A Journal of Practical Writing II

Contents

(Unattributed Articles by Meredith Sue Willis)

 

 


Latest Articles


 
 


 

Adventures in Editing with Danny Williams
And More Notes on Editing


 
 

 

 


More

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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





                   HOW I GOT MY BOOK PUBLISHED

                   By Alison Louise Hubbard


kelsey outrage

 

My Historical Fiction, True Crime novel, THE KELSEY OUTRAGE, The “Crime of the Century” was published by Black Rose Writing in January, 2024.

My journey from writing to publication began in Meredith Sue Willis’s Novel class at NYU. I wasn’t sure exactly when I had taken that first class, but on picking up my copy of Meredith’s book, OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS, I read her inscription: “To Alison, with best luck on your novel! 10-24-11.”

Oh, no! I thought. Did it really take me that long? For anyone attempting to write or publish a book, fear not. It probably will not take you that long. But if it does, take comfort in one of the things I learned along the way: each book in its own time.

For thirty years I had written lyrics for musical theatre. While I never had that Broadway opening I wanted, I did have touring musicals, productions, publications, and had received industry prizes. I made money; not enough to quit my day job, which was giving flute lessons, but enough to have an agent and consider myself a professional. But getting a musical from page to stage takes a village—writers, director, actors, set designer, sound person, stage managers, producers. Mounting even the smallest off-Broadway show costs millions. Many of my shows had industry “buzz” and seemed ready to launch, only to fizzle. Burned out and discouraged, I decided to step away from musical theatre for a while.

I had an idea for a novel based on an unsolved murder in my town. A plaque titled THE KELSEY OUTRAGE* marked the spot on a quiet street where a poet named Charles Kelsey had been tarred and feathered before being murdered “By Persons Unknown” in 1872. I began to do some casual research, and discovered an eye-popping tale of love, lies and lawlessness. But writing a novel was not in my wheelhouse. How would I even begin?

I went to the NYU website, found the School of Professional Studies, and signed up for Meredith’s Novel 1 class. Luckily, I found a teacher who was both structured and inspiring. I marveled then, and still marvel, that Meredith is able to read and comment on fifty pages of each student’s writing in one semester. Her charts and assignments taught me the rules of the road for this new journey: the difference between omniscient and third person POV; how to write a crowd scene; when to slow down or speed up the action; what makes dialogue crackle. Writing a novel was refreshingly calm after writing for musical theatre. Sitting at my computer, I was the producer and director, could have an unlimited number of characters in my cast and an unlimited number of scenes and props. I was free to do whatever I liked! I believe I completed my first draft in Meredith’s class the following semester. It was the journeyman work of a novice, but getting that first draft written was an important milestone.

Over the years I took Meredith’s novel class many times, as well as other novel and short story classes at NYUSPS and the New School. I signed up for summer courses at the University of Iowa; Yale; Kenyon Review; New York State Summer Writers and Bread Loaf. I attended the New York Pitch Conference and took Tom Jenks’s Art of the Story workshop. With each class my manuscript evolved and deepened. There were three significant turning points along the way. The first was when I decided to make it completely fictional. Freed from the shackles of historical truth, I used my imagination. The second was when the victim’s sister, Cathleen, became the protagonist. The third was when I cut down the number of POV characters from sixteen to five. Each of these revisions took time, but helped to make my book more focused and dramatic. Also shorter: I cut about fifty pages, ending up with 370 pages (92,000 words). I concentrated on one goal only: getting readers to turn the page.

In the fall of 2022 I began querying agents and small publishers. I found names on the internet, in PUBLISHER’S MARKETPLACE (a monthly subscription) and books such as WRITER’S MARKET. The online publication AUTHORS PUBLISH (Caitlin Jans) had lists of small indie presses that did not require agents. These are only a few suggestions; there are many websites and books out there that list agents and publishers. Querying is like applying to college. Each agent or publisher has specific requirements for what to send. Some want only the query, a one-page cover letter consisting of a hook (one line description of the novel) the book (how many words, what genre, comparable titles of successful books published within the last few years) and the cook (a brief bio). Others ask for sample pages or a synopsis also. It is very important to research who the agents are and what their MSWLs (manuscript wish lists) are, so in your one or two sentence introduction, your agent or publisher knows you have done your homework. Of the fifty-one queries I sent out, three agents and two publishers asked for the full manuscript to read. When Black Rose Writing offered a contract, I signed.

I can’t vouch for other publications. Black Rose is a small indie publisher in Texas. They are in some ways a mom and pop operation. The owner, Reagan Rothe and his wife Minna choose the books to publish, and they have a small team for design, marketing, sales and PR. They have quite a large catalogue, and were organized and professional about producing my book. They strongly encourage their writers to purchase packages for sales and marketing. After being hit with a blast of emails, I made the decision to hire Diana Bassett, who had done PR for my daughter Emily’s shoe company. Diana is young, practical, and full of positive energy.

A note here. Although I have a publisher for my book, I have spent a fair bit of money promoting it. On paper this is not a sound investment. But I was faced with a choice: let Black Rose put it out there and be done with it, or hire a pro to create an outreach and also a collection of press interviews I can keep in my “scrapbook.” I realized trying to promote my book myself would be like trying to fix my car. So far Diana has gotten me some nice interviews. (Here’s the latest: https://medium.com/authority-magazine/alison-louise-hubbard-on-the-5-things-you-need-to-know-to-become-a-great-author-c070ee882fd6). She organized my book launch (very successful: a great crowd, and sold over fifty books), and lined up another signing at Barnes and Noble in Manhasset, Long Island, in May. Beyond this, she has acted as an agent, interfacing with Black Rose, book stores, and the Long Island Authors Group, where we’re hoping to have THE KELSEY OUTRAGE in the Gold Coast Book Fair this June. Having a weekly meeting with Diana has helped me to strategize; her wisdom and experience have been invaluable.

I didn’t realize, but soon learned, that PR and Marketing are two different things. Diana does not handle social media. My daughter Emily organized a social media campaign for me before my book “dropped.” I was blessed to have her time and expertise. While my social media imprint is not what you would call high profile, and I have fewer followers than I would like, I have a URLs where people can find me, and a place to post information about events. Emily also manages my website, which I built with the help of the Authors Guild. If you check out my website, alisonhubbardauthor.com, know that it is in need of updating, and is pretty basic.

 

Before publication, I sent my book off to be reviewed in a few places, both organic (free) and paid. Most of the paid-for reviews cost a small amount, but Kirkus, the largest and most prestigious reviewing company, cost about $400. I decided to pay, because I wanted the imprimatur of a Kirkus review. So far my reviews, organic and paid, and on Amazon and Goodreads, have been good. That said, once your book is out there you have no control over what people will say and how many stars they will give it. I know a Black Rose author who had a person post a one star review because of the controversial subject matter of her book (a sex transition). On a positive note, Kristen Anderson-Lopez—a musical theatre colleague who went on to write the sound track of the Disney movie Frozen— was incredibly generous, and provided a beautiful blurb for my cover.

So there you have it. At the moment I’m curating a collection of my short stories to send out. But I’m also getting ready to write another book. If I do, and am lucky enough to get it published, I will be much wiser the next time.



 

Alison Hubbard invites readers to reach out with questions or comments to alisonhubbardauthor@gmail.com. She says, "I don’t have all the answers, but am happy to help."


The Kelsey Outrage is available from the usual online suspects like  Amazon as well as from Bookshop.org, the online store that shares profits with brick-and-mortar stores.




mechanics: replace

 

The “replace” function can be a powerful tool for fine-tuning a text. (In Word, it’s under “edit” on the formatting bar. There are a coupleof ways I like to use it, and if I am in early enough on a manuscript and the author is open to my input, I often recommend they do it themselves. (When I amfortunate enough to have work at all (wink-wink).)

First, “replace” can identify clusters of is/are/am/been/was/were verbs, the words a more innocent age labeled as“copular verbs.”. Nothing wrong with any of these words, but probably you want to be aware if they are massing anywhere. Rewriting with a stronger verb can oftenimprove a sentence. Plus, every passive sentence contains one of these words, and probably you don’t want to dwell too long in passive-voice land. (Yes, passivesentences are necessary. They are especially useful if you or your character want to avoid stating the sentence’s subject. Richard Nixon: “Mistakes weremade.”)

So here’s how. Replace each of these words with boldface. (I like to go a chapter at a time.) Now you can spot densely-populated regions byjust swimming your eyes over the pages. I wish I had thought of this 40 years ago. The first paragraph of the liner notes for that Glenville recording stillhaunts me.

One of my weaknesses as a writer is an occasional over-fondness for long sentences. To identify passages where I’m channeling myinner Faulkner, I replace every period with a couple of paragraph symbols. Since I’m already adding space after each paragraph, this makes every sentence clearlyannounce its girth. To do this in Word: From the “home” tab, go to “editing” (the little magnifying glass), open “replace,” then the “special” menu. Hereare all the formatting commands. Just put a period in the “find what” field and a couple of “paragraph marks” in the “replace with” field. All your sentencesare now isolated, and you can readily see any clusters of three- or four-line—or longer ones. Even though I feel like every one of my tumescent constructionsis a thing of beauty, I shed not a tear as I bust up gangs of them.

I also like to temporarily embolden “very,” and any other throw-away words I suspect may be lurking. of, that, really

Email me (editorwv@hotmail.com) if you have any comments on this or anything else. I have an opinion on nearly every topic. And tell mewhat you’re working on. Don’t send a sample, just a few words about your baby. I’ll reply with an encouraging sentiment or two.

 

Last book that kept me up literally all night: The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant. ISBN 13: 9780312195519


 




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

Danny Williams
editorwv@hotmail.com

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:

 

Book Reviews for Writers: Danny Williams on Meredith Sue Willis's Love Palace

In this “book review for writers,” I plan to bypass much of the usual book-review matter, and look instead at what the author is doing and how they are doing it. This may or may not be of use to someone, but for me, reading a book from this new angle has been fun and instructive.

 

Love Palace, by Meredith Sue Willis, is a Meredith Sue Willis novel. She’s written a boatload of them, and covered quite a range of action, setting, and characters, but from time to time she comes back to a familiar place.

In this type of Willis novel, setting and action retire to the background. The time and place are familiar. Modern amenities exist, the location is urban or suburban, but there's no strong tie to any particular location or time frame. No Eiffel Tower, Windows 9, side-ponytail fad, Grand Canyon, Barbie movie, or Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota. The central character is a woman, not especially old or young, who’s facing some challenges or decisions. She is intelligent, more or less articulate, and likeable, but maybe not loveable. Her situation might be unusual, even extreme, but it’s recognizable and relatable to readers. There are a very few other important actors, not enough to muddle the story or distract attention from the star. Minor characters all have some function, some reason to appear on the stage. If Hollywood makes a movie of one of these novels, there won't be any need for elaborate costuming and makeup, stunt doubles, exotic props, or on-set medical facilities. There are no fistfights, alien beings, explosions, whalebone corsets, weapons of mass destruction . . . not even one little car chase. Within all these parameters, about the only way left to advance the story is to put the characters together and see what they do.

And so to Love Palace. Martha narrates the novel, which means it's first-person writing, which means it's all about Martha and her encounters with herself and other characters. Chief among these are John, a slippery sort-of spiritual leader/political organizer/compulsive womanizer, and Robby, a 21-year-old man eager for something or other. The small cast also includes Martha's sister, her therapist, and an assortment of characters at the Love Palace, a sort-of church/community-action center/flophouse in a blighted urban section where upscale development looms over the lives of the remaining residents. The building is a former adult entertainment venue. The new occupants removed the "A" from the facade and attempted to redub it LOVE P LACE, but of course that didn't work out.

Martha resembles a few of Willis’s other protagonists. She’s a woman, neither young nor old—43 in this case. She’s facing some challenges, internal and external, but there’s no immediate threat to her life or health. Some aspects of her makeup or her situation may seem extraordinary, but it’s only an issue of degree. Her issues and her reactions to them are part of humanity. Some life changes are surely coming, and by the end of the novel she’s likely to have a different daily life and a different relationship with herself and others, but she will be the same Martha. There will be no transfiguration. This is Willis, not Dickens.

Well if Martha’s the narrator, that means Love Palace is first-person, and that brings a special set of considerations. In my own fiction writing—rarely more than a few hundred or a couple thousand words, I’ll admit—writing in first person is in one small sense mechanically easy. There’s no consideration of what other characters know or don’t know or what they may be thinking, so the writer doesn’t need to decide how much of that to include, and where and how.

In first-person narrative, the writer’s task is constructing the narrator’s personality through the character’s use of language. Here’s the hard part. The reader will be trapped in an elevator with this person for the duration. If we don’t on some level enjoy the way this person talks, we will start looking around for an escape, and likely find that the only way out is to put down the book for “later.” And we need to find out who this person is, but this needs to happen gently, piece by piece. If the narrator begins reciting an Apologia Pro Vita Sua, we’ll soon be eyeing the little access hatch on the elevator’s ceiling. Willis has committed to having Martha narrate Love Palace, so now the task is to tell us everything, but without sounding like she's working at it.

So what does Martha's voice sound like? Playfully intelligent. Amusingly self-deprecating. She’s well aware of her shortcomings, overindulgences, challenges, and self-defeating behaviors, and she thoroughly enjoys a cynical laugh at herself. Maybe she places her problems too close to the center of her self-identity, and unconsciously holds them dear. Her first words to us are “I had a meltdown after my birthday.” Seven words into the novel, and already we know we've met a woman who's capable of observing herself, and who intends to involve us in the process.

Here are some more bits of Martha from the first eight and a half pages of Love Palace, the first chapter.

During the years of the longtime boyfriend, who I call Rotter the Third (Rotter two being my divorced husband and Rotter One being my father) . . . I’m good in bed, too, by which I don’t mean particularly skilled, just happy. . . . There is something really satisfying about sinking to the bottom like this. . . . Rotter Three decided that, unlike his hedge funds, I was not increasing in value. . . . There was a pretty up-front competition in my therapy group over who was most self-destructive. . . . My God he’s dumb, I thought. Unless it was Thorazine. . . . I could feel my neuroses clearing away like a stuffed nose shot up with Afrin. I could feel the breezes, I’d take a poetry workshop. I’d get a job counseling teenagers. . . . Dr. Landowska says there are worse reasons to have sex than to feel beautiful, but there are also better ones. . . . like a lot of what Dr. Landowska says: practical, true, and way beyond my power to put into effect.

There’s a lot of personality there. Martha very much wants to tell us about herself. She’s not harshly judgmental of people different from herself, but she does feel at least a little superior. Superior to the Rotters, certainly, but also gently superior to “ordinary” people, like the ones who actually believe in traditional avenues of self-improvement like poetry or satisfying employment. Her affected wordplay tells us she is unusually intelligent and deeply creative, and she puts effort into the game of words and ideas. “Rotter.” Probably the immediate word would be asshole, jerk, or maybe fucker, with rotter way down the list. Willis enables Martha to educate the reader about herself, and deftly do it like that teacher who was such an engaging person to spend time with, you didn't realize how much you were learning until after class.

Willis conscientiously maintains Martha’s playful language, whatever the topic. On her aged, infirm grandmother Martha’s pronouncement is grimly playful: She wasn’t dead yet, just warehoused at Miriam Sisters. (47) At a Chinese restaurant: It had been the China Tea Cup for about a million years, and then then when the area began to come up, they remodeled and started cooking their actual original native cuisine, which they remarkably remembered how to cook after all the years of chop suey. (95) Out of place at a posh restaurant, she tells the wealthy man who has invited her, “You order, I’ve always been a good eater. I’ll eat anything higher on the food chain than beetles.” (128) Assessing the current trend in cars: Parked in front of the Love Palace was an enormous silver block of an SUV with one of those aggressive names like Colossus or Incursion. (188) These examples are in page order because I found them by casually flipping through the book and looking for an apt sentence wherever I landed. Martha’s voice permeates nearly every page.

Of course, some things are happening outside Martha’s mind, in the so-called real world. She has revealed that she’s broke, about to lose her apartment, unemployed, and not really looking for work. She seems unable or unwilling to plan and accomplish anything. Poverty has reduced her diet from spaghetti with canned sauce to spaghetti without the sauce. But she still has enough money for some day drinking at a local bar, and as she sits staring at her reflection between bottles in the big mirror behind the bar, pretending to look at the want ads and blithely wallowing in her impotence, she seizes an opportunity to exercise the one power remaining to her—the power to attract men. At the moment, the nearest potential conquest is a cute man less than half her age. The man wants to tell Martha about Jesus, so their conversation bypasses the usual phatic phase and goes straight into substantial matters. When it turns out the man is a virgin, the possibility of bedding him appears epic, enough of a triumph to jump-start her life. “I decided that if I could get Robby to come home with me, my luck would change. I would make the phone calls. I would have a job within a week. . . . Get rid of the five pounds I’d picked up, and be so self-confident and svelte . . . ”

Playfully exaggerating of course, but Martha does actually attach some authentic power to the act of seduction. And here's an important piece of Willis's art. Martha's first real action in the novel reinforces our understanding of her character. Willis could have had Martha tidy her apartment, apply for a job, buy some groceries, call her sister, or any number of deeds, but those would have been a time-out from our education. Martha's attractiveness as validation of her self-worth--and her genuine enjoyment of sex--are part of her, and part of the journey the reader will be sharing with her.

And it sort of works. Through Robby, Martha gets a sort-of job, organizing the neglected office of the jumbled mess of the Love Palace. It’s a fitting site for Martha and her vague, shapeless notion of who she is and where she’s going, combining fragmented elements of a church, flophouse, neighborhood action committee, cult compound, soup kitchen, and love nest. Bringing some order to the chaotic office reminds Martha that she does possess some ability besides seduction. She makes a beginning at throwing out papers and organizing others into piles. She plunges into sorting out the haphazardly kept finances. When she learns that the new-looking dishwasher doesn’t work and nobody seems to even wonder why, she finds the manual, calls the 800 number, learns that the machine is under warranty, and gets it fixed the same day. She tells her therapist, “At the Love Palace I haven’t even started, but I already feel good, competent. I go diving into the piles of papers for a phone book and find a wallet that belongs to one of the girls. They think I’m a genius. . . . I could do a dozen things before Robby and the others even got up in the morning. I felt a glow of competence and superiority.” (60-62) She even goes some brief time without seducing a man or allowing herself to be seduced by one.

So now instead of directly letting us learn more about Martha, Willis is letting us watch as Martha learns more about herself.

Martha doesn't revel in her superiority. She flashes it, mentally checks the box, and moves on. A long-ago college English graduate and apparently a lifetime reader, she likes to drop an apt literary quotation or reference into a conversation, no doubt aware that few if any in her circle are conversant with Shakespeare or Tolstoy. When nobody seems to notice it, she happily moves on instead of calling attention to the little boost she's given herself.

The more time we spend with Martha, the more we see the essential wholeness behind her at times puzzling behaviors. Early in her Love Palace tenure, Martha discovers that someone is making ATM withdrawals from the agency’s bank account, a couple hundred dollars or so at a time. Trying to learn what’s going on, she finds out nobody even knows how many ATM cards exist, or who has them. Martha continues to probe the mystery over the course of probably weeks. Wouldn’t anyone just go to the bank, cancel all the cards, and wait to see who shows up asking for one? Confident that Willis had thought of this, and Martha’s failure to take this simple, obvious step was somehow rooted in who she is, I held that thought as I read on. Eventually I realized that, of course, Martha is enjoying the heck out of this. Delving into old papers, suspecting this or that person among the raggle-taggle of the Love Palace, discreetly questioning people, exercising her intelligence, placing herself as the person with the power to examine the others—this is Martha’s playground. Willis never attaches many weighty adjectives to Martha’s character, but by now we know her well enough to integrate a seemingly absurd behavior into our understanding of who she is.

The truth emerges, other matters arise, and characters not mentioned here play their parts. These will be addressed in more typical reviews. This review for writers is about how Willis contrives to make our entry into Martha’s life feel as natural and spontaneous as the relationships we’ve played out so many times before, in real life and in other skilled and insightful fiction.

When we say goodbye, Martha is in a quite comfortable position . . .  for her. Her job is certainly not long-term, and she will likely lose her apartment soon. She may or may not be sort-of married (it’s complicated, of course). She’s had a couple of unexpected sexual flings, has no immediate plans for another, but that will happen. Importantly, she has discovered she can accept and even embrace her unorthodox makeup, and survive and even in some small way thrive without plans or directions, finding some foothold wherever circumstances land her. Willis has made Martha real for us, and we would like to know where she goes from here. We wish her well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Hints from a Professional Editor by Danny Williams

Got a nice novel manuscript in the shop this week. Has some mildly magical elements—something more than natural, but way short of dragons and crystal balls.* About half of it is set in 1860 or 1861 Virginia, on a quite wealthy  horse breeding, trading, and racing  concern. It’s very carefully written, and even with my nearly pathological attention to detail I couldn’t catch the author in a timeline slip or a substantial tense shift or anything.

Most of my advice was to take greater advantage of the setting, an opulent estate in the final years of the Virginia slave economy. There was a magnificent plantation mansion, and gala feasts and dances. Don’t just say the woman was dressing for dinner, tell me about her gown, bustle, wig, or corset. The gaily clad menfolk, too. And that feast—what’s on the table? All the bounty of farm, ranch, orchard, and sea are withing reach, so tempt me with some. And that opulent mansion, I want to hear about its colonnaded veranda, English oak woodwork, and manicured landscape.

The author had written some nice old-time-sounding dialogue, and I encouraged him to do more. Many of the suggestions I’ve actually learned in my academic study of Appalachian speech, which differs from modern Standard American English largely in its retention of obsolescent syntax.** Adding essentially meaningless auxiliaries to verbs: I might could do that. Other quaint redundancies: I like these ones. Using “anymore” positively, and “of” with times and seasons: Anymore, I like to sleep later of a morning. And one character was visiting horseman from Louisiana, so I would give him a little belle femme, merci, excusez moi, and à tout a l-heure.

Speech idiosyncrasies can add differentiation to dialogue. An individual might be prone to throat-clearing before speaking, cursing, or substituting long or obscure words for simple ones. A former co-worker ended every sentence with rising pitch, so every utterance sounded like a question. Nowadays, in every group of speakers there’s probably one who begins every remark with “so.” All these tools are obvious, but it requires awareness and effort for authors to prevent dialogue from sounding like their own.***

Maybe my input will prompt the author to reexamine the manuscript, maybe not. I honestly do not care much. This work brings me joy.

*             Paola Corso, Giovanna’s 86 Circles and Other Stories. Twenty-some years ago I had the pleasure of reading the manuscript of this collection. Ms. Corso's habitual setting is urban Appalachian, a much under-recognized genre, and many of these stories feature just this type of quasi-magical touches. Sadly, in the end I was denied the opportunity of working with this gifted fiction writer, poet, and photographer. University of Wisconsin offered her a quite modest advance, and my tightwad director would not allow me to match it. (No budget concerns on his pet projects, of course.) Anyhow, read this, and more of her work, for enjoyment and for instruction.

**           Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech. After all the years and scholarship, this slender 1976 opus is still the place to start on Appalachian (or other old-timey) dialect. Quite possibly it will be as far as you need to go with the subject, sparing you some of the more ponderous tomes.

***        Must mention Ken Sullivan, former long-time editor of Goldenseal magazine. He had a real knack for taking submissions from all types of informants and somehow doing a great job of editing while keeping the writer's individual voice. I try to keep him in mind while doing my own work.

Send me some of your stuff—vague notions or developing manuscripts. I'll put a couple hours into checking it out and giving an opinion, for free. I would do every editing job in its entirety for free, except that I'd get so immersed I would have no time for cleaning the bird cage or showering.

Danny Williams, editorwv@hotmail.com

(see one of my other personae at Facebook Page "Sassafras Music Shop.")

 
 
 
 
Names in Fiction
by Danny Williams

 

 

People’s names are a big deal. They’re such a big deal that—except for ms. lang and mr. cummings—they begin with capital letters. When someone tells us their name, we try to remember it, and sometimes feel guilty if we don’t. Here’s some stuff I think about names in books, from my reading and editing.

In most stories, I believe awarding a character a name ought to be a special recognition, like giving a letter to a school athlete. Just like in the putative “real” world, we can’t help but take special notice of someone’s name. If the character is just passing through, never to return, giving them a name is asking the reader to spend a tiny bit of effort on something that in the end doesn’t matter. We’ve all had that boss. Give your readers a break. Back to a Maugham sentence I remarked upon before, “The doctor was a small, beardless man with a dismissive air.” Besides painting a sharp portrait with a very few words, the sentence tells the reader, “It’s okay to forget this guy. He won’t be back.”

As for what to name your people, you can figure that out. Time and place are important. If I were setting a realistic story in my youthful days in Wayne County, West Virginia in the 1950s and1960s, there would be no Gonzales or Nakamura, no Pierre or Mercedes. Year after year I sat between Linda Watts and Debra Witham, and I believe Lindas and Deborahs made up about half the girls in my class of 1970.

One of my writers, who admits he does not read, populated a government research facility in Northern Virginia with names which would have fit right in with my childhood. I talked him into a Mustafa, a Devonte, a Negrescu, and a few others. He had a Dick Dangerfield he would not part with, but I nudged him into making the man kind of a wimp. (Dick also complained continuously about the humidity in his basement office, so I suggested to the author that the man might enjoy growing bromeliads.)

And with Dick Dangerfield, we come to characternyms. (I made that up.) Besides choosing a set of names appropriate to the setting, you could decide to use names which say or suggest something about the character. Annie Proulx (author of my favorite Appalachian novel, though it is set in Newfoundland) uses this tool for central characters in much of her writing. Homer Quoyle feels like he doesn’t fit in anywhere. Loyal Blood is tragically upright. Bob Dollar manipulates down-on-their-luck farmers into selling their land. An unfaithful and abusive wife, Petal Bear, tries to sell her daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, to sex traffickers. Dolor Gagnon is a very sad man.

Unless you’re writing a children’s book or a fantasy, the decision to go this route is a big one. Some readers will absorb the name into their perception of the character, and others (raising my hand) will probably find it distracting, maybe fatally so. If you can’t resist the fun of it, you might apply the name to a relatively minor character. A barrister named Mr. Bideawhile appears in a few Anthony Trollope novels, and a fabulously rich nobleman, the Duke of Omnium.

As a final check, along with the dozens of other final checks, just list all the names in your story. One of my very good writers found she had named four characters with forms of William. One of them was so minor he could be anonymized, and she redubbed the others.

I love big fat novels, ones so thick and dense the author has to supply a list of characters. If you write one of those, then obviously much of what I just said does not apply. Also, tell me how to get a copy.

React to this post, tell me about your current project, send a sample, or even talk about us working together. Or anything else. I have an opinion on every topic. Also, I have written a chapter of yet another imaginary novel, and I would adore some feedback from y’all. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

 

Danny Williams

editorwv@hotmail.com

 

“An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he’d have someone to look up to.”
–Gene Fowler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


From Middlemarch                         George Eliot                            From The Mill on the Floss

Five Lessons from George Eliot:
Celebrating Her 200th Birthday 11/22/1819
(With writing exercises)

If you don't know the story of George Eliot's life, it is worth a novel in itself: her religious rebellion; her unconventional twenties as a single woman trying to earn a living editing and translating; how she finally met a man who fully supported her work, but could not marry her because of what now seem like ridiculous divorce laws; how she and he considered themselves married by their own commitments and morality; how the rest of the world did not; how she became one of the most famous and morally influential writers of her century. Indeed, a lot of us believe that her novel Middlemarch may be one of the five best novels ever written in English.

You may or may not have the patience for the long descriptions and pontificating of nineteenth century fiction, but if you haven't read George Eliot, at least give her a try. A good place to start is The Mill on the Floss. It has a feisty girl protagonist whose fatal flaw is that she wants too much to be loved, especially by her honorable but rigid and self-righteous brother. It paints a splendid picture of life in rural England in the first half of the nineteenth century and has a satisfyingly melodramatic climax (see illustration).

But Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss are recommendations for reading. What does Eliot have to suggest to us about writing?

 

Lesson I:

This first lesson is not exclusively from George Eliot, but rather from all the best nineteenth century novelists (the Russians, the French, certainly the English). These writers believed that everything can go into fiction. Nothing is forbidden--not teaching moments or philosophical speculations. I strongly recommend that at least in your first draft, you should reach out broadly. Don't hesitate to include religion or current events or scandals of the day along with the close-focus of physical detail and internal experience. Include dreams and recipes and baseball box scores if the spirit moves you.

This is not, of course, to suggest that you write a story strictly to push a particular political or religious belief. That isn't fiction but rather journalism or an op-ed piece. The point is that these are part of real life, and prose narrative in its many ways tends to be about real life--even when it is fantasy or science fiction or horror.

I consider it enriching to your fiction to give a character some of the doubts and queries that may run through your own mind. You can do this in monologue or dialogue. Sex and violence and descriptions of weather and meals are all part of fiction, but so may be discussions about politics and work

One of George Eliot's novels, Felix Holt: Radical is set firmly at a time of labor unrest in England. She was interested in how a change in the law (the First Reform Act of 1832) would affect workers and farmers as well as in the terrible secret of one of her characters. She sometimes goes off on not-so-little tangents that show off her learning (probably in more detail than a twenty-first century reader appreciates), but the point here is that you can use everything in even a lean, minimalist story. Put the events or ideas in dialogue or have a television in the background of a bar. Have your main character mull over the big issues as we sometimes do in real life.

 

Exercise 1: This is another of those all purpose exercises for restarting a stalled story or book, or to get more material. Have your main character hear something on the radio or see something on TV or on the smart phone, some world event or famous crime. You can use this to ground the story in its time and place (which impeachment hearing is this?), but more importantly, What does it mean to your character? How does the character react, if at all? With anxiety? With cynicism?

Exercise 2:   Think about the media your characters are using. Are there thematic news stories that can add to the mood and ambiance? If your story is set in 1976-77, for example, how do your characters react to the Son of Sam serial killings?

Exercise 3:   Rather than have your protagonist react internally to the events, have them come up in conversation before class, at the dinner table, etc.

 

Lesson II:

Eliot is famous for her awareness of and appreciation of farming and the lives of farmers of various social levels. One of the things we often leave out of our fiction is work--that is to say, what people do day-to-day. Obviously you don't just write little essays about how things are done and set them in the middle of your fiction undigested, but anything in which you have interest or expertise can enrich your fiction. It may lead to some plot element, or it may lead to a deepening of the main character or a minor character. Phillip Roth has wonderful descriptions of glove-making in American Pastoral. It is part of what his main character does in his everyday life, and it eventually takes on symbolic meaning.

Exercise 4: Have a character watch her grandmother make tortillas (or do some other work with the hands): break down the physical action, mention the rich odor, the slapping sound. Or, give a character a job as a car salesman--What are the little tricks to keep up the customer's interest. Does the character like the challenge or hate the job? In other words, include your characters' professions or jobs.

 

 

Lesson III:

Eliot tends to use the omniscient viewpoint. She uses it very well, as do many of the nineteenth century novelists, but she always stays close to one character long enough to capture the full emotional depth of what that person is going through before pulling back to an overview or the next character. This is the essential challenge with the omniscient viewpoint. It is too easy to move around too much, creating a kind of narrative vertigo. Be sure you stay with one character long enough to learn something about him or her.


Exercise 5:  If you are working with the omniscient viewpoint, experiment with following some peripheral character and following them very closely for a while--longer than you might without the special instruction. Choose a figure that almost disappears in the background. Maybe it's a dark gray city rat with a broken tail hurrying to the drain with a piece of pizza. Once you start following the rat, let us feel its struggle with the big piece of pizza. Is it a mother with hungry pups? How does the world look at drain level?

 

 

Lesson IV:

Our most vivid sense impressions probably happen when we are very young. This is one reason people often write successfully about their own childhoods. When we are small, many things are Firsts, and our senses are open and sharp. George Eliot wrote till her death about people in farm landscapes similar to the one she grew up in.

I'm not suggesting you suddenly put a toddler in your story (although that might be fun to see what happens) but rather that you use your characters' senses with the vividness of a child.

Eliot's probably least popular novel today is called Romola, and it is set in fifteenth century Florence. I didn't like it the first time I read it--I could feel her research weighing down the story, I thought. But then I read it again years later, after I actually visited Florence, and it suddenly lit up for me. I had my own sense impressions of the place that added to the book. I was also older, and the book's strengths are its portraits of traitors and turncoats: it isn't a cheerful book.

So the lesson is the importance of vivid sense impressions for making our fiction alive for ourselves and readers. Whether we've got a detective being beat up by bad guys or a child tasting bread hot out of the oven, we will go deeper into our created world and bring readers with us when the sense description is sharpest. Not longest, note, but most vivid.

Exercise 6:  Go back to some scene you are having trouble with. Re-envision it with your eyes closed, starting with your senses other than seeing. Get some details of touch and the sensation of breeze or dampness in the air. What music is playing in the car down the street? What do you smell? Give these observations to one of the characters in your story, or just set the scene differently. Does it change what happens?

Exercise 7: Okay, try putting a toddler in your story! Maybe it's a child being smacked in a public place. How does you character react? Maybe it's a lost child, or the main character's family member. What does this stir up? Change about the plot? Daughters have become a cliché for tough guy thrillers and detectives. They are always getting kidnapped or threatened! You can borrow the cliché or try something different with the kid: humor? Disturbing a stake-out? Reminding the hero how much she doesn't want to have children of her own?

 

 

Lesson V:

Write what fascinates you, or don't bother. Eliot was through-out her life highly sensitive to criticism--pretty neurotic about it, really, to the point that her partner wrote letters to friends asking them not to send comments on her publications. She suffered during the process of writing a new book over how bad she thought it was, and dreaded reviews.

At the same time, while she accepted technical and stylistic suggestions, she always wrote what she wanted to. She had the good fortune to write in a way that led to great popularity and financial success, but she didn't seek popularity. She wrote to find out what her characters were really like, and she often surprised her readers, and possibly herself, about the depths of characters that in another writer's hand would have been caricatures.

For example. Maggie Tulliver's mother in The Mill on the Floss is a ridiculously superficial woman who is far more concerned about her beautiful linens and Maggie's unruly hair than about the child's moral or intellectual development. Still, as the story goes on, and after the family suffers heavy financial setbacks (and her beautiful linens have to be sold), she is faithful to her family, and more importantly, when Maggie suffers the the deepest social disgrace, she sticks by her.

Dickens would have handled it differently. He had one of the most amazing imaginations every employed in fiction writing, and his characters are so wonderful with their memorable tics and catch phrases, their inimitable names, extreme behaviors and large gestures. But in general, they don't change a lot.

Eliot, on the other hand, believed that the function of a novel is, among other things of course, to chart the gradual changes people go though from start to finish. She turns her characters before us as on a potter's wheel, gaining form, expanding here, narrowing here.

 

Exercise 8: Put yourself in a quiet mood. Play some wordless music softly, or do slow breathing, or whatever it takes to quiet yourself. Close your eyes and think of all the writing projects you've started. If they are still on the computer, imagine they are printed out or even published, and arrange them (in your imagination) on a table in front of you, or as books on a shelf, or a list. What have you not written? Is there a subject you are interested in that never seemed appropriate for a story? A character who always fascinated you? A plot that came to you when someone told you a story? (Henry James's The Turn of the Screw was given to him at a dinner party; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina came from a newspaper clipping). Set a timer for fifteen minutes and write as much as you can about that plot or character or idea.

 

Final Thoughts on George Eliot:

 

George Eliot made a lot of money writing. In fact, she managed to save her partner George Lewes's financial bacon (he was responsible for his own children with his legal wife as well as his legal wife's several children by another man). Eliot made enough to create a very comfortable life for herself and Lewes, and to give all his children good starts in life.

But she (and Dickens and Thackery and Trollope and Mrs. Gaskell and all the Victorians) had a great advantage over us now which was that the reading public was growing and buying. The buying is particularly important, because you could make a tidy fortune writing stories and novels. The Victorians wrote at the height of the time when novels and poems had relatively few competitors for the middle class entertainment shilling. Yes, there was theatre, if you were in London, and certainly there was socializing and sport and church, but the particular pleasure of being entertained with stories was all on the page. People read potboilers, and they read high art with equal enthusiasm: they had time and inclination and wanted to read.

Or to be read to--one typical way of consuming novels used to be around the lamp in the evening, the ladies perhaps doing their "work" with needle and thread, and one person chosen to read to all of them. Books were rented, borrowed, and bought in periodicals and cheap editions.

Today we have what my mother would have called a hard row to hoe. That is to say, some of you may write novels that are just what the public is hungry for, and you may get a movie deal, and you may actually get rich writing--and if you do, my most sincere congratulations!  But more of us today end up with small press publishers or alternative, independent publishing careers. Some of you may never make a career of it at all, perhaps writing a handful of powerful short stories.

You can't be guaranteed a living from turning out a certain number of pages or words, but you can still take writing lessons from George Eliot, especially the part about writing what you really want to write.

Make the act of finding your story and gaining insight into your characters, and working out your ideas through fiction an end in itself.

 

 

 

 

 

Structuring with the Raised Relief Map Technique

 

For short stories and even novellas, I am trying a new way of drafting. I have always read over and organized my notes and rough drafts of scenes and passages of narration before I started a "real" first draft, but I've begun to do it in a more formal and disciplined way.

Instead of my usual process of slipping as quickly as possible deep into the words, I pull back a little first. I begin with some left brain work that doesn't sink into the creative depths. This sounds counter-intuitive, especially as the going-deep is what attracts most of us to writing, but not-sinking-in is actually the discipline here. I've already been inspired to write the various rough bits, and now, for a little while, I avoid inspiration and instead try to tidy up the material. Again, this is nothing new except for when I am doing it, which is early on.

I scrape the extremely rough drafts of scenes, the scraps of dialogue and description, into digital heaps and shove them around until I have a little landscape of homemade hills. I give the piles temporary names, which probably won't be there in the finished version: The Book Club; Bobby One; The Psychiatrist; Bobby Two. The heaps, the hills, serve the same function as the "rules" of a genre story: a formula to change and ignore. I use it as the biographer uses the chronology of a life, as a rough guide. The form is not a choke collar or a cage, but a landscape to wander in and discover.

After the heaps, I go back to the beginning and write in my normal way, letting one thing lead to another, letting myself sink into the scenes and ideas and sensations.

This is not, by the way, the same as a clean start, which I recommend to myself and others when there seems to be major confusion and too much material. In a clean start, you begin with an empty screen or blank sheet of paper. Having no notes in front of you allows your mind to edit on its own. It brings back only the best parts of what you've already written, and you usually get a leaner, cleaner, altogether better draft into which you can, of course, put anything good from the old one.

The raised relief map technique preserves the materials but groups it into a sort of map. You can climb the high points, make side trips, stop to smell the flowers. You can be surprised by what is hiding in a cave or an old mine shaft. You can excavate or wander off, and then come back to the path or make a new one.

How, you might ask, do you find the direction?

My best hope is that the very wandering and exploring will give it to you, but also, ideally, when you made the heaps in the beginning, you were looking from your cool distance at where the pieces might go. Thus, the hills should have a natural progression, a hypothetical story structure: lowest to highest, maybe with a climax in the middle. In other words, you chose the general path when you first heaped up the extremely raw notes. Now you take that general direction, with leisurely side trips as you write.

The extended metaphor begins to break down here: the idea is to plan and structure the story line early on. Anyone trying this should jettison it as soon as it feels the least bit restrictive rather than formative.

The technique is pretty straightforward with a short story or even a long story or essay, because usually there are only six or eight of the heaps of ideas and materials. It is more challenging, or at the very least more time-consuming, with a novel.

Need I reiterate that this is something to play off of, not get stuck in? The plan may change radically before you're done, but for the moment, you have (1) an excellent way to see what you have, the lay of the land; (2) at least a hypothetical structure; and (3) lots of material ready to expand and explore.

 

(By MSW, with suggestions from Joan Liebowitz, Carole Rosenthal, and NancyKay Shapiro)
 

 


 
 

 

Rolling Revision: The Interplay of Big Picture and Close-Up

 

Writers often come to prose narrative from a place of having a story to tell--or, conversely, from their sheer love of language. Obviously, the best prose of any genre combines both things--an idea, a shape, and also graceful choices of phrase. You hear writers praised for the rhythm of their sentences, and you hear them praised for the powerful momentum of their stories.

Beginning writers tend to fall into two categories: some get completely caught up in polishing their sentences and their first page, and after a while despair of ever finding a direction let alone completing the work. The other type of beginning writer sketches out a terrific plot and vaguely imagines that someone else--a hired editor, the prop person for the movie version--will fill in the details.

Those of us who have been writing for many years usually recognize these tendencies in ourselves and consciously or unconsciously compensate for them. I think I do my best writing when I am aware of the requirements of the manuscript and of my own needs at a given moment. Thus, if I am distracted by life's daily business (a class to teach! an upcoming medical procedure! preparing a holiday dinner for nine!), I still try to write, but I do a particular kind of writing. When I only have a half hour, I've found that I can always do a little sharply focused detail editing, or I can dash off something wildly new or surreal. I'll daft an incident from my childhood, or a dream or a scrap of overheard conversation with no relation to my present writing project,

What doesn't work for me when I'm distracted is the kind of deep work that happens on my best full writing days. Then I begin perhaps by tinkering with the paragraph where I left off on my last writing session (close-up work). Next, as I continue with something new or a little more revision, I might get a new idea--a flash of insight (But wait! What if he knew that earlier on?) Then I rough in a new scene two chapters earlier, which requires adjustments to my outline. Next I would work on the outline for a while, maybe breaking a chapter into two chapters, which means some mechanical renumbering. I might also run through the chapters to see if my new material requires any "continuity" work to make things match up.

Fantasy writer Patricia C. Wrede calls this "rolling revision" in an online article "12 Contemporary Writers on How They Revise." (If you don't want to read the whole article, just search for Wrede's name). Sometimes, after this, I go back to the point where I started the day, but more often, after all that back and forth, my brain hurts (as the Gumbies used to say in the Monty Python sketches), and I go out for a walk.

For me, the real heart of writing, after the original inspiration, is this travelling back and forth among and between close editing and bursts and snatches of new ideas, and the Big Picture reorganizing that comes out of it.

 

 

 

 

 

Some Thoughts on Self-Publishing

By Allen Cobb

 

Several years ago, when Print On Demand (POD) was becoming practical, I started my self-publishing "company" - Mulberrry Knoll (.com) - and produced my first book, a collection of poems (start small!) called Cave Paintings. Create Space didn't exist, and Ingram had only Lightning Source, which they were already willing to make available to self-publishers. (LS didn't, however, initially realize how much hand-holding would be required as people with no prior experience in book production suddenly began experimenting with self-publishing. This spawned IngramSpark, intended to serve newcomers to publishing.)

Since I have experience in content and copy editing, and in the technical side of publishing, and have designed book covers and interiors over the years, it was tremendously satisfying to have total control over the whole process. This, of course, meant that I saved thousands of dollars (and paid myself nothing), but I got the books I wanted, and since no initial press run was involved, it cost about $100 per title.

To my surprise and delight, I found that Ingram's long-standing business relations with Amazon, largely through the massive Ingram Catalog, meant that without doing anything at all further, I could have my book listed as "in stock" and "sold by" Amazon. No special arrangements, no contracts, just $12/yr to keep the listing in the Ingram Catalog, and suddenly my book was available to the entire planet. What's more, Amazon offered my books at a modest but worthwhile discount. (That discount changed, and is still changing, but it's a long story.)

With one slim volume under my belt, I tidied up my short novel, The Rules: for playing the game of life, and published it the same way. More recently, I collected and revised 21 short stories, under the title Brain Frieze, and that's also on Amazon for all the world to see.

Of course, it's immediately obvious to anyone who's tried this that the world doesn't see. Nobody knows that your book(s) are among the bazillion others on Amazon, or even among the tens of thousands newly listed each year. So "publishing" isn't a very apt word for this new process of getting a book "out there."

That said, traditional publishers are also no longer performing the services they were known for, so the distinction between self-publishing and traditional publishing is much less dramatic. There are too many details to consider in one posting, but, for example, if your self-pub title doesn't accept returns, then probably no bookstore will touch it (not that they're likely to hear about it). If your wholesale discount isn't the archaic industry standard 65%, then distributors and book-sellers probably won't touch it. But again, without the expensive marketing campaign that publishers used to do, nobody will ever know your books exist. You may, of course, have a good connection with a world-famous bookstore, or an existing audience of some kind, in which case you do have a market and you may sell some books. But that's the primary challenge for self-publishers - marketing.

Ironically, the biggest disadvantage of self publishing has also become part of traditional publishing. Authors are expected to conduct substantial self-marketing campaigns that far exceed what was often required only a few decades ago. But now self-publishing may be the only remaining means of getting "out there" even for well-established authors.

One interesting caveat has cropped up recently. Some of the periodicals that publish short fiction, whether in print or online, are absolutely not interested if your story has been self-published. In some cases, this applies even to making a PDF available on your website, but it certainly applies to having a book available for sale on Amazon, even if your family are the only buyers. Others don't care at all - the Iowa Short Fiction prize, for a first collection, was perfectly OK with my book already being on Amazon. Part of this inconsistency is due to the lingering disdain for self publishing - to many in the traditional world, it's not really publishing. But be aware that technically, it is publishing, since your book is now available to the public in any quantity, whether or not they buy any.

 

 

 

 

Making Your Own Deadlines

By Anna Egan Smucker

 

Deadlines are good.  Right?  The problem is that my writing doesn’t usually have deadlines. Contests such as the WV Writers Contest and deadlines for poetry submissions are great, but a more personal deadline is, in some ways, even better.

My good friend moved hundreds of miles away. As a way to connect and to continue our critiquing and encouragement for each other’s work, we give ourselves a deadline for when we have to e-mail each other a new poem. We mark two dates on our calendars: the date the poem needs to be e-mailed and a time the following day to call and critique each other’s poems, as well as chat.  Knowing we have a deadline coming up in a week helps to get the creative juices flowing.

With friends and fellow writers who live closer, we meet at the local library, and commit to writing from 10:00 a.m. to at least 1:00 p.m.  We sit at different tables and simply focus on our own work.  Just knowing that a fellow writer is close by, busily working on her poem or manuscript, is a great energizer. The reward, besides getting some good writing accomplished, is the fun of getting together afterwards at a local restaurant for lunch.

Another idea is to coauthor a book, in my case picture books.  Having your coauthor’s revision appear in your e-mail box requires getting down to work on that draft, and quickly e-mailing or calling with your suggestions for revision.  Lots of back and forth certainly helps sustain both energy level and interest in the project.  Working with two different authors on various separate manuscripts has, I think, made the stories stronger than had either of us worked on the manuscripts alone. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Revision Technique for Novels

MSW

 

I've been giving a piece of advice for many years to students in my novel writing classes: go through your manuscript once as a reader, sitting on your hands. This is, of course, another way of saying "Don't tinker. Don't start manipulating the sentences. Don't edit, Just read." Notes are allowed, but only at section or chapter breaks. The aim is to get an overview of plot, story, flow, and momentum.

Most of us who love to write are especially devoted to our words and phrases. We are always looking for a better way to say it. We expand here, tighten and cut there. We are often very good at the trees, but we tend to lose our way in the forest. Others of us, of course, are gifted at plot and story line. We may be natural storytellers, or we may have a clear model in mind that gives structure and momentum: a coming of age novel, a life story. Or, we might be mostly drawn to the possibilities of exploring character, slowing down time, going back and forth in time, examining moments and small details.

The best novels, in my opinion, do all these things. The writers of the best novels, however, don't necessarily do the things all at once. Thus I suggest different kinds of revisions, some fast, some slow, some focused on only a single thing. I wrote an essay about this called "Seven Layers to Revising Your Novel" that appeared in The Writer. Most of these suggestions for revision come from my own experience. I particularly like one that revises the second half or even the last quarter first. I also often do the "search for details" revision where you search through the whole novel for all appearances of a certain character (or place, or important object) to see how that element changes over the course of the novel. I also do housekeeping like checking for catch phrases or words that I tend to overuse ("shards" and "gazed deeply").

What I had never done before, however, was the straight-through read I described at the beginning. Since I'm working on a science fiction novel where story is of the essence, I decided finally to try it, and last month, I read the manuscript on my Kindle e-reader. I e-mailed it as a .doc file to my special Kindle address (if you have a Kindle, you have one of these, usually yourname@kindle.com). I kept a pencil and notebook at my side, and while I couldn't quite make myself wait for the end of the chapter, I did scribble only an occasional note, and tried hard not to copy edit or line edit. I concentrated on the story, and was horrified by various discrepancies: I had made certain revelations more than once, and the first person narrator repeatedly overheard conversations like a regular little spy.

The biggest problem, though, was the order in which the characters begin to explore the desert outside their home. I had them learn to ride the local flying aliens out into the desert before they took walks into the desert under their own steam. There was a complicated explanation for why they stopped flying to walk, but as I read, the impatient reader in me said, "Duh, why don't they just walk first and learn to fly later?"

I wrote myself a long note about what I needed to do, but didn't work on it till I'd finished reading. For me, this took a lot of self-discipline. I was glad, though, because once I got over some bumps, the story went very well, at least with the kind of speed read I was giving it, so I was encouraged and ready to get back to work.

I've now put the events of the story in a more sensible order that also seems to have the advantage of upping the ante, as they recommend in script writing--that is, the farther they go out into the desert, the more danger there is. For those of you who see yourself as artists rather than as suspense-builders, keep in mind that your first several drafts should have given full play to your instincts and inspiration. That comes first: getting out whatever it is that you are interested in exploring. Then, as you step back and begin to reshape and polish your sentences, you may also need to reshape and polish the trajectory of the story itself.

This revision technique might help.

 

 

 

 

 

Literature, Genre, and Me

     

I've been trying to understand the difference between literary fiction and genre for a long time. A member of my writers' group used to bring in science fiction for critique sometimes, and sometimes her avant garde work. It was all meticulously written in her delightful, faux naif style, and we could never tell the difference between avant garde and science fiction, except that occasionally the science fiction had some very human aliens in it.

In fact, I believe the best fiction, whether literary or genre, has always combined powerful language with psychological and social insight and story. The way we separate genre and literature in the twenty-first century is, to my way of thinking, mostly about selling, and there is no doubt that writing in certain niches sells far better than others.

I've been writing since I was about six years old, and in the beginning, I was above all interested in the stories. What happened to the Indian Princess? What did she do? What happened next? I went through a long period in college and after when I saw myself as devoted to high art. The truth is that I have always loved some high art, admired other high art, and reacted to some with a big "meh."

I find myself increasingly, in my later years, reverting to the pleasure of novels with a lot of narrative momentum. In our present literary landscape, this often, although certainly not always, means well-written genre books. The problem with highly polished art writing is the danger of creating only static set pieces–bijoux for contemplation and admiration by a leisured reader rather than a river that sucks you downstream through its rapids and sluices.

The novel I'm working on now is science fiction, and I've been trying hard to master how to create that river. I'm writing just as carefully as ever, at least in the later drafts. But I have been moving toward ever more rough first drafts for years, trying to get story first, then sink into the wonder of creating places and character and conversations and monologues. This likely means I'll never be a commercially successful genre writer because it will always take me too long to write a book, and a prime characteristic of successful genre writers is that they keep new product in the pipeline.

How is writing this book different from writing my other fiction? Occasionally in the science fiction novel, I choose to simplify language for action--but I do that for action in anything I write. I am probably more careful about the geography of my settings because I want them to be very clear in the reader's mind as the action plays out. In language, I pay a great deal of attention to using words that fit the material culture of the world I've created. I avoid images that include objects or ideas that don't exist on this planet. This is part of the pleasure though: I delight in world-creating as much now as I did when I was five years old and my parents bought me for Christmas a miniature ranch with horses and fences and people.

Much genre writing is simply sloppy–hastily written, to meet deadlines, or in the case of some of the mass of self-published material appearing now, written to satisfy personal needs of the writer. This may also explain some of the popularity of even badly written genre: it is probably scratching some widely shared itch. If I'm going to read it, however, I need a level of clarity and clean writing at a minimum. Along with science fiction, I like good detective and crime fiction and I also like fantasy, if it abides by some set of internal rules.

All novels, of course–and this is why genre and literature are more alike than different–create worlds, whether alien planets far far away or south central Los Angeles just after the Watts riots of the late sixties. In my science fiction novel I have to spend more time describing my created world than I would if the novel were set in New York City, but frankly, it's a trivial difference because even though I can expect my readers to fill in a lot of blanks about New York City–that there is one sun in the sky on a bright fall day, for example (in my science fiction novel, there are two), there are still particular streets and waterfronts and restaurants that have to be built out of observation and imagination. A failing of much student writing I see is to assume a frame of reference: that we all know certain clubs or monuments, or what certain catch phrases mean, or that we feel the emotion the protagonist does when listening to a certain song from the nineteen-nineties.

Genre writing gives me that satisfaction of play from my childhood. I am, at least in the initial drafting stages, manipulating the riders and horses of my little plastic ranch, and clopping them over the floor on great quests by the light of the Christmas tree. But as I play, I've also discovered that, for me, science fiction in particular, offers a more direct way to write about ideas and power relationships. In my realistic fiction, I have mostly written about people and experiences and social action that I am familiar with. I don't know–for example–what it would be like to have my community destroyed by an enemy. I can imagine it–and indeed, in my science fiction novel, I'm doing exactly that. What effect will it have on the characters? How will they be changed from their ideology of non-violence?

So in my science fiction novel, along with the fun of imagining lavender shadows from the double suns, I can explore the potential results of decisions based on ideology among the humans and the mistakes different sentient species make about one another's motivations. I can experiment with political structures, and I can have my characters be major figures in their world's history.

That's not what I sat down to do when I started my genre novel. I think I sat down with the urge to play as I played as a child, but as an adult, the topics I play with tend to be issues I see unresolved in this world, and I find I can write about them more directly here, in my invented places.

 

 

 

 

 

The Importance of Art to the Artist and the Universe (end of To the Lighthouse)

 

This is perhaps practical as a psychological matter: the final lines of To the Lighthouse talk about the importance of art to the artist and to the universe, without respect to fame and fortune:

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was–her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blue, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? She asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Using the Omniscient Point of View Successfully

 

The omniscient point of view is dangerous: it seems easy–you can just tell anything anyhow you want–but, handled badly, it quickly begins to look amateurish.

Virginia Woolf handled omniscient point of view very well, especially in her novel Mrs. Dalloway. This novel links its switches from one character to another by the simple device of having them pass one another on the streets of London, and as they pass, the point of view shifts. At one point, an unnamed member of the royal family drives by, and the mild excitement of this event links wealthy Clarissa Dalloway out shopping for flowers for her party and Moll Pratt the rose seller as well as some random unnamed men.

When I think of Mrs. Dalloway, I usually remember it as told from Clarissa Dalloway's point of view. If pressed, I might recall that it also followed the war-damaged Septimus Warren Smith. What I had totally forgotten is that the novel also follows Septimus's wife, Clarissa's husband, Clarissa's old love Peter Walsh and many others, including the flower seller Moll Pratt.

One reason the movement among many consciousness works so smoothly is that the novel dances on the surface of the observed world. This in no way suggests it is superficial, but rather that it often concerns itself with physical surfaces– light glinting on porcelain, the sweep of a gown, the colors of flowers. In Woolf's hands, of course, such things are a direct line to memory and deep emotion, and they become a natural way into the characters. The sense details experienced by Woolf's many characters join with the patter of human voices just below the surface- the more-or-less conscious thoughts of her people, and this becomes the fabric of her novel.

Here is a sample from Mrs. Dalloway:

Gliding across Piccadilly, [the car carrying a member of the royal family] turned down St. James's Street. Tall men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with their tail-coats and their white slips and their hair raked back…. stood even straighter, and removed their hands and seemed ready to attend their Sovereign, if need be, to the cannon's mouth, as their ancestors had done before them....Shawled Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement wished the dear boy well (it was the Prince of Wales for certain) and would have tossed the price of a pot of beer–a bunch of roses–into St. James's Street out of sheet light-heartedness and contempt of poverty had she not seen the constable's eye upon her, discouraging an old Irishwoman's loyalty....

–Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1953), pp. 26-27.

 

Since these people come from all walks of life and share the same splendid June day in London, their moment in the same space and time seems natural. Even more to the point, their thoughts are mostly just one-level-down-- the kind of things anyone could be thinking and that that would be reasonably accessible to a sensitive imagination.

Thus, the omniscient point of view earns its keep, moving smoothly from person to person. It is, indeed, essential to creating the world of the morning of Mrs. Dalloway’s party.

 

 

 

 

 

Anthony Trollope's Discipline

Anthony Trollope wrote many, many novels. He also worked much of his life full time as a Post Office inspector and surveyor, and in his forties began to write on a travel desk as he made his almost daily train rides. Here is how one biographer described his discipline:

 

...For years [Trollope] had been making scrupulous records of his daily travels and expenditures for the Post Office, keeping track of every mile, every shilling and penny. In his commonplace-book of the 1830's he had said a young man ought to keep a careful account book of every monetary transaction, that his own failure to do so had brought him near to 'utter ruin'. Now, past 40, he adapted ledger-like columned record-keeping for his writing, marking off the days in weekly sections, entering daily the number of pages written each session, and then noting the week's total. His 'page' had approximately 250 words. He set a goal of 40 manuscript pages per week. He would have preferred to work seven days a week, but of course there were weeks when he could only manage a few days, and some weeks when illness or pressures of other work kept him from writing altogether. He usually managed the 40 pages per week; on a few occasions he pushed himself to more than a hundred pages in a week....

 

(N. John Hall, Trollope: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) p. 143.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Conversation About Keeping Drafts

Suzanne McConnell, Carole Rosenthal, NancyKay Shapiro,
Diane Simmons, and Meredith Sue Willis

 

At a recent writers' peer group session, NancyKay Shapiro was reading a new draft of a short memoir piece we had heard once before. Suzanne McConnell asked to see the previous version. NancyKay said she didn't have it anymore because she had discarded the old version. She reworks the piece as she goes. Suzanne expressed horror. She told us she keeps all her drafts, prints them out, looks back frequently, and even reverts to the previous versions.

We talked a little more about this part of the writing process, and on the way home, I thought more about it. Most of the members of our writers group are old enough–or old-school enough–to have done at least some writing before everyone had a personal computer. Some writers, of course, still choose to draft by hand. All of us, though, one way or the other, have made changes in our process. For example, I've always been a fast but very sloppy typist, and one of the great gifts of technology for me has been never having to retype. I work on the same electronic file as if it were a lump of clay I can reshape or add to. Only occasionally do I make a digital copy of the whole file (I back up my work every day, of course). I label this version for future reference "Draft of Fall 2014" or "Early notes–spring 2016," etc.)  Also, I sometimes draft a whole novel before I make a hard copy print out. Psychologically, it's important to me not to discard things, and the vast digital storage space on a computer makes this little reassurance practical.

For this article, I invited the group members to tell how often they save complete drafts, whether they print them out, whether they ever use them again. Do we, in other words, mostly rework what's there, losing past versions, or do we systematically preserve everything?

Suzanne McConnell, an award-winning fiction writer and fiction editor at The Bellevue Literary Review, is presently working on a nonfiction book about the writing advice of Kurt Vonnegut. She said, "I do keep drafts. Roughly, I compose something from beginning to end to lay the paint on, and then I make a clean copy and start reworking it. When that gets coherent, I make another copy and revise again. That third draft I may keep re-working until it is final, or maybe make another copy to revise. The piece I read [from the Kurt Vonnegut project], for example, has three drafts, but the last one has been re-worked quite a bit. It's refining work, not discovery or placement. This method works well for the Kurt Vonnegut project because my first draft contains mainly his quotes lined up in more or less the sequence I'll use. The next draft is filling in between, roughly. The third is a much better revision. I do all those single-spaced so I can see it better, and in the final draft [which I'll bring] to the group, I make it double-spaced. (This is only true of the Kurt Vonnegut project where I'm relying on his quotes and want to see the proportions). I also keep a list of something called 'out takes:' Cut or alternative phrases, sentences, ideas, etcetera. I keep track of which draft by dating it and labeling '1' or '2'."

Suzanne also says that in her editorial position with The Bellevue Literary Review, when she is exchanging work with writers, she labels the back and forth by numbers. She tried to do this with her novel, but found that it got confusing and problematic, especially labeling the differences in chapters: she would forget what was in one and not another. She says she will look for another system for her next novel.

NancyKay Shapiro, author of What Love Means to You People, said, "In writing novels, I do a lot more draft keeping, and also tend to have a file called 'Scrap' into which I'll paste anything I cut out that I don't want to say a permanent goodbye to, in case I later decide it was golden and should be reinstated. In writing something short ....it just didn't occur to me to do the draft thing. Now I'm more aware I'll put that into practice. With [my new] novel, though, I tend to find that beyond a certain # of pages, having multiple drafts of the same material ends up adding to my sense of being overwhelmed by it."

Adding to the consideration of multiple drafts as both enriching and a little dangerous, Carole Rosenthal, author of It Doesn't Have To Be Me, wrote," I'm one of those writers who save drafts of what I'm working on.  The reason for that is that I sometimes find an earlier draft more concise, more direct.  I can be myopic when I'm revising, inserting too much detail, too many insights.  However, there is a downside to saving drafts, particularly of long works, and that is confusion, too many similar versions.  Then the process grows unwieldy, particularly with longer works."

 

Finally, Diane Simmons, whose upcoming book is The Courtship of Eva Eldridge, said, "Like Nancy Kay I find it crazy-making to save too many drafts of something long. So I just seem to truck along. Though if there are significant out takes I try to save them in a file labeled "title.outtake.date." With shorter pieces, at least when it gets to the point of sending it [out], I save the file, labeling it to whom it has been sent, person or publication. Mostly I do this because sometimes there are comments or even an acceptance, and then I can't remember what stage the piece was at when I sent it. Never quite as bad as my friend who once got a glowing acceptance with no idea what piece she had sent!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Writers Groups

By Troy E. Hill

 

 

While classes can be vital, especially with the right teacher, writing groups offer a number of benefits: low cost (no cost if you have a free meeting space), more frequent opportunities to have your work reviewed due to fewer participants, a safe atmosphere for honest feedback resulting from meeting over a longer period of time, and the chance to have a select group get to know your work in depth.

I've been working with a writers group for more than a year and a half, and it's proven invaluable for my fiction. The ongoing feedback keeps me motivated to rewrite and edit, and all of us seem to be inspired by a deadline. I don't feel the need to implement or address every comment I receive, but almost every one is worth considering. Even if I don't necessarily agree with a particular comment, it can still spur an idea for taking my story or novel to the next level.

The important thing in forming a group, of course, is having people whose criticism is insightful and that helps you write the piece as you envision it—and of course you want to respect the work of the others since you will be reading it frequently. That doesn't mean that everyone needs to work in the same genre. Diversity in the work and members is always enriching.

My group formed out of a novel writing class at a local University. Once the course ended, a few of us who had talked about forming a group reached out to the people we felt would best fit our needs (based on their work submitted in the class and the feedback they gave). We ultimately formed a community of six writers. Over time, a couple of people have had to step out due to business in their lives, and we've brought in others.

Our format is to meet every other week with three members submitting twenty-five to thirty pages for review a few days before the meeting. That way, everyone gets the opportunity to submit about once a month. Sometimes members pass if they aren't ready and others get to submit more often if they are.

We all live and work in New York City and split the cost of renting a small rehearsal space for three hours, which comes to about ten dollars per person. One member moved away, and she joins via Google video chat. While some groups meet entirely online, ours appreciates the sense of community of meeting face to face.

I have attended seminars and heard of groups in which members write during the meeting from prompts and other exercises. This can be fun and result in surprisingly solid nuggets to start new pieces. I've also heard of exercises that help writers develop characters and plot points within a work in progress. For our group, the ongoing feedback is the priority, but I keep these exercises in mind to potentially mix things up in the future.

Online classes can also provide forums in which you may find writers interested in forming a group. I'm currently taking a class through One Story, and there are over a hundred people in the class discussing the assignments on the discussion board. The students are from all across the country and even overseas, so this would more likely result in an online community, though you may find other students nearby.

Good luck forming your group and keep writing!

 

 

 
 

 

Those Handy Little Binoculars

By Sarah B. Robinson

 

I'm a relatively new writer, especially when it comes to fiction. In the course of writing an historical mystery novel for teenagers, one based on actual people, places, and things, at first I used actual names. But during the revision process, over the years I've decided to replace the actual names by substituting fictitious ones.

One Y/A mystery novel workshop leader advised against the practice of using actual names of people, places and things. Obviously, locals who would read the work may take issue with how something they are so familiar with is portrayed in your story. And, when using actual names of places, your accuracy may be called into question, unless you know for certain "Maple Ave. is exactly 1.5 miles northwest of Edgewood Street." Knowing how difficult this could be, I had to ask myself, "Is the writing good enough—without actual names--to stand on its own?" My answer was "I'm not sure." And, "Would the use of actual names in a fictitious piece benefit the reader?" My answer was "Not necessarily." Since my revision process on this novel is ongoing, I need to be willing to ask myself tough questions. Crafting and revising should reward both the writer--and more importantly--the reader.

Once I decided to change the actual names throughout my 60,000 word document, I had a daunting task. I also had a serendipitous moment at a workshop. (Just had to throw in that wonderful word.)

Right before I decided which fictitious substitutions I would use for my story, another workshop facilitator clued the participants in to that little, tiny set of binoculars in the upper right-hand corner of my Microsoft Word program. Clicking on the binoculars enabled me to search for a word I had used, like the city of "Lewisburg." Magically, the tool brought up every page where Lewisburg was found, and even highlighted them all. I was able to click on the "Replace all" option, and type in "Lewisville" (not much of a change, I know) and all of them instantly changed to the new word. I had to be careful, though. Upon visiting further revisions in my text, I simply liked a new word better than one I had used originally. I wanted to replace a town's name, change it from "Clear Springs" to "Spruce Springs." (Kind of sounds like Bruce Springsteen, I know.) But it occurred to me I may have used the word "clear" throughout my novel, as both a verb and an adjective, and I certainly didn't want anyone "sprucing" their throat. In using my binoculars to highlight every time I used the word "clear," I discovered I had made my protagonist and his girlfriend "clear" their throats eight different times, and they didn't even have colds.

 
 

 

Dialogue: The Spine of Fiction

by Meredith Sue Willis

 

First published in BigCityLit. For the whole article, with exercises, see http://www.nycbigcitylit.com/contents/ArticleWillisPanel.html

 

Many years ago, while working with some fifth graders, I referred to dialogue as the spine of fiction. "What's a 'spine'?" called out one boy. His friend said, "It's like the back part of the skeleton that holds you up." "No," said a third kid, "The spine is where the nerves go. It carries the messages."

Exactly. All of the above and more. Dialogue does many things at once. Characters show what's on their minds and what they're made of. They may lay out some background facts the reader needs. Above all, dialogue is where the story's essential conflict is dramatically revealed. "Spine" may not be your image for dialogue in fiction—one of my writer colleagues calls it the "spark" and another says it is the "adhesive"—but when you think back over a novel you've read, you most often remember the scenes in which something important happened, and usually it happened as the people were talking.

Of course some fiction, like parables and tales, depends on narrative rather than scene and dialogue. Some experimental fiction has as its subject the play of language rather than character and event. These remarks about dialogue best fit fiction that uses the conventions rather than overturning them. In such convention-using fiction, the real subject is the people and what happens to them, and thus it shouldn't be surprising that the emotional content is demonstrated most vividly when people interact with one another. Indeed, in my writing (although hardly in everyone's), dialogue is often the climax of a chapter or story. Several of my published novels actually end with a line of dialogue, and others have dialogue within a few lines of the end. Do you remember De Maupassant's story, "The Necklace?" Even though much of the story is narrative, it ends with a dialogue between two women, and the very final words are an unembellished spoken revelation by one woman to the other. I'm not suggesting this as a prescription for fiction, only to emphasize the importance of dialogue and how it carries the drama and sometimes emblemizes what came before.

Dialogue is also closer to the thing it imitates (conversation) than any other element of fiction. In real life, a person's appearance is an impression you get in a single glance, and you observe the details piecemeal over time. Description of a sword thrust is much slower than an actual sword thrust and has to be described by analysis or metaphor. But conversations, in real life as in fiction, are actually made of words, and words in print can be read aloud in something close to real time. Description can be extremely well written and important to the story, but it is not very much like the thing it describes, whereas dialogue comes as close as fiction can to an identity between artifact and what it represents; its pacing can thus create a special bond to the real world.

I had a student once who wrote almost no dialogue but lots of long, beautiful passages of description. Her work was the kind that caused people to say, "How well written!" It was highly finished—and extremely static. It lacked the life that fiction is capable of. To me, fiction is not an object to walk around and contemplate. Rather, fiction moves, and moves the reader with it. At its best, fiction gives a reader the experience of plunging into another world and riding as in a flume to another place. Since dialogue is where you often find the drama, it is thus the part of prose that propels the reader through the story.

My student decided to take a play writing course in order to improve her dialogue writing, and when she returned to her novel, it took off with animation and energy. She had learned to see her conflict dramatized and to hear her characters' voices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The “Stakes” Outline by Suzan Colón

 

 

Suzan Colón's note about this style of outline: I usually don’t work from an outline. This novel-in-progress doesn’t have a lot of actual action in it; it’s more interior narrative. It started to look to me like the novel was boring!

So I asked: What’s at stake here?  What’s the deal, the point, the tension, the goal?

The question gave way to more situations than I’d had before.

 

        1. Will Angie and Richie rekindle their ancient romance? Will she add “homewrecker” to her resume of bad choices?Answer:
           No. Angie will decide this is not a good idea. Goes with character development/evolution.
        2. Will she be able to turn the yarn shop into a profitable business—and then convince Mama to sell it? Or will she leave town and start up somewhere else? Answer: She will turn the shop into a viable business; she will realize that this shop is basically the main reason Mama has to get up in the morning, and it’s a community hub in a way the newer business establishments are not; she will not try to sell it.
        3. Will Mama lose her shop due to non-payment of rent for a few months—will the owner of the building, someone she’s known for years, not renew her lease? Answer: Hanging in the air until toward the end. Landlord will announce that he’s sold the building. Angie and Mama will expect that they’ll be asked to leave, may even start packing up the shop. Turns out Jim McKee bought the building and is their new landlord.
        4. Does she get another job offer? Someone might ask her to be a consultant. Like, Jim’s biggest rival! Would Angie remain loyal to Jim and not bring his trade secrets, and client list, to the rival, or would she take the money and giggle her ass off all the way to the bank?
          Answer: She will be sorely tempted to take the money and bail out her mother’s shop, but she will decide that it was her fault, not Jim’s, that they ended up in prison. She will not betray him and will turn down rival’s offer. (More character development)
        5. Will the town council decide to not renew the yarn shop’s lease, or find some other way to drive them out of business? Will Angie and Beryl be able to meet their financial obligations or lose the store?
          Answer: See above re: Jim buying the building. Also, the shop becomes too valuable to drive out of business. Attracts many visitors, even in off season.
        6. Will Angie start drinking again, thereby heading down the road of Really Bad Decisions?
          Answer: no. She’ll come to the conclusion that she’s better off a dry girl in this dry town.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Should your book have a price on the cover?

By Danny Williams

 

It’s a question for writers who are self-publishing. “Yes” is the answer. What’s that? I hear a chorus of “Why?” from all over the room. Well, here are some reasons.

Bookstores really want it. The way the bookstore business works, lots of stores are able to offer a 10 percent discount on new books. If there’s no price for the customer to see, then the discount isn’t real. Like that antique/junk shop with the permanent “All items 20 percent off” sign. The book says $18.00 right there on the cover, and I can get it here for $16.20. Good, I’ll buy it.

And bookstores expect to buy at 40 percent off the cover price, so they like to know the price is real and immutable. More on that below.

Distributors need it, if you are fortunate enough to have one in you locality or niche. Here in West Virginia and the region we have a guy who buys every title of regional interest he can get, and resells to bookstores. A blessing for authors, readers, bookstore managers, and the human  race. Like others in his trade, Bill buys books at a 55 percent discount, and sells them at a 40 percent discount. So that 18-dollar book we mentioned, he’s going to make $2.70. If he sells it. If you hope to sell to people other than your friends, who trust you, act business-like.

Bookstores expect 40 percent off if you the author are distributing it, too, with no minimum purchase and the right to return unsold copies. Sounds unfair maybe, but if these guys were getting rich they wouldn’t be leaving the business running and screaming. They need to see a price.

But mostly, you the author need a cover price. You’re going to sell at some public event, you haven’t been selling as many as you hoped, so that book you were hoping to get 18 from, you decide to make it 16 for the weekend. Bad move! I don’t buy it today, but next week I go to my local bookstore for one and it’s $16.20 after a 10 percent discount. How much does this book cost, really? Even if you don’t consider yourself a business person, selling a book is business. Indulge your love of haggling at yard sales, which will be blossoming soon.

[Hagglers were egglers, egg sellers. Obviously, in the pre-Frigidaire days, the value of their product was quite fluid, and changing every hour. Not so with books. Off the subject, I know, but I find out so many useless but fascinating (to a book nerd) things in my work as a book editor. Which I’d like to do more of, if some wise writer would email me at editorwv@hotmail.com. Let me take a look, whether your baby is embryonic or near-term.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Best Writing Advice I Every Heard/
Best Novels for Learning to Write Novels


Genevieve Castelino

Regarding best advice - mine comes from Gabriel Garcia Marquez who says, "if I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it's always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says "God help me from inventing when I sing." It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination." (Source)

Brain Pickings is one of my absolute favorite things on the Internet. This is one of my bookmarked articles on writing advice that I refer to quite often.

Books:

Is it a novel? I don't know because it doesn't fit the traditional definition of a novel. But the work I find best for learning is Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country. His language is so precise, it is funny and poignant, and so so so wise. When I feel a writer's block, I pick it up, turn to a random page and read. Tying back to what Marquez says – 'write about something that has happened to you' – that's what Vonnegut does here, and reading it never fails to jumpstart my creative juices.

The other novel I find really helpful is Elizabeth Strout's My name is Lucy Barton. – I am writing a family drama. From the smallest to big sweeping ones, I love how Strout handles of the nuances of family relationships.

 

Suzan Colón

Best advice I was ever given about writing: read your work aloud. An editor told me to do that, and I was amazed at how reading aloud affected what I'd written, and how it would be read. The editor suggested it when I was writing 1500-word articles, but I've used this practical tip for all of my books--yes, I've read 80,000 words aloud. It takes a few days and it's always worth the time. I've been able to write smoother, more true-to-life dialogue, find inconsistencies, and its value for finding repetition or gaps makes the creaky throat worthwhile.

 

Most instructive novel: Not the most instructive of all time, maybe, but I recently read a novel that could have been a good book with revisions and steering from an editor with solid story navigation. As is, the protagonist is unlikable, and not in a refreshing, clever way; the story meanders, giving the idea that it's leading up to something, but doesn't; it hops around in time in a confusing way.

The book was very instructive as an example of what revision, and the willingness to put in the time for revisions, can do for a story.


 

Mack Hood

The novel which influenced me is Naked Lunch (and others) by William Burroughs which uses the cut-up technique. It shows that a story does not have to be told in a linear fashion and how, even when you basically explode the text, the reader can still follow the story and see things they might not have seen had it been structured traditionally.

As for the best advice....it was when a writer told me to have someone hold up a photograph and then tell them what I see. I find this has been very useful since I was not detail oriented previously.

 

 
Sebastian Lopez
Advice:

Stephen King - "All you need to write is an empty room and a door you're willing to close."

 

Anonymous - "Rules are for nerds."

 

Books:

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson - I want to reach the level of plotting that he achieved with this book whenever I write. The story moves perfectly at such a fantastic pace with great characters.

 

Lord of the Flies: Hated it the first time I read it. The second time was for a class and so I was forced to pay attention to themes and motifs and in reading it I gained a newfound appreciation and began to see literature as an art rather than just storytelling.

 
Tina Rosenberg

"Read everything, all the time. Write voraciously. Cut, cut, cut. Dream it, coddle it, write till you bleed, cut some more." My high school English teacher, Jim Carney.
Extras:

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." W. Somerset Maugham (Sebastian would like this one).

"To me, the greatest pleasure in writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make." Truman Capote

Novel that taught me a great deal-
Light Years by James Salter- one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.
 
Greg Williams

Best Novels ever in every aspect of learning were Lonesome Dove, East of Eden (also Canary Row for emotive detail), and Shipping News (ending, the strange man finally fitting in, remained with me for years, so lyrical). Presumed Innocent and Silence of the Lambs went much deeper their their genres (also a goal for me).

I have read some books on novel writing over time. My best advice has come from the old crusty news editors I have worked for. Write you like you talk Narrative has to move like lightning, being almost instantly digestible. You have to write like one bad word, sentence, or paragraph is enough to loose the reader. Write with strong verbs (not adjectives and adverbs).



 

 

 

Real-Life Adventures in Editing

By Danny Williams

 

 

Editing is fun for me—every phase and form of it. Sometimes I get in early and the writer and I exchange ideas about characters, plots, settings, and other big elements. Always there’s checking facts, timelines, dates, spellings of place names, and such. Then there’s the last step, discussing words and sentences. Here are some samples from my comments on real-life manuscripts. I’ll reword, combine, or condense, but everything here is typical of my work. Remember, these are suggestions, and the author always decides. I use imperative construction to save time, instead of “perhaps you would like to consider…” I also give praise when I see an especially apt element, but I’m not including any of that here. There’s no design or plan for this, I’ll just start somewhere and go until I stop.

 

…values which they shared in common.

Redundant, shared = in common.

 

...materials which were housed in the library.

...materials housed in the library. A nice dactylic rhythm, without the “which were”

 

“Claudia, caro amore…

Trans. Not needed. Most readers will get it, and in context the ones who do not will know it’s a term of endearment.

 

What was it about having seen Luca in conversation with Messer Pintaspada that had unsettled him so much?

Globally change Messer (over 200 uses) to Messere. Messere is preferred spelling, and though Messer is accepted, it is also an unrelated German word. Change Messer to Messere to avoid confusion because of all the Germans in the story

.

…experience had shown that 95 percent of the time, whenever Maso was engaged in an undertaking, it failed. [in a novel set in 1520s Italy.]

Percent sounds too modern for 1520. I think. “…shown that nineteen times of twenty, whenever Maso…” is better here.

 

She entertained him for a while with the more amusing bits of her life and then, at his insistence, she went to the spinet and played a few of his favorite songs. Now…[Set in 1520s]

Replace spinet with clavier. Earliest spinet known was 1631, so just outside the time frame.

 

Near the entrance soldiers and other official- looking people milled around. Despite it being a Sunday, there was constant traffic moving in and out the entrance.

            Redundant. Delete second “the entrance.”

 

. “It is a hobby of hers, because of course she could buy all her cosmetics, but she prefers to make her own according to recipes which she tries very cautiously.

“…but she prefers to make her own. She tries the recipes very cautiously…”  Casual speech between associates, people don’t make many long sentences.

 

“Hotter than an Arab’s crotch in the desert,” old Luigi used to say.

Delete “in the desert”? Redundant I think, and sounds more punchy and proverbial w/o the prep. phrase.

 

He wept over his collection of antique coins.

Maybe “…collection of antique coins–Thrace. Numidia. Persia. Cathay.” I just like the rhythm, plus imagining Bonsignori deepening his sadness, mentally counting out details of his loss.

 

Madonna Clara declared that she was at Montefalco to stay, for nothing would induce her again into the wagon.

Make “Madonna Clara, young daughter of a glazier who had often accompanied her father on tradesman trips to the castle, declared that…’’ This is the first mention of Clara, and since she’s not part of the family or household, how did she get there?

 

The delicate cream of barley soup disposed of, carp baked fresh from the Montefalco pond…

Carp were not appreciated as food fish until recently, and still aren’t in most places. Sub perch?

 

Why the tense shift?

 

…doting on the row of violets on the high windowsill.

Since they have mentioned a few times how humid it is in the basement, how about bromeliads? They famously need a lot of moisture.

 

roar of arquebuses.

to “roar of the arquebuses and boom of muskets”? Arquebuses, 1520s, were  rapidly discarded in favor of muskets. Arquebuses needed to be mounted on a support, muskets were more handy b/c they were handheld.

 

In North Evansville, by contrast, some of the same restrictions set for South Park were carried over to Whittier Hill.

Delete “by contrast.” There’s no contrast. Or something like, “Similarly, in North Evansville...” or In the same way, etc

 

It’s got antlers, so a hart, not a hind.

 

The School of Medicine at WVU at that time offered only pre-clinical basic science courses, which required students to matriculate to other universities to complete clinical training required, for a doctor of medicine degree.

Delete “for a doctor of medicine degree.” Already specified medicine.

 

a fiery temperament that bordered on the edge of explosion.

Redundant, border and edge.

 

“

 

“ ’taint” is a contraction for “it ain’t,” so use “’taint” or “it aint,” not “it ’taint.”

 

“...and that begs the question,” (here she paused for dramatic effect,) “what next?”

That’s the usual modern use of begging the Q, but strictly speaking there’s an older “correct” use. I think Charlotte is the type to use the older version, and feel superior. So it raises the Q, or leads to it, or something.

 

Average chapter is about 2,600 words and fairly consistent, this one is 4,900. If you want to insert a chapter break, this is a good spot.

 

Three sentences on this page begin with “After.”

 

Emery paper doesn’t exactly sand. It polishes.

 

…and always a camera, ready to stop whatever she was doing if she caught sight of a wildflower.

She’s such an enthusiast, maybe be specific w/ “camera.” I looked at one site of pro wildflower photos, and three credits were for Canon EOS 40D, Nikon D40, and Nikon D600. No doubt there are many more. Maybe Google “pro camera bag” for her to put it in.

 

You got me there! I didn’t know Glock made a revolver.

 

“I am on the board of one of the leading chemical engineering journals, and I have to…”

Speaking to a colleague, he would certainly specify the journal. Google “chem journal list.”

 

Thelma nodded her understanding and smiled in a knowing way. “Well, Miss Jones on behalf of board I thank you for…

I think they would be on a first-name basis, especially after their first greetings.

 

As always, Wetzel wore his customary buckskin and his well-worn moccasins.

“As always” and “customary” are redundant.

 

“Very” 44 times and “really” 29. Review, and drop or sub. some of them?

 

The Appalachian a-prefix , the word has to have accent on the first syllable. You can say “a-fixing to…” but not “a-beginning to…”

 

Some other features of Appalachian speech, which might find a place here or there in Jessie’s dialogue:

“Of” with times and seasons. Of a morning I like to... It gets cold here of a winter...

“The” with diseases other than flu or clap. She’s got the cancer. Died of the Covid.

“Might could” for “maybe.” I might could eat some more.

“These ones, those ones.” I like peaches, but these ones are not ripe.

“Plumb” for completely. Plumb crazy.

Spigot (pron. Spicket), not faucet. Wash rag for wash cloth.

A toboggan is a particular hat.

 

Roy’s was full of the usual bunch.

She would have a word for these people, like she does for coworkers and neighbors and children. (I like “slobberbags.”) The usual bunch of fuckwits, or something.

 

 

 

Comments, questions, your own experiences to share? Want a free opinion on your project? editorwv@morgantownstrings

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contributors

 

Allen Cobb
 
Ed Davis

 

Troy Ernest Hill is the author of the recently published novel, MYXOCENE, and the novella, "A Revelation." His work has appeared in Sobotka Literary Magazine, Underground Voices Magazine, and The Circus Book. Learn more at troyernesthill.com.
 
Alison Louise Hubbard had a long career as a musical theatre lyricist, with productions, publications and prizes, including two Richard Rodgers Awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has studied writing at NYU and The New School. Her short story “Belladonna” was the winner of the Slippery Elm Literary Journal Prize for Prose in 2021, and her short story “Wildflowers” was published by The Saturday Evening Post in February, 2022. She is working on two novels.
 
Sarah B. Robinson has had numerous articles and essays published in newspapers and magazines, such as Outside Bozeman, WV Living and Morgantown Living. “Donovan’s Intuition” is her most recent short story, published in Diner Stories: Off the Menu in 2014.
 
Anna Eagan Smucker
 
Danny Williams

Meredith Sue Willis is the publisher of this Journal. Learn more about her at her website.