This week an essay by Jessica Shattuck in The New York Times caught my attention. Entitled “I Loved My Grandmother. But She Was a Nazi,” it recounts how the author tried to reconcile her grandmother’s connection to the Nazis with the sweet and gentle woman she knew. At best, her grandmother gave stock responses or evasive answers to her many questions about that time. The essay resonated especially sharply with me. Having helped a German born, naturalized American doctor write his memoir, Backbone: The Life and Game-Changing Career of a Spinal Neurosurgeon, I recognized in it what I think of as the Nazis’ legacy of silence.
I was thinking about that silence, anyway, in preparing to respond to fellow writer and blogger Charli Mills’s flash fiction prompt this week: to write about an audience. As it happens, there is a moving scene in Backbone, wherein my author, Dr. Volker K. H. Sonntag, is to give a keynote speech in Berlin to a combined convention of German and American neurosurgeons. Like Sonntag, the German doctors had all been born during the war or immediately following the defeat of the Nazis. As Dr. Sonntag explains in the story:
After casting around for a topic I could get my teeth into, I decided to call on my own experience as a naturalized American born in East Germany in the last days of World War II, just as the Russians were massing at the border like a cresting wave. I called the presentation “A Personal Reflection of the Cold War.”
When I first met Dr. Sonntag 4 1/2 years ago, this was the story we set out to tell in his book: how, in the last days of the war, his mother fled the East with her infant son, Volker, and his brother in tow; how, after the defeat of the Nazis, the family languished in an allied refugee camp for 4 years; how their brief postwar recovery was halted by a brain abscess in his father’s parietal lobe that destroyed his career as a dentist; and how they immigrated to the United States in 1957, where the young man overcame further adversities to realize his version of the “American Dream”—and came to grips with Germany’s Nazi past.
Dr. Sonntag’s memoir, to be released May 2, 2017.
While that version still exists, the current book relegates that story to the background and focuses on Dr. Sonntag’s remarkable career as a pioneering spinal neurosurgeon. Certainly the story of his rise in the high-stakes world of neurosurgery is no less thrilling than his immigrant chronicle. But it was that earlier account that came to mind this week.
The questions Miss Shattuck grapples with are those that Dr. Sonntag and his contemporaries have struggled with, at even less of a distance. He was born to educated, bourgeoise parents in late 1944, in the walled city of Graudenz, which was then in East Germany and is now the Polish town of Grudziądz—”a city,” he writes, “that was fast becoming a landscape of bombed-out craters and smoking ruins.” He does not believe his parents were Nazis. But though historical hindsight has filled in many gaps for him, it has also posed questions his parents never answered, among them:
Nazi Panzers roll into Poland in 1939.
I don’t know if my parents had already moved to Graudenz when, five years earlier, on September 3, 1939, Hitler’s Panzers rolled down its cobble-stoned streets to cheers of jubilation from the minority German population (and to the horror of the Poles), but it was in this town on the Vistula that had found itself part of Prussia, then modern Germany, then Poland, and now at my birth, Germany again, that my father decided to establish his dental practice and his family.
Like Ms. Shattuck, he wonders about his father’s and mother’s experience. What did his parents feel about the Nazis? Did they witness the persecution of the Jews? Did they know of the concentration camps? Did his father (as some anecdotal evidence suggests) defy the Nazis early on? Were they, in the end and by nature of their complacency, complicit in one of the greatest mass acts of evil history has known?
Those questions and more have not diminished in urgency, as Ms. Shattuck’s essay, and its reach, have shown. And while the children and grandchildren of the generation that brought Hitler to power have gone on with their lives and done good deeds—and, in Europe, become the cornerstone of a pan-European peace-keeping effort—they can never quite escape the stigma of Germany’s great sin.
The issue of the Nazis was a very sensitive one for my client to address in his book. But address it he did in scenes such as the one I mentioned earlier, where, in 2004, Dr. Sonntag delivers his “Personal Reflections of the Cold War” to an audience of stoic German doctors. Seeing their reaction, he concludes:
“It seemed that what had happened to my family, and to me, was a piece of a larger story that many Germans of my generation have been unable to tell, or even to explore for themselves. After all, our stories stemmed from our family histories, and who wanted to hear about the hardships German people faced after the war? Who wanted to hear how the generation of Germans who had brought the Nazis to power overcame adversity, did good work, loved and sacrificed for their children?
And it is that scene that has provided my response to Charli’s flash fiction challenge this week: March 23, 2017 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write about an audience. It can be broad or small, and gathered for any reason. How does your character react to an audience? Is the audience itself a character. Go where the prompt leads.
So imagine now that generation to which Dr. Sonntag belongs, a generation that inherited both the ignominy of the Nazi legacy and the silence to which that legacy condemned his parents’ generation—and their families. Imagine a cadre of very successful members of that first postwar generation gathered together to reflect on their experience. Here then, named after and modified from the chapter in the book in which it appears, is my flash.
Dresden
When I’d finished speaking, the air in the hall felt like a single, collective breath being held. Then clapping surged, a hard rain on a tin roof.
Several fellow Germans made their way to the podium.
“Very fitting, Doctor,” one said, his voice breaking. “I’ve not thought about those days in so long.”
“Your story is my own,” said another. “No one has talked about what happened to us after the war.”
Last was the distinguished head of a large hospital. Blinking through tears, he took my hand. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m very grateful.”
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?
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Original TOC in Scrivener, starting at the beginning in a straightforward chronological account of a life.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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;
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?
I met with my client yesterday to review the third version of the book proposal for his medical memoir. This time we went over the chapter summaries, which I had significantly reworked and beefed up to create a better sense of how the completed narrative will flow. We are hopeful that this one will be the clincher, and that our editor/agent will put her stamp of approval on it. But if it does pass final muster, we will face the daunting task of deciding on a subtitle that might instantly hook some editor’s interest, and make that gatekeeper to publication read on.
I was reminded that all authors struggle with this task by a post on a blog I follow, Writer Unboxed, appropriately entitled “Untitled,” by author Anne Greenwood Brown. I plan to go back to this post and try out some of the amusing techniques she tested in her own endeavors to come up with a title for a new book. Just to give you a hint of what those techniques might involve, think algorithms.
The good doctor and I have been thinking about subtitles for over a year now, having agreed long ago on a title for the original manuscript, one we will keep now for the new book. To come up with that main title, I had researched extensively the titles of new releases from major publishers. I noted the convention of using one or two key words in the main title, and threw out some possibilities. My client did not like my first choice among all the suggestions that referenced his profession as a spinal neurosurgeon. But his wife loved it, and so did the editor, and he finally came around. The double meaning of the word is what clinched it; it is a word that very effectively evokes not only the author’s profession but also his values and the character strengths that allowed him to overcome great adversity in his youth.
Now, before I reveal that main title, and give you a chance to weigh in on a subtitle, let me run a few of the early contenders for title by you. Remember, my client, the ostensible author of this medical memoir, is an internationally known and respected spinal neurosurgeon who contributed significantly to the evolution of his profession. So for starters we played with the word “spine,” another word that suggests courage or strength of character. The subtitle (included on the first example below) reflected the original trajectory of the life story, from birth until reaching the height of his career. That subtitle won’t work for the reworked medical memoir. Hence, our search for a new subtitle. Here are those early candidates for title:
Early Contenders for Title
Spine: A Journey From Refugee to Neurosurgeon
A Spine Man
A Strong Spine
Spine and Spirit
Spine and Soul
Anatomy of a Spine Surgeon
The Miracle Spine
The Balanced Spine
The Whole Spine and Nothing but the Spine
The Honest Spine
The True Spine
The Straight Spine
The Proud Spine
Nothing But Spine
The Spinemaster
The Stalwart Spine
Spine
Well, we eventually ditched the word “spine.” And, whether or not it was simply my repeating to him endlessly my own preference, my author decided, after enthusiastic reactions from friends, family, and the editor, to go with my suggestion. The working title is (drum-roll) . . . BACKBONE.
Now however, we are stymied over the selection of an appropriate subtitle, one that hints at the career of a spinal neurosurgeon who made game-changing contributions to the evolution of spinal neurosurgery. Some of our current attempts are below.
Current Contenders for Subtitle
Backbone: Tales from the Dawn of Spinal Neurosurgery
Backbone: Adventures in Spinal Neurosurgery
Backbone: Pioneering Neurosurgical Inroads to the Spine
Backbone: A Near Decapitation, a Summons from a Queen, and Other Tales from the Annals of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
Backbone: Changing the Face of Neurosurgery, One Vertebra at a Time
Backbone: The Inspired Life of a Neurosurgeon
Backbone: One Neurosurgeon’s Courageous Quest to Conquer the Spine
Backbone: A Neurosurgeon’s Memoir of Brains, Bones, and Battles with the Spine
Backbone: The Triumphs and Defeats of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
Backbone: The Making of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
Backbone: A (Spinal) Neurosurgeon’s Journey, One Vertebra at a Time
Backbone: Courage, Hope, Hard Work and Other Timeless Tools in the Trade of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
Backbone: A Tool in the Trade of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
Backbone: Scaling the Heights of Spinal Neurosurgery in Game-changing Times
Backbone: A (Neurosurgeon’s) Story of Breaking Barriers between Brain and Spine
Backbone: The Life and Game-Changing Career of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
Backbone: The Struggles and Triumphs of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
Backbone: Twists, Turns, and Triumphs on the Road of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
So, is your mind all agog now? Or perhaps it’s numb. Mine sure is. But I’d love to hear your take on the subtitle in the comments section. Give me your top five choices from the above list, or if you would like to submit your own subtitle—or even suggestions for an entirely new title—I welcome all efforts heartily. Happy Wordsmithing!
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.
When I first met Dr. Sonntag 4 1/2 years ago, this was the story we set out to tell in his book: how, in the last days of the war, his mother fled the East with her infant son, Volker, and his brother in tow; how, after the defeat of the Nazis, the family languished in an allied refugee camp for 4 years; how their brief postwar recovery was halted by a brain abscess in his father’s parietal lobe that destroyed his career as a dentist; and how they immigrated to the United States in 1957, where the young man overcame further adversities to realize his version of the “American Dream”—and came to grips with Germany’s Nazi past.
