Adventures in Editing
With Danny Williams

(Updated 5-4-24)









 
 

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