Craft of Writing

The Higher Power: Transcendence in Rehab and Writing

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments

I’m flexing my own creative writing muscles this morning with a flash fiction challenge from Charli Mills at Carrot Ranch. Naturally the prompt leads me  to experiences in my personal life for fodder. This provides a bit of conflict, since I recently vowed to keep this blog confined to writing topics. Still, I hope to honor my vow not only by falling back on the oft-repeated maxim about writing—write what you know—but also tying in the theme of transcendence, whether in your personal life or your writing life (as if the two were separate.)

One thing I have come to know (against any intent or desire to do so) is the terrible challenges for individuals and their families wrought by the epidemic of opioid abuse in our country. According to last week’s New York Times article, Inside a Killer Drug Epidemic: A Look at America’s Opioid Crisis, it killed more than 33,000 people in 2015. When you count the families and communities affected, the damage goes much deeper.

Today, though, I want to address not the epidemic itself but the related topic of rehab, in particular the idea of the “higher power” invented and popularized by the most enduring drug and alcohol rehab program out there, AA.

Rehab and the Higher Power

I recently visited a loved one in a rehab facility here in Phoenix where he was doing a month-long residential treatment. It was cold outside, so we gravitated to the rather institutional cafeteria to chat. Posted on the wall were the 12 steps, among which 6 mention God or higher power, a key element of the program:

* Step 2—We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
* Step 3—We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
* Step 5—We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
* Step 6—We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
* Step 7—We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
* Step 11—We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

I was struck by the focus on God in the program, though I was aware of the idea of the higher power and that participants could interpret that according to their own beliefs. Yet, tending toward an atheistic view of reality myself, and having raised my children with a more scientific and evolutionary understanding of the nature of things, I wondered how my young man could reconcile his secular grounding with a program clearly designed with a deistic approach to human existence.

We revisited this topic last week when I drove him to a different facility for a second month in residential rehab. He admitted that he was having difficulties with this focus on God, that he had talked to his counselor about it. He understood the idea of replacing what had been his “higher power”—heroin—in the sense that he  had lost control of his life by giving it over to the needle. But try as he might, he could not identify what a “higher power” meant to him outside of the religious sense.

I recalled a conversation I’d had with my philosopher futurist husband, Tom Lombardo, concerning the idea of transcendence, which appears as a major theme in chapter 12 of his forthcoming book, Future Consciousness: The Pathway to Purposeful Evolution. In applying the idea to the struggle with addiction, I had understood it too narrowly. I believed that transcendence, in the case of overcoming addiction or character flaws or adversities, meant simply to connect to a vision of yourself that transcends your former self. Just as our older selves transcend our younger selves, so, I thought, could our future “good” selves transcend  our former flawed selves.

For Tom, however, transcendence is connected to deep purpose in life. As he writes:

Deep purpose usually entails some higher good or reality transcendent to our personal existence or life. Deep purpose is a “calling” toward something greater than ourselves, a holistic, perhaps cosmic dimension to motivation, bringing in the ego-transcendent, above and beyond our individual well-being. Deep purpose is intentionally placing the storyline of our lives within a bigger whole.

Granted, conceptualizing a higher good transcendent to our personal reality is a a task of a high order even for those of us with less challenging struggles than addiction. When each day is a battle with a demon, how do you identify what that transcendent reality might be? And yet, it is a mistake, I believe, to to underestimate the desire in the substance abuser to do just that. While the idea of the higher good may begin on a highly personal plane—good health; job stability; a “normal” life—from there it expands to goals such as improved relationships; marriage; membership in a community…moving beyond the narrow focus on self that substance abuse engenders to a view of how we might contribute to a broader good as neighbors, friends, citizens, humans, inhabitants of the earth and cosmos.

Moreover, the beauty of conceptualizing the higher good in this way is that it in no way sacrifices a person’s individual condition. As Tom adds:

Yet, reciprocally, deep purpose invariably reflects and serves the individual. In identifying a person’s deep purpose in life we find that it intimately connects with that person’s strongest interests, skills, and qualities of personality. Deep purpose seems to emerge, at least in part, through finding activities (and consequent goals) that we love. Deep purpose requires personal passion.

Transcendence and Writing

These passages only skim the surface of the topic of transcendence, but as I applied the message to the theme of rehab, I also thought of how it worked in my life as a writer. Specifically, what do I want to accomplish with my writing? What do I want to write about? What purpose does it serve? Certainly I write not only for personal satisfaction. I would like to touch others with my writing, to provide something of value, beauty, (dare I say) wisdom. On the highest order, I want to improve my craft to improve myself as a person, and thus equip myself to fulfill what I see as my own evolutionary purpose: to in some way contribute to the positive evolution of humanity.

These are the thoughts that go through my head as I enter my fifth year of a life dedicated to writing. What about you? How does your writing connect you to your deep purpose? How does it reflect and/or facilitate your passion? Is your writing ego-focused or ego-transcendent?

And…before I forget, here is this week’s flash fiction challenge:

January 5, 2017 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about a rattling sound. It can be an intimidating sound of protest, a disorienting loud sound, a musical expression or a gentle baby’s toy. Go where the prompt leads you.

The Gettin’ Place

He took a drag and rattled the ice in his cup.

“That Coke’s no good for you,” I said.

“One poison at a time, Mom.”

Our usual exchange.

“Feeling ready?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“We’ll get the apartment packed up. Figure out the rest after rehab.”

He nodded, his beauty piercing and hopeful in the dawn light.

“Those blankets, though, I’m tossing them.”

“OK.”

We’d argued about the overstuffed garbage bag the girlfriend had left behind.

“Where’d she get them anyway?

He smiled, knowingly, sheepishly.

“The gettin’ place,” he said.

He’d come far, but the street was still in him.

 

 

Ghostwriting: Expressing Your Author’s Authentic Voice

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 2 Comments

I am an American woman with a Humanities degree and a background in languages, literature, and the arts in general. My client is a naturalized German-American, retired spinal neurosurgeon. You would be correct in assuming we do not share a common voice when it comes to expressing ourselves. So, when it came to writing what eventually traveled the trajectory from life story to medical memoir, one of the most critical lessons I had to learn was how to muffle my voice and allow his to ring out.

I was reminded of this lesson today when reading a post by Nicola Krauss on Writer UnBoxed, From Bestseller to Ghostwriter. In describing the art of capturing an author’s voice, Ms. Kraus writes that:

Each person has their own natural lexicon and rhythm of speech. It’s essential to stay confined to that. I will never impose my own way of saying something when I’m editing, because it would stick out. I would advise anyone interested in doing this work to spend as much time with your client as possible so that when you sit down to edit their words you can “be” them.

Such great advice, especially for someone who is naturally a wordy writer, as I am. I tend to throw everything in at the onset and then reduce, refine, and sculpt during the edits and revisions. This is evident in passages from an early draft of my author’s book. As one writing friend pointed out, the overall tone was not only verbose and flowery (another problem to be addressed later), it also struck his particular ear as the voice of a female.

To illustrate just how important it is to develop an authentic authorial voice for your client (something that realistically requires months of collaboration), let’s look at the following passages, in particular the lines in italics. The first one is from the draft that eventually became the first book, a life story:

Sports grounded me in those years. No matter what was happening at home, once I got on the court or the field, I focused my attention and energy on the goal in front of me. And when my mother put the kibosh on football my sophomore year . . . the main thing I did was run. I ran in track and field meets. I ran cross-country. I ran at Central and at competing schools. One spring, I ran up and down the wooden bleachers until my shins burned, all the while trying to outrun dire images of falling through the open spaces between the benches and breaking my neck. I ran the mile again my junior and senior year, but only broke five minutes two or three times and never won a race again, or even came in with the top three. Before every race, I got anxious as hell. I didn’t know which was worse, the butterflies in my stomach or the sense of dread that lodged in my chest and chased all rational thoughts out of my head. The thing is, though, that once I started running, all those negative feelings disappeared. In action, they were transformed into fuel.

In the medical memoir version, the passage was reduced and, in the final line, connected to the primary theme driving the story :

I also knew, inherently, that physical fitness was essential. I had played soccer from my earliest boyhood in Germany, but sports in the US were much more organized and competitive. I went out for the usual athletics: football (my mother put the kibosh on that after my freshman year), basketball, and track. I didn’t know what I was good at in track, but I ended up running middle or long distance and eventually ran the mile. Now looking back, it seems I was running figuratively too, towards my identity as an American, towards my future in medicine.

Now, this is a mild example. I murdered many darlings in the rewrite. Consider the following lyrical waxings:

The scenery we took in on those drives never failed to affect us. When you climbed a low rise and looked out over the land, you couldn’t help but be moved by the immense landscapes, the way the mountain ranges unfolded one after another in the distance; the way they changed from a pale gold at noon to slate blue and finally deep purple in the evenings.

And this, a description of life at sea:

Each day was the same. Each day was a surrender to nausea and monotony, punctuated by brief sorties to the upper deck. My world had shrunk to a thin mattress in a sea of beds. For the others, it was waking up to an icy wind that continued all day and then finding a way to pass the time until evening brought some diversion. Except for the large day room, there was only the deck; the choice was to endure the noise of a thousand foreign tongues reverberating off the bare, damp walls, or brave the raw elements outside.

Admittedly, I was enthralled with my client’s story and the dramatic possibilities. And he enjoyed the embellishments, keeping many of my descriptions in the life story he published for family and close friends. But when it came to the more commercial version, it was clear that my love affair with language had to be reined in.

Enabling your client/author to tell their story in their words while making the text engaging and colorful involves many more elements. A sensitivity to the way your client really speaks is just the beginning. My job also entailed suggestions for changes that would not stray too far from his natural speech but that would replace commonly overused and empty words such as “interesting” and “nice” with words that were true to a particular character or experience. But that requires another post.

What about you? What has been your experience in telling another person’s story? If you write fiction, how have you arrived at an authentic voice for your characters?

 

Working Titles

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 4 Comments

Having struggled with titling a book (and subtitling it!), I appreciated today’s post by writer Lance Schaubert on Writer Unboxed, and his “quick manual on how to title a work.”

If writing a novel is like having a baby, then titling it is like naming your kid. And parents fret over the names of their children. Big time. Have you seen the sheer number and size of baby name …

Source: Working Titles

The Memoir and Christmas: Finding Meaning in Family Memories

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays all! Following is a post from my “latent” blog, Memoir Crafter, that speaks to the season and to the craft of memoir.

The Christmas season is upon us like snow on North Dakota. With it comes a sleighful of memories. But how to write meaningfully about this most evocative of holidays in a way that engages the reader?

In a first draft of my client’s memoir, I mined a five-page document he had written about the Christmases he remembered from his childhood in Germany in the early 1950s and inserted it into the memoir in chronological order. I found the cultural details colorful and fascinating: the walk through the snow to the Gothic Stadkirche in the center of town; the candles on the tree; the Christmas Eve rollmoepse (rolled herring); the recitation of poems and the small tables of presents for each child. I researched Christmases of the 1950s and found a cache of wonderful photos on the Internet from which to draw for authentic descriptions of street scenes and interiors. My client loved it.

When it came to using the memory in the memoir, however, it was too much. It slowed everything down. It became a “travelogue” of a German Christmas.

I cut the entire section. Later I asked myself several questions: How does this anecdote advance the themes that are emerging in the book? Where is the best place to insert memories about a childhood Christmas (or other holiday or event)? Can these memories be tied to a later event?

In the rewrite, the details that are important to my client reappeared but in much shorter form. And in what turned out to be a second book entirely (a medical memoir), they had shrunk to one single paragraph in a chapter about his mother’s death decades later. Juxtaposed with a description of the mother’s last Christmas, these childhood memories have attained a poignancy that they did not have in the earlier draft. They deliver a message about the importance of family and tradition and the cultural transmission of values and family lore from one generation to the next.

So, now I invite you to think about a favorite Christmas memory and to write it down. I invite you to approach this exercise within the framework of a theme: family, friendship, regret, parental sacrifice, romance…whatever emerges as you think about it. How would you make a memory meaningful to a reader? How would you flesh out the significant people–what details would make them come alive? What reflections from your adult perspective would add meaning?

If you have trouble beginning, take out an old photograph. Nothing stirs our memories better than those glimpses into our past. And while you are mining that photo for details, don’t limit yourself to the visual. What were the smells associated with the scene, the sounds and the tactile impressions, even the taste?

Towards that end, I have illustrated today’s post with a photograph of my siblings and me (and a cousin in the upper left) taken circa 1958. This photo was shot at a time that precedes memory for me, but the simplicity of the tree and the fact that my parents had us kneel says much about the place and time and culture I was born into.

And by the way…I am the impious child who will not kneel. This detail is what I might use as a jumping off point if I were to write a memoir scene of Christmases past, how that little girl, her older, uber-pious sister in the middle, and her prayerful twin on the left would become, respectively, a quarter decade into the future, a free thinker, a lesbian CEO, and a nun.

How have you used Christmas memories in your writing?

7 Great Books on Writing Memoir

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 2 Comments
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With my client’s medical memoir gone to press, I’ve been reflecting on the four-year journey that took us from our first meeting in 2013, to the completion of a full-length personal history/life story in 2014, and to the transformation of that life story into a medical memoir set for publication in December of 2016. Below are 7 books on the craft of memoir writing that got me started and still serve as valuable resources.
Writing the Memoir: A practical guide to the craft, the personal challenges, and ethical dilemmas of writing your true stories by Judith Barrington: The first guide I ever picked up on memoir writing and one of the most practical, addressing issues of craft, ethics, structure, with writing suggestions following each chapter. Take a look at the chapter headings for quick look-see at the helpful topics covered.

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Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir by Natalie Goldberg: “Through timed, associative, and meditative exercises, Old Friend from Far Away guides you to the attentive state of thought in which you discover and open forgotten doors of memory.” Writers are invited to respond to varied and creative prompts, from writing about relentless dreams, to radishes and salmon, to everything you know about ice cream. With excerpts from established memoir writers.

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Stephen King on Writing: a Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King: The master story-teller chronicles, in the first half of this book, how he became a writer, illustrating how memoir can work even without masses of details (think of the descriptions Mary Karr can summon from the deep past). The second half is a delightfully succinct guide to the craft, enhanced by a markup of the author’s own early manuscript.

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Legacy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Personal History  by Linda Spence: A practical guide to capturing long-ago events with questions to help in unlocking the memories that make up a life. Aimed at writers wishing to create a legacy for family rather than a commercial memoir, but helpful in beginning the process of remembering.
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Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir  by William Zinsser: Authors Russell Baker, Jill Kerr Conway, Annie Dillard, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, and Zinsser “explore the craft of memoir, defined here as a portion of a life, narrower in scope than autobiography.” Great insights into the process of structuring vastly different memoirs from family history to coming-of-age stories and more.

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Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past by William Zinsser: My favorite guide of all, in which the author takes the reader “on a memoir of his own” recalling “dramatic, amusing, and often surprising moments in his long and varied life as a writer, editor, teacher, and traveler.” A master teacher as well as celebrated writer, Zinsser uses his own experience to explain technical decisions such as selection, condensation, focus, attitude, voice, and tone.

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Modern American Memoirs, an anthology edited by Annie Dillard and Cort Conley: Samples from 35 of the finest memoirs written in this century, including contributions by such diverse writers as Margaret Mead, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston, Loren Eisely, and Zora Neale Hurston.

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Of course one of the best ways to learn how to write memoir is reading deeply in that genre. I’ll share some of my favorite memoirs in another post. For now, I leave you with a question: What are your favorite books on the craft of memoir writing?

Forging Flash Fiction from a Medical Memoir

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 12 Comments
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Model of the cervical spine with a cervical anterior plate.

If you are reading this post, you probably know where I disappeared to from May to August. Yes, it was that mythical book I’ve been working on for my retired neurosurgeon client. Well, the good news is that, after pumping out the last ten chapters in those three months, the manuscript flew off to the publisher ten days ago. Now I wait on the old tenterhooks for the verdict: Is it engaging? Is it good? Is it well written or screamingly pedestrian? Am I really done with the thing? We shall find out soon!

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog and on my old blog, Memoir Crafter, about my experience as a ghostwriter for the above mentioned surgeon. What an amazing journey it has been. I am not a religious person—I leave that to my twin sister, Sister Sara Marie Belisle—but I can’t help but marvel at my good fortune. Four years ago I wondered how I could ever leave my day job to write. Then, out of the blue, a completely unforeseen opportunity. Now, I have two complete 90,000–word manuscripts under my belt, the first a version of the book as life story, and the second a more commercial medical memoir.

I have missed my practice of flash fiction, however, and having had the pleasure of stopping in at Carrot Ranch again after months “on the trail,” I want to use this week’s challenge to flash a scene from the book. From the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge page:

August 17, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that features a fossil or uses the word in its variant forms (fossilize, dino bones, petrification, gastroliths, ichnofossils, etc.). Dig into your imagination and go where the fossil record leads you.

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My first urge was to create a fresh flash about real fossils or petrified wood or bones, but then it occurred to me to lift a line I was particularly fond of from a draft of my client’s story.

Here’s the back story: My client is a world-renown spinal neurosurgeon recognized not only for his many contributions to spinal neurosurgery—including patents on wiring, plates and other instrumentation that he was “instrumental” in designing—but also for his leading role in the fight to have spinal neurosurgery recognized as a sub-specialty in its own right. That latter achievement, many people say, was his primary contribution. Because up until the 1980s, aside from cervical trauma cases, spinal surgery remained largely the domain of orthopedic surgeons, not neurosurgeons. In the late 1980s, however, with technical advances emerging, a turf war broke out between the two medical communities: the bone docs and the brain docs.

A confrontation between an orthopedic surgeon and my client, the pioneering neurosurgeon,  became the impetus for a chapter in the new version of the book. I wish I could reproduce that scene here to show you how I whittled it down to a flash. (You can see it when the book comes out near the end of the year.) I think it well illustrates how flash can be used as an editing tool. Suffice it to say that this section was originally 438 words.

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A Half-Excavated Fossil

The whine of the drill got the orthopedist’s attention. He was chiseling a shard of bone from the patient’s hip while I worked at the neck where the dislocation was.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I’m putting plates in.”

He stepped up, peered into the cavity where the spine rose from the tissue like a half-excavated fossil. “Why?” he said. “Wires work perfect for the fusion.”

“The plates will work better.”

He pivoted away, ripping off his gloves.

“Take me off the op note,” he said, striding towards the door. “I want nothing to do with this case.”

The Book Proposal as Guide: Pinpointing Purpose and Readership

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 4 Comments

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Book proposals are usually submitted in lieu of an entire manuscript for non-fiction books rather than novels or memoirs. But they can also be used effectively in restructuring an original manuscript or directing a disorganized first attempt at a narrative.

In my last post, From Life Story to Memoir, I described the first steps of transforming a life story/autobiography into a focused memoir. These steps—preliminary to the book proposal— included: identification (and if necessary a complete rethinking) of the major themes of the narrative; identification of the bedrock scenes—in my client’s book, both medical and personal—that would carry the revised story; alternating those scenes/chapters to create tension between high points and low; and repeated tinkering with the table of contents (TOC) of the original manuscript. The final step at that point was to identify a new starting point, one that would show the main character in the middle of an important (but not the most important) event.

Now, what to do with the new starting point and the evolving TOC?  Our agent Claire was already moving towards the idea of doing the book proposal, but I still struggled (with little success) to wrest the original manuscript into a significantly different book. The new plan added two elements of the book proposal:

  • Do a knock-out sample chapter (preferably chapter one)  that shows the main character at a critical moment, revealing a major conflict or theme (in our case, this meant showing the doctor at the top of his game and confronting an adversary in the OR);
  • Create an overview of the book, snagging the editor with a description of a dramatic scene and summarizing the main events and themes.

One last last point Claire emphasized was to focus on the editor not the imagined reader. Make each sentence crystal clear. Use powerful language that reflects the book’s uniqueness and appeal (in our case, “high-stakes”; “groundbreaking”; “game changer”; “pioneering”) and which in turn signals the main theme(s).

That new starting point, coupled with a new Chapter 1, was an important breakthrough, because, again, throughout the early process it had been very difficult to break away from the original chronology and structure of the work. See below two different versions of the book’s TOC and opening chapter. Note how chapter one in the restructured version starts in the middle of an important event.

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Original TOC in Scrivener, starting at the beginning in a straightforward chronological account of a life.

 

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The revised TOC; the new first chapter opens with a dramatic moment near the height of the author/protagonist’s career.

The Book Proposal as Guide to a Rewrite

With those steps out of the way and a rough idea of the new direction, Claire now suggested we carry on with a formal book proposal that she could submit to publishers.

So that you understand how the book proposal can serve as an outline/guide for a rewrite, I should mention its important elements here. There are many sources for writing a book proposal. (I love the example at the back of Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents. Or check out his Write the Perfect Book Proposal with Deborah Levine.) All of them include the following:

  • Title Page: Make that title sing.
  • Overview: Grab the editor’s attention with 3-4 succinct pages of your story/concept.
  • Author Bio: Why are you ideal to write this book?
  • Marketing Section: Who will buy this book?
  • Competition Section: Half a dozen titles of books similar to yours and why yours is unique.
  • Promotion Section: Which outlets/platforms will be appropriate to publicize this book?
  • Chapter Outline: The meat of the proposal, tentatively titled and clearly abstracted.
  • Sample Chapter(s): Yes, the editor will see that you can really write and tell a story.

The book proposal turned out to be the key to restructuring the book. It forced me to know— and hew to—the genre of the book much more strictly; to hone the message and theme of the book and carry them through the entire story;  and to identify and then write for a much more defined readership. Not that it all came together like clockwork. It was sometimes a scattershot process, moving back and forth between sections.

Whether you want to attempt a formal book proposal or not, working through the points below as you revise (or write) your book will help you know where you are going with it.

The First Chapter

The new first chapter set the process in motion. Following Claire’s advice to start with a major event, I tackled a scene over halfway through the original manuscript, one that had originally been a paragraph long. It was a surgery during which another surgeon walked out. The scene represented a major turning point for my client. I had interviewed the doctor extensively the first time around; now I interviewed him again. I interviewed the fellow (as in fellowship) who had assisted him. I researched the pioneering spinal surgery technique they had used and made sure I understood it. I delved into the details of the surgery and OR environment—my genre was now the medical memoir, mind you, and I needed to really beef up the specifics.

Just as importantly, I changed exposition to dialogue (a separate post coming on this! Hugely important.) This new chapter was significantly different in tone, style, and pace from the original manuscript. This chapter firmly belonged to a medical memoir. I began to see the enormity of my task.

The Overview

With a sample chapter under my belt and progress made on the TOC, I tackled the overview. This was not to be a straightforward task. My starting point was the event in the sample chapter I had written. When Claire decided the overview (and thus the book) should start with another surgery—the one that had catapulted my client to superstar status—I wrote out that chapter as well. At times Claire would like one aspect of the original manuscript and ask me to bring it forward. At other times, she would decide it was not very important and suggest I drop it. After three or four months, she deemed the overview still “a little dry.” We needed more drama. We needed “to build excitement.” The first two pages had to be “seamless” and “dramatic.” Through my exasperation, I came to realize that this was all part of the process. All part of a deep fashioning of the story through thinking and rethinking its most dramatic and meaningful themes, scenes, and total arc.

The Competition

All during this time I was working on other sections, among the most important the competition section. There is no way around knowing what other books like yours have been published. There is no way around reading some of them. I read five or six medical memoirs (taking note of how and to what extent the authors worked in their backstories). I read reviews of these books and others. Claire thought some of the books I had chosen to summarize were too old and had me research newer titles—it’s best to see what is current in your genre. For each title I had to determine what set it apart and more importantly how my client’s book was unique. By the time Claire gave me the thumbs up on it, I had a much stronger idea of the genre and the readership we were trying to attract.

The Chapter Outline

At last, the most daunting task of all. Above, I wrote about using Scrivener to begin the restructuring process. I had created tentative chapter folders for the new version based on the revised TOC.  I had two new chapters for the new beginning of the book—these formed the new “present” of the narrative, from which I could move the main narrative forward in time and flash back to earlier important scenes. I had an idea of the scenes I wanted to keep from the original manuscript and scenes I needed to build from existing anecdotes, and I began to populate my chapter folders with these scenes.

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Populating the chapter folders with scenes. This allowed me to create chapter outlines for the book proposal, a task very difficult to do without a finished manuscript.

Creating the chapter outline without an existing manuscript was messy. The order and content of the chapters would change once the rewriting began in earnest. But through this process the narrative arc emerged. So did capsules of the main events. All that remained was to write two to three succinct paragraphs about each chapter—no mean feat. (My first drafts had whole pages or more for each chapter. Happily, what I cut from the chapter summaries in the book proposal came in handy in helping me build the scenes for the rewrite in Scrivener.)

The Rewrite

The rewrite was certainly not the simple reshuffling of chapters and scenes that I had originally imagined. The rewrite was indeed a REWRITE. But the process of preparing for and writing the book proposal, which took the better part of 2015, had laid all the groundwork. In January, 2016 I began writing out the next chapters. Mid February Claire submitted the proposal to an Indie publisher. Mid March my client had a contract—and I had a deadline of August. I wrote chapters. I axed chapters. I moved chapters around. I anguished over integrating flashbacks. I went down multiple wrong paths. But I had to stick to the TOC and the chapter outline we had sent in. In the end, I finished writing roughly twenty chapters of an essentially different book between March and August.

What about you? Have you been stuck with the direction your story is taking? With where to start or what to include? Are you rewriting your story? How have you approached this task? I would love to hear!

 

From Life Story to Memoir: The Rewrite

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 8 Comments

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A year and a half ago, I had completed my client’s story. It had started out with aspirations to being a memoir, turned down the highway toward autobiography, and ended up as life story. He was satisfied. We had a publisher. Soon, I thought, the project would be over. Ha!

I’ve relayed this story several times. Here I reference it to address the topic of rewriting a book. Not just revising. Rewriting. And it occurred to me this morning that what I had spent these last 16 months doing to my manuscript bore much resemblance to grappling with an unfinished manuscript, or even with a work in the germination phase. You’ve got dozens of gripping anecdotes. You’ve got a unique and workable angle and a clear theme(s). You might even have whole scenes and chapters written out. But how to organize it all? How to get at the point of it all? How to set the story soaring?

A recent post on fellow blogger Lisa Reiter’s Sharing the Story provided the impetus for me to finally write this post. Close to having a completed manuscript, she still struggles with key questions:

. . . ‘purpose’ is the biggest issue I feel I am grappling with. What is the purpose of my book? Who is my intended reader? And therefore where am I trying to end up? Answering these questions would help me jettison anything that is just background noise because writing this sort of memoir – one where the story is never quite over so long as I’m still living – could mean the writer makes the mistake of including everything that happened since survival.

This point in the road is precisely the juncture at which I found myself in February 2015. Like Lisa, I had a big theme; where her story is one of surviving cancer, my client’s is one of surviving early adversities to make it in the high-stakes world of neurosurgery. The problem was—as Lisa suggests in that last sentence above—that in the original manuscript I had included everything that had happened to my client over more than sixty years. Sure it was a hell of a story, but one that appealed at best to a handful of readers who knew or knew of my client. The key events were there, but they commanded no more page space than much smaller events. And what was the purpose? Indeed, what was the genre? Immigrant story? A tale of rags to riches? A life in medicine?

From Life Story to Memoir

I had had an inkling of the problem at the outset when my good friend, author, and grammarian Kathy Papajohn posed the question to me: Who is going to read this book? There are circles she explained to me, from intimate friends and family to readers interested in autobiography and memoir to those who look for a good story across genres. What is this book? WHY is this book? Who is your target market?

I was ill equipped to answer those questions in the beginning. I thought they would take care of themselves once I had 80,000 words. Indeed, I thought I could worry about overall structure during the revision phase. I didn’t know how else to tell the story but to get it all down. Such an encompassing process proved to be invaluable, but it also greatly extended the time it has taken for my client to get his story told.

Which brings me to late 2014. I was doing last revisions on the existing manuscript, and working towards eliminating unnecessary scenes and lines—what Lisa referred to as “background noise.” (I blogged about this process on my old site, Memoir Crafter.)  Soon after, everything changed when my client and I began working with an established agent/editor named Claire Gerus. After encouraging us to “stop the presses” with the first publisher, Claire immediately honed in on certain elements of the manuscript. Great medical anecdotes, she said. Engaging formative episodes in his youth. Fascinating stuff on his German roots. But his time coaching his kids in soccer? Boring. His first day of high school? Who cares? Then she told me the kind of book she saw in the manuscript, one that she felt she could represent: a medical memoir with brief but telling flashbacks to those important formative events.

How to Attack a Rewrite

It was almost harder to rewrite the manuscript than it would have been to start afresh. For starters, how to identify the key scenes? How to decide on a new starting point? Claire provided me with a couple of helpful exercises.

  • THE FIRST was to review the story and identify the important events:
    • What were the turning points?
    • Where did the protagonist experience a revelation or epiphany?
    • What dramatic moments moved the story forward?
    • What scenes showed the protagonist working through the important themes?
    • Which ones included key characters that served as friends or adversaries?
  • Then, Claire told me to break this list down into two columns: one showing the positive events that had supported my client’s journey toward self realization, and one listing the negative events or moments that had blocked the attainment of his goals or wishes.
  • Equipped with this list, I was now to block out a timeline where I interspersed these high/low events. This would create drama and tension in the narrative.
  • THE SECOND EXERCISE took my existing table of contents as a starting point. Using the list of positive and negative events, rethink the table of contents. Build the TOC from the combined list of high/supporting events and low/obstructing events.
  • Finally, identify a new starting point, not at “the beginning” but with a significant event, a major surgery for example.
    • Move forward from that point, using flashback as needed to fill in the narrative gaps and reveal and/or reflect on the formative experiences.

The high/low exercise encouraged me. I can do this, I thought. Just identify the events, slot them into roughly chronological order, and insert sections of the original manuscript. Bingo. The rewrite.

Then I attempted the second TOC exercise. My efforts fell flat. I could not get away from my original chronological sequence. I ended up at least five or six chapter titles in before I got to a medical event, and that was only med school.

At the same time I was using Scrivener to rethink the structure and order of chapters. I moved the entire manuscript back into Scrivener, divided by chapter and scene. I experimented with moving the chapters around. I axed scenes I judged to be irrelevant. Most times I felt more muddled than ever. What I was doing was avoiding the real REWRITE. I hoped to slide by with a little shuffling and sleight of hand.

IMG_3931
Using Mary Carroll Moore’s “W” structure with the high low points of the story. The bottom diagram shows the chapters inserted into the “W.”

Book Proposal as Guide to the Rewrite

In February Claire suggested a new approach. I didn’t have to have a completed manuscript, she said. The story was solid. Hold off on rewriting the manuscript. We could sell the idea to a publisher with a book proposal. Focus on a few crucial things, Claire said:

  • Rework, yet again, that new TOC with compelling chapter titles;
  • Do a knock-out sample chapter that shows the doctor at the top of his game;
  • Come up with a succinct title and subtitle that will grab attention and signal what the book is about;
  • Create an overview of the book, snagging the editor with a description of a dramatic scene and summarizing the main events and themes;
  • Throughout, focus on the editor not the imagined reader. Make each sentence crystal clear. Use powerful language that reflects the book’s uniqueness and appeal (“high-stakes”; “groundbreaking”; “game changer”; “pioneering”) and which in turn signals the main theme(s).
    • Remember, Claire said, editors want to see hard-hitting specific content that readers can get excited about.

So, that was the beginning. Those first sections of a traditional book proposal—overview, TOC, and sample chapter—set me on a track that over an entire year led me to the skeleton of my rewrite.

I will expand on this topic in my next post: The Book Proposal: Pinpointing Purpose and Readership, and show how for me, the proposal pulled me up from pantsing mode to outline mode—and gave me the structure I needed to make real headway.

What about you? How have you dealt with the task of organizing your manuscript? Of deciding which elements to include and which to leave out? What tools have you used to gain more control over the process?

 

 

From Autobiography to Memoir

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 8 Comments

sisyphus

So, what about that book you were ghostwriting?  I hear that a lot from friends I haven’t seen in a while. After all, it’s been three years. And it’s true that at times I feel like I’ve been sucked into a black, bottomless hole, or tossed upon some steep Sisyphean slope the peak of which I will never reach. Then again, what did I expect? It’s a book not a sandwich. A book doesn’t have a clear blueprint, or at least if it does (an outline), it is one that has the unnerving habit of morphing even while you are adhering to it fanatically.

The Decision to Jump the Genre Track

I punched out the first version of the book in a year. It was a straightforward life story beginning in childhood and ending with the author’s retirement and reflections on his life and career. I had, as William Zinsser put it in his acclaimed guide, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, imposed “narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events.” Several readers responded favorably, but these were mostly swayed by their fondness for either the author or myself. Then something happened to change our trajectory. (Long and complicated story there, one I wrote about in July.) Brakes were applied to the publishing schedule. Acting on the suggestions of a professional publicist and editor, my client and I pulled back to explore a more commercial version of the story in the form of a medical memoir.

Steps to a Genre Metamorphosis

At that time, I think I had some vague notion that I would be able to simply cut and paste my first autobiographical version into a cohesive new memoir. How wrong I was. What was needed was a complete overhaul. I would have to jettison parts of the book I (and more importantly my client) had loved, and if anecdotes or scenes did not support the memoir, out they would have to go. Following are the steps I have taken these last months in the process of transforming a life story to memoir.

  • Book-ending the narrative: A crucial distinction between an autobiography and a memoir is focus. According to Zinsser, a classic memoir recalls “a particular period and place in the writer’s life.” It is “a work of history, catching a distinctive moment in the life of both a person and a society.” Accordingly, I had to identify new starting and ending points to my story. This being a medical memoir, I would focus on the years my client worked at the top of his field, building the new narrative within strict bookends from the time his reputation took off to his retirement. While I didn’t want to completely abandon important events and key experiences that took place in his childhood or training, I had to find a way to incorporate them through flashback within the new truncated time frame.
  • Building a new chapter sequence: With a clear start and end point, I now went back to the original chapter sequence, pulling out the chapters that took place during this span, and using them to anchor the new narrative arc. Scrivener was helpful in this endeavor, allowing me to easily build the new structure by first importing all the chapters from the original manuscript into the binder of a new project, and then selecting from them to build a new sequence. However, since my client’s childhood and training had taken up nearly half the original book, I was left with only a dozen or so chapters that fit in the new time frame revolving around his career.
  • Identifying events in existing chapters from which to build new chapters: Now I had to explore the chapters that dealt with his career and identify material that I had given less importance to that could be the basis of complete new chapters. This has been tough but edifying . An author makes so many choices focusing on one anecdote here, eliminating another there. Guiding my search was of course the strictures of the medical theme. However, I had to be careful not to settle for “fluff,” minor episodes that did not have enough meat to expand into a real chapter but that I was tempted to use out of desperation to replace chapters I had dumped.
  • Integrating earlier key events through flashback:  A real challenge has been how to retain some really dramatic scenes that on the surface did not directly support the new focus. I could integrate key childhood experiences through flashbacks but only when they supported or related to something that was happening in the new present of the story. The flashback must also be triggered by something happening in the present; there had to be a reason the author reflected on his past when he did. While a number of acclaimed memoirs have served as a good model, I found myself dipping time and again into Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, to see how she accomplished such a seamless shift from the present (the hike on the Pacific Crest Trail) to various points in her past that pertained to and illuminated her struggle.
  • Identifying high and low points: This exercise was one of the first tasks the editor gave me, but it has turned out to be the cornerstone of my approach. Scanning the original manuscript (and working from memory) I created a table with two lists, one the high points/successes in my client’s life and the other the low points/failures/challenges. These I put in chronological order, then referred back to them as I built my new chapter sequence. Those that fit in the main narrative became, in many cases, the basis for a chapter. Those from earlier periods of his life could be included as flashbacks interspersed around the main action. The challenges in particular—and how the author dealt with them—reveal character and motivation, while the successes allow for a release from tension and provide variety and movement to the narration.

A Memoir Takes Form

This process has been slow and sometimes frustrating. Working with so much material (97,000 words in the original manuscript, as well as two dozen audio recordings) often feels like wading around in a flood grasping at flotsam as it floats by. And while I did get a good start on transforming the book into a memoir using the steps above, it was when my editor suggested I hold off on actually doing the rewrite and create a book proposal instead that the new book began to emerge in more clarity. I will be blogging about how creating a proposal expedites the actual writing of a book in an upcoming post.