This webpage will be available
till @ March 1,2025
Housekeeping for Prose Narrative:
Polishing and Organizing
Saturday, January 18, 2025
For Novels, Short Stories, Memoir, and more
3 Hour Workshop with Meredith Sue Willis
Saturday, January 18, 2025
10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
E-mail: MeredithSueWillis@gmail.com
Instructor's home page: Meredith Sue Willis
I. Welcome, Business, Introductory Remarks
A. Business (not much!)
My notes on your papers will come back via scan and e-mail in the next couple of days
I use this web page as a script and place to read materials, so tell me if you can't see it!It is not "written," that is, it is notes, not polished prose.
This page is for you to use, come back, copy things, etc. I'll leave it up till March 1, 2025. Get access from my website or here: Housekeeping for Prose Narrative January 2025.
B. What does HOUSEKEEPING have to do with your writing?
Can Housekeeping help us finish, move forward? How do you make your writing better? Cleaner, better organized.
I submit that the upkeep and organizing (and always cleaning up by cutting and tightening!) are the heart of the writing process.
It is essential, of course, to separate out the Inspired Drafting from all the kinds of revising and editing. Too many writers think there are only two kinds of writing:
-- Inspired Drafting
-- Line Editing, which I suppose is analogous to polishing (we even use that word).
Inspiration and drafting can't IMHO really be taught: There are prompts, but basically, this is the mysterious part that just comes to you. I've been thinking about this as I do story telling to my grands: I can hear myself borrowing from what I know about my audience, pulling in things I've read--opening myself up to the unconscious.
This is the part people tend to love--it's like being in love, it 's a high. It's probably what makes people write. Can be scary.
The rest of it can be improved and even taught, not necessarily by a teacher. Some people love editing for the deliberate rationality of it, the correction, making small changes. It's satisfying to find a better adjectives catch a grammatical error.
Personally, I love best what I call Deep Revision-- the part that comes between Inspired Drafting and Polishing/line editing.
Some of it is at the level of cutting and tightening and editing dialogue from naturalistic to the illusion of real speech. This is highly satisfying and people can do it for each other. Big piece of advice which most of you know: get someone else to look at your work and makes some of these suggestions.
There's another level,too, however, which in many ways is the real writing. People say "Writing is revising," and I take this to mean the kind of work that goes back and makes changes to deepen/explore character and to hold the story in place.
I'm now writing and expanding a told story for my grand children, in the middle revisions which I adore.
I change a character's name, and this gives me an idea for tone, or a joke.
I change a talking horse's gender, and think about whether the elves have gender or not, and does that matter and if it does, how.
I cut sentences to speed up the action--we don't need to know how the cape flies in the air if the character is fleeing a monster! I can have the nice flying cape metaphor somewhere else.
I realize I never explained how they got that magic power and go back and put it in.
Today's rough outline is, with breaks for quick exercises and discussion (and one Break for stretching etc.) :
Adding, especially description--what description can do besides describe.
The always-valuable cutting and tightening.
Cleaning up your dialogue.
Some Ways to Organize and Shape
Making it run smoothly: pacing and more
Macro techniques for revision--continuity for plot; sitting on your hands to edit; etc.
II. Introducing our projects and our selves.
The first part of housekeeping is often to acknowledge, gather up the MESSINESS.
WRITING #1
1. Genre (one sentence description of what you're working on today)
2. Length you expect it to be when finished
3. Method it will be "consumed"--book, online article or story.
4. Who do you picture reading it (Audience)?
5. What is your big mess? Your biggest challenge?
Go-Round discussion on this.
Process and Product. This is something I really emphasize, but I'll go lightly here: The main t thing about it is not to lose as much inspired drafting as you can do. Don't start thinking of what you do as a thing to sell or convince, do as much as you can before you start revising at all.
III. Adding more: Piling stuff up for future organizing
A. I want to avoid overdoing the extended metaphor of housekeeping, but....
The first kind of revising I want to work with is the kind that deepens and comes up with new things.
Any new idea, even if it comes out of a misspelling or a rejected metaphor should be valued. It might be a new idea, a new inspiration, a new passage to draft.
This can be called Description, but I'm interested in
Description that isn't just about having lots of details (being "descriptive")--
Not just how it affects the audience....
But about what it does for the writer.
Senses: using description/rich language to go deeper.
Examples.
Straightforward description, but it is not about "flowers" but about a very specific plant:
I had to look over the world where I lived and I chose a place on a very high hill. I fell in love with it as I did the hills when I walked along the dirt road as a small child. The Joe Pieweed now grows in my yard. How it flourishes with it full head of flowers. It joined other tall flowers someone had cut and handed me to wrap in paper in my suitcase. They grow next to the purplish Japanese Maple where cat birds come for a few months each summer so I can write poems about them.
-- Dreama Frisk
From the reader's point of view this tells us how things look, a little about birds, but mostly sets a tone and voice.
For the writer, I would guess, this was an exploration in memory: using the details as hand holds for climbing into the past, being there.
B. WRITING # 2
Earlier writing was a big picture way of thinking.
Pick a place in your project, preferably something you haven't written yet-- a dinner party, a rundown street, a room in a friend's house when you were small--and describe it as much as you can using senses. OVERWRITE it. All the senses and little facts you can get in in five minutes.
(5 min)
SHARE
C. So, what is description For?
SENSE DETAILS Concrete not abstract or generalized is what fiction is all about. One of the essential "small things"– the MICRO the novelist has to work with is: the senses. IMPORTANCE OF THIS is "Meditation" and "Going Deeper" as well as vivid description.
1. Conveying information
2. Penetrating, going deeper. Explores character from the outside in.
2. Getting more material you may have missed in your first draft.
3. Plot ideas
D. Description specifically for Exploring Character/Character Development
If you describe a person or the person's room or new shows or weapon of choice, the description becomes about CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.
Character from the outside. Physical description, but also the person's possessions, places.
Here are some shoes used to create a character:
....He was wearing a pair of brown-and-white shoes which fat Josie had given to him. They had belonged to a man for whom fat Josie's daughter had worked as a housekeeper in the city. The man died and his widow gave away his clothes. The shoes were beautiful, almost new, thin-soled, sharply pointed, with angles and whorls of perforation. There were metal taps on the heels, and the leather creaked. They were too large for Abel, but he wore them anyway, had waited a long. time for the occasion to wear them. And now and then in the bus he looked at them, would slide the instep and toe of one and then the other along the backs of his legs to removed the dust and bring out the shine, would flex the soles to hear them squeak. But the shoes were brown and white. They were new, almost, and shiny and beautiful; and they squeaked when he walked. In the only frame of reference he had ever known, they called attention to themselves, simply, honestly. They were brown and white; they were finely crafted and therefore admirable in the way that the work of a good potter or painter or silversmith is admirable: the object is beautiful in itself, worthy of appreciation as a whole and for its own sake. But now and beyond his former frame of reference, the shoes called attention to Abel. They were brown and white; they were conspicuously new and too large; they shone; they clattered and creaked. And they were nailed to his feet. There were enemies all around, and he knew that he was ridiculous in their eyes.
— N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
Another example:
A girl (the narrator) in a little hideout in the woods, and a snake comes: the snake is described, but it's the girl's reaction that is the character development pulled out of it:
...a green snake I hadn’t seen wound around the branch nearest me, relaxed her coil, stretched her head towards my face. We were eye to eye. I remember leaning back a little as I drew my breath to scream. I remember opening my mouth wide, tonsils flaring, and tongue thrust flush against unstraight lower teeth. And then, that thing from dreams happened and my scream was all force and no sound.So, I just sat there, silent and helpless on my firewood furniture, just inches separating me from the bright green snake. After a while, she moved even closer, flicking her tongue, pink and curious, probably attracted by the hot breath from my opened mouth, and the rising temperature from my panicked and quickened pulse. We stayed that way, face to face and very close, for what seemed a long time.
Eventually, I relaxed, and began noticing the surrounding sounds; black-capped chickadee from high in the hemlock, the occasional car on Chapel Road, even the applauding sounds of a light breeze through nearby drying hickory leaves. While she remained near me in the branches, I became comfortable in her presence, and I remember I began humming while imagining adventures with her, canoeing the river or climbing the highest oak, an unlikely partnership, a secret friend.
-- Elizabeth McConnell
Both of the descriptions I've pulled out from your work today have a child point of view, even if not a child narrator. Logical: our senses so sharp as children, everything new, firsts.
The definition of vivid.
E. WRITING #3
One more super short one: An object that belongs to a character in your project (real life grandparent, villain in the novel or story, etc.
SHARE
IV. TAKING AWAY Cutting as getting rid of dirt and clutter.
A. Adding more taking it away
Go back to your overwritten piece and cut.
Samples of cutting:
1. Tightening, tightening. An example of what was drafted to clarify things for the writer, but not needed for the reader.
Version I
Ashley moved close again, and I thought she was going to hug me again, but she stuck out her hand and showed me a ring with three glittering chips. She laughed and hugged Elton's waist. "He's my big ole huggy bear husband now!" Accent a little Southern, not Spanish.
Version II
Ashley stuck out her hand and showed me a ring with three glittering chips. She threw her arm around Elton's waist. "He's my big ole huggy bear husband now!" Accent a little Southern, not Spanish.
2. Version I just has too many words for most twentieth century readers. And what do they add anyhow?
Version I
The trees in the gorge had begun to turn rusty orange, having passed their brightest colors earlier up there than in town, but in the late afternoon light, they were still beautiful. Three hawks were circling at about eye level. Merlee filled up her lungs before going inside.
Version II
The trees in the gorge were rusty orange in the late afternoon light. Three hawks circled at eye level. Merlee filled her lungs and went inside.
3. Finally, good bit of description with one suggested tightening [it appears in brackets] -- the kind of thing I do all the time to my work, just clean it up! Fewer words. My suggestion below is to cut the material in brackets. You can elide, for example, mother getting out of car:
Again a screech of tires. This time it was Mom’s familiar forest green Volvo that came up the pass.
[Her medium-long blonde hair swung behind her petite frame as she stepped out of the car.] Her blue-grey eyes were fighting back tears, but she was smiling. She gave me a warm hug and helped me up and into her car. The radio was on, something classical and calming. I preferred the word play of rap. But right now the music soothed me, She offered me a bottle of Dasani water.
“You are with your mother now,” she said with confidence. Everything will be all right.”
-- Jill Farrar
This is something we should be doing all the time, but one good editing technique is to go over a passage or a chapter or a whole book and simply try to cut away roughly a quarter or a third of the words.
B. Cleaning Up Dialogue
Have you been too creative with tags ("she asserted;" "she asseverated;" "she exclaimed;" "she declared;" "she insisted"--usually better just to stick to "said" for transparency).
Often, it's better to use a verb that gives action: "Oh really!" She waved her umbrella at him.
Here's an interesting piece from one of your projects. There are a lot of ways to include dialogue in your writing: quotation marks, no quotation marks. E-mail, phone conversations, and here, in a passage clearly set in the past (1843) formal letter writing:
St. Augustine, Florida
October, 1843
Frederick Weedon's son-in-law, Daniel Whitehurst, sat down to pen a letter to his mentor, Dr. Valentine Mott, at New York University, where Daniel had studied medicine. In the yellow lamplight of his study, he began,
My Dear Sir:
Accompanying this, you will be handed the head of the celebrated Seminole Chief , Osceola, a man who in recent years filled a large space in the eye of the American public, if indeed not the civilized world..
He took time to write a little about the troubles in Florida when the Indians resisted the whites' efforts to accomplish “the removal of the Red Man,” concluding the passage—
Among those distinguished for resisting in an eminent degree was Osceola: Brave and active in war, he was equally docile in peace and from once having been a firm friend of the white man, he became its bitterest foe.
Whitehurst wrote that he knew many sentimental people would disapprove of the taking of the warrior's head from the corpse and putting it on display, but he also knew that Dr. Mott, with his cabinet of heads, understood the regard for learning associated with such preservation and display.
-- Eddy Pendarvis
That was, appropriately, extremely formal. For many of us writing fiction or memoir, the problem is that our training leads us to make dialogue too formal ("with whom?") instead of the way people talk ("who with?") Similarly, within quotation marks, generally use contractions--it's how we speak! So within quotation marks, for dialogue, try for natural conversation.
Here's a nice bit of dialogue with hardly any tags or other material at all. Does this satisfy you as a reader? Do you want more?
Note the first person narrator's set up.
....All the while, I was ruminating on who I contact to dig up dirt on Judge Anzillone. I decided to start with Garry Farrell, a good colleague who had started his legal career as an A.D.A. and advanced to the Homicide Bureau under Anzillone. Gary had an aggressive style in the courtroom. We fought many a case against each other and had a roughly an equal win rate. Outside the courtroom he was friendly and garrulous, a great story-teller in the tradition of his Irish progenitors. I tracked him down in Peter Hillary, the local bar where we hung out after a long day in court.
"Hi Garry, what’s happening?”
“You know, another day in the salt mines. I’m doing a Man 1, fight in a bar. My client got the best of it. Claimed the other guy was going for a gun. Maybe he was.”
“Who’s your judge?”
“Hutcherson. Nice guy. Knows zip about the law, but he knows the street so we have a shot. What are you up to? Helping Thad get elected? We’re all-in for him. Smartest guy in the room. For sure, he’ll be a star on the bench.”
“Funny you should say that Gary because Judge Anzillone is making noises about trying to block his election. Let’s just say he’s not a fan.”
Garry laughed. “You mean he hates Thad’s guts from way back. Everyone on the Office knows that. But what’s he got on Thad. Do you know?”
I did but wasn’t sharing. “You think he would try blackmail to stop Thad?”
“Are you kidding me? Blackmail was always his m.o when he wanted to get rid of his rivals. He raised digging out dirt on them to an art form. Worked for him in the court too. Look where he is, head honcho of the courthouse.”
“But how does he get away with it?”
Garry laughed longer this time. “ He learned it at the knee of his uncle, Frank, Frankie Anzillone. Luchese “associate”. No one ever said no to Frankie. Sound familiar?”
“Wow, he’s a Mafia baby? I had no idea. Not the ideal pedigree for a Supreme Court judge. How did you know, Gary?”
“The cops in my family go back to my grandfather. Plus, I love a good story. You think Thad could use it? I’d be happy to help.”
“Thanks, but I think Thad can handle himself once he’s on the right track. Bless you Gary.'
--Linda Atlas
BREAK
V. Organizing & Shaping
(This is where you go through your closets and reorganize the drawers, getting rid of things as you go).
A. Any questions at this point, things on your mind, that you want covered?
B.
I like different kinds of run-throughs of a manuscript, or part of a manuscript (the dialogue survey above). After going through sitting on your hands, scribble down a quick evaluation. Did it seem to start in the right place? Would straight chronological be better than the whole story as a flashback?
Were there slow parts?
Did you notice something missing?
Note Things to work on.
VI. Keeping It Running Smoothly: Schedules, Pacing, etc.
A. Short discussion on how to organize writing time/process--
Make a running outline; make a schedule. Suggestions from the group.
Here is a gross over-simplification of my own process: note that drafting/inspiration is probably the smallest part of it time wise. Drafting/inspiration is, however, the part without which there is nothing else. It is also the part no one can teach you. It comes out of you, your history, your observations, your imagination.
So I begin by...
-- Drafting the whole thing if possible, or at least fifty to 100 pages. This can go very fast, or be done over several years. (Current children's book had a super-rough draft as a told story to grands).
-- Go through it primarily adding and enriching and coming up with an ending if I didn't have one before.. (Rough written draft of children's story--got it down in less than a month, partly trying for the spontaneity of story telling.)
-- Make notes on plot points, changes, new ideas-- a "running" outline.
-- Go through again moving things around to find the best order to tell your story--consider conflict, rising action, raising the stakes, story arc, the "beats" of movie scenes; climax (es), and more.
-- Make notes on plot points, changes, new ideas-- a "running" outline. Do this often--like, daily!
-- Go through again cutting and tightening. Respect your audience's time!
-- Go through for more housekeeping. Continuity, dialogue, pacing, grammar, etc.
-- Let it sit, maybe a long time.
-- Go over it again.
-- And again.
B. Editing for Pacing
Pacing controls the rhythm and speed of a novel or story. It is about how readers are pulled through events. It is part structural choices (should this scene be dramatized fully or summarized?) and part word choices (short, everyday words versus long elaborate ones and metaphors). Grammar counts too: short, simple sentences for speed versus multi-claused slower moving sentences.
To speed up (for action and suspense and drama and conflict):
Cliff hangers at the end of a chapter or scene, suspense and prolonged outcome Making readers think: What next? What next? (Speeds up) More things for speed up: sentence fragments, spare sentences, short paragraphs, punchy verbs, some harsh-sounding words like crash and ill. Grammar for speed: get rid of prepositional phrases and passive verbs.
To slow down:
Use longer sentences with many clauses representing thought. Put lots of business in dialogue (this can build suspense too) Grammar for slowing down– commas, appositional phrases, complex sentences.
Here's an example of nonfiction narrative writing that gives us a character sketch of the narrator's father and covers a lot of time, but in a medium-paced narrative style that draws us close to oral recounting or story telling:
Daddy was from Harlan County, tucked between Leslie County and southwestern Virginia. They met at Southland Bible Institute, run by a fundamentalist sect, though Dad’s initial religious training had been with the Methodists, to whom he returned after the folks at Southland tried to censor his choice of theological reading. While the backwoods preacher Peter Cartwright might have also been appalled by Dad’s quest for education—his library eventually numbered in the thousands—he would not have questioned my father’s calling, considered by Methodists to be the primary qualification for a preacher. Dad told the story of being a young teenager whose only reading interests were comic books and Zane Grey paperbacks suddenly startled into a religious conversion by a voice outside his head telling him to read and preach the Bible. He eventually became a chaplain in a Methodist college not too far from Kentucky’s Wilderness Road. He later quit the preaching but stuck to reading and teaching.
--Pauletta Hansel
Look at these ways of telling the story-- Useful terms (DON'T FORGET: THIS IS ABOUT EDITING AND HOUSEKEEPING NOT DRAFTING!)
Ellipsis --
Time is speeded up by skipping, or perhaps information is skipped. Uses techniques like jump cut or an extra helping of white space.
Summary -- Also speeds up time, but doesn't cut, rather, narrates short or long passages of time.
Scene -- Closest to "real" time: fully dramatized, "shows" the things said, actions done. It may describe settings, people, etc.
Stretch -- Slows time by things like giving characters' thoughts during a scene or describing or including materials that would, in real life, happen in a split second.
Pause --- Time stops completely for a character to have, for example, a fully-dramatized flashback. When we return to the present of the story, essentially no time has passed.
VII. Some Techniques for Macro Revision (not line-editing)
A. A couple of articles
-- "Eight Final Revisions to Try Before You Submit" by Matt Bell. A lot of this is most appropriate for short stories, but I especially like these two ideas:
1) Go through only the dialogues--all of them
2) and cut the weakest sentence from every paragraph (I'd suggest picking one chapter or section to try this on).
-- My article "Seven Layers to Revise a Novel." For tonight, I just want to point out a couple of crucial "layers:"
B. Where to Put Backstory and Flashbacks?
First,always write it when it comes to you.
Later, see if it breaks things up, if it falls naturally: avoid a major fully dramatized flashback in the middle of an action scene!
("As his lips pressed against hers, she felt a delightful surge run through her body, and was suddenly back in the past on the day they met in a coffee shop when she spilled her selfieccino on his leather jacket...")
Much better to get in how they met would be a memory, dramatized or not, when the character is walking by the place where the incident happened, or as in this passage, when the narrator just got a text from her ex and threw up, and is now sitting still (when we naturally tend to think, remember, etc. And of course she was reminded of him by the text).
I wave Mae off and rush to the bathroom. Seems fitting while my head is in the toilet for Kiernan to text. Happy Birthday! How was your weekend?
When I’m feeling well enough I sit up against the wall and debate how to answer. I could tell him that it’s warm in New York today. He wouldn’t need to wear that coat we picked out from the Gap, but I’ll avoid asking if he thinks about me when he wears it; hoping he’ll mention it on his own. I’ll fight the urge to tell him that every day on the walk from work to the train I pass the exact spot where he kissed me. I won’t tell him that moment was the purest thing to happen to me in one of the dirtiest places on earth or how before that kiss the best thing that ever happened to me in Penn station was getting a window seat on a rush hour train with a minute to spare.
--Alexis Gogh
C. Editing for Continuity
This is one of my favorites. You go through a chapter or piece of a manuscript looking for a particular object or character. Do a proper name/character check. Search for every appearance of an individual character or city or named club or church. Read just those parts to see what you have described. Did you leave out anything important? Have you been repetitive, and if so, can you spread some of the descriptive details over the various appearances? With a character, can you modulate the information and change? In other words, focus on one thread, a person or whatever, and see how it arcs through the entire novel.
I went through for a horse named Butterscotch just to fix gender, discovered that I had the horse talking telepathic in the children's minds. It was very unwieldy, and I thought, "Why telepathy anyhow?" Why not just have the horse talk. So I went back over every appearance of the horse and put in quotation marks and paid attention to the horse's tone, and how it changed.
And as I did this, I made changes in how the horse talked and the kinds of things it talked about. I learned more about its character from his mechanical revision.
"Continuity" also includes details like the hero's eye color. Does it stay chocolate brown? or turn steely gray fifty pages in? This is part of housekeeping, and since you are the whole crew for your novel, you're responsible for all the details.
Going through looking up a single character for continuity can also be about pacing. Every time the Queen in my children's story appeared, I seemed just to repeat how she was wearing a lot of jewels and velvet and was very large and insisting on how much she loved the children. But as I went through looking at her appearances, it seemed that she never changed. She didn't have to, but I wanted her, by the end, to cause the big climax: she has captured the children and she learns you can't kidnap something you want, and she lets them go. So by a mechanical trip through looking at every appearance of the queen--housekeeping--I actually figured out how to end my story and send my kidnapped kids home.
D. Revise from the middle or three-quarter point. This will focus you on the final sections which often don't get the close attention the beginning does.
As above, read the whole project at a reader's pace, sitting on your hands so you don't tinker. Only take notes at chapter or section breaks. This takes great discipline!
E. Small but important: Check your project for metaphors that don't match the setting or world you've built. If it is a first person narrative, is this the way the narrator (say a child) would see things? Maybe your narrator should be an older person looking back?This is a big job in science fiction and good fantasy. You can't make comparisons about, say, rising bread if the people don't have yeast or wheat. You don't want to write "as fast as a deer" if there are no deer on your planet. You can't refer to to Pride and Prejudice because it's been forgotten, and people can't read, or at least it isn't clear that anyone can. You can't refer to Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump if your story is set in 1960.
@ 12:50 p.m.
VIII. Comments, Questions, Sharing
IX. "Homework" and Farewells
Some Thinking/Writing Exercises
1. If it were an object I could hold in my hands, it would be....
2. A two minute review of the work, generally positive:
what it is;
what I-the-Reviewer admire about it;
something I-the-Reviewer wish had been a little different.
3. Write/Name the 3 or 5 most important points or scenes in the story. More for a book. How was that?
Some things to read:
Meredith Sue Willis's books & Articles on Writing"Seven Layers to Revise a Novel."
Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel (How to Write a Novel)
Dialogue: The Spine of Fiction" (article by MSW about dialogue online at www.nycbigcitylit.com/contents/ArticleWillisPanel.html)
More Resources:
Meredith Sue Willis's website and elsewhere:
--Articles for Writers
--Resources for Writers
--Bibliography of Books about writing
--Proof reader's marks
--Notes on Point of View --Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules for writers. You don't have to agree to be amused.
--Some quotations about writing
--Phillip Roth and Richard Wright and Virginia Woolf on writing.
--A funny poem by Billy Collins about workshopping.
Some books on style, syntax, and grammar: suggested by Heather Curran
Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison
Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte
The Art of Styling Sentences by Longknife and Sullivan
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