convertible, top down.
NJ car with bumper sticker "Using Your Turn Signal Is Not Giving In to the Enemy."
***
Headline of the Week, from the Charleston Gazette:


Danny Williams
editorwv@hotmail.com