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?
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?
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.
Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoirby 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.
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.
Legacy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Personal Historyby 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.
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.
Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Pastby 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.
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.
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?
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?
Our last house lay cradled in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains. The neighborhood terraced up the slope behind our property, ending three blocks away at the edge of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. From the path that emerged from our end of the development—marked by a dead, two-armed Saguaro that traced fat black ink strokes against the sunset—trails traced their way up into the desert: Lost Dog Wash; the Anasazi Spur and the Sunrise Trailhead; the Ringtail and Old Jeep Trails; Tom Thumb’s Trailhead and the Marcus Landslide Trail. A short hike over a low rise and the city disappeared behind us. Before us a sea of ironwood cholla, saguaros, barrelhead cactus, ocotillos and creosote crested like waves.
Sea of ironwood cholla with a storm heading in, one form of the notorious “jumping cactus.”
I loved the idea of living so close to the desert. We’d been a ten-minute drive from the preserve in the previous house, and though we’d had our share of javelinas and coyotes wandering down into the neighborhood, the mountain seemed removed. We could not feel its pulse. So when circumstances dictated a change anyway, we went with our gut desire to live in the desert, not just near it. On a March day in 2007, we rumbled up the long slope of a road called Via Linda—Pretty Way—to our new home.
Looking east from our front yard. The foundation of a pretty yard here is gravel and river rock.
It was magnificent. We hiked the trails. We collected pieces of quartz from the upper elevations—the rocks spilled down one side of the mountain from a white waterfall of an outcropping two hours up the trail. At night, we ambled up the long, dark avenue bisecting the neighborhood until we reached the end of the pavement. We crossed over into the desert and paused, listening to the silence undergirding the night sounds. From our patio, we watched the hawks circling overhead, and reeled at the panorama of stars undiminished by the brighter lights below.
Yours Truly with North Scottsdale and Phoenix in the distance from the McDowell Mountains
The professor heading out on the Anasazi Spur just past a magnificent ocotillo
We had wildlife adventures. Coming round a corner before Halloween one year, we surprised a herd of javelina nibbling on pumpkins in a neighbor’s yard. We froze. They bolted. Stampeding towards us, they parted at the last moment and disappeared into the brush on the other side of the road.
Another time, heading up the avenue in the dark, we saw a parked car ahead with its lights on full beam. “Assholes,” I said to my husband. “What the hell are they doing?” The next moment the profile of a deer split the glare in two. It bounded into the brush at the side of the road and emerged with its young before hightailing it back into the dark mountains. The people in the car had been trying to locate the fawn, they explained when we reached them.
All this beauty so near. Geckos and hummingbirds and coyotes howling at the moon.
And treacherous creatures of a more insidious nature.
One night as I snuggled up to my husband in our bed, I felt a thin whisper on my leg. I had just enough time to wonder if I had felt it or not, when the hypodermic jab of a needle in my upper arm jolted me upright. “Fuck,” I wailed. I’ve been stung! I’ve been stung!
“What?” My husband hollered, still sleep drunk. “What happened?”
“There’s a scorpion in the bed,” I said, throwing off the covers and bounding out of bed.
“Hold on,” he said. “Are you sure? Maybe it was a needle from the cactus. We were re-potting those plants today. It could have gotten on you .”
“No!” I said. “That was no cactus needle. I’m sure of it.” Still brushing myself off and shaking my hair out, I danced around wondering if the fucker was on the floor now.”
My husband jumped up and circled around the bed. “There it is,” he said. “Get a shoe, quick.” It lay motionless at the foot of the mattress, primeval, repellent, oblivious to its own danger. A whack and it was no more.
The scorpions sabotaged my desert mountain experience. I was later stung in a chair while convalescing from the flu. My daughter was stung in her bed and had to be taken to the emergency room. One of them crawled out of a pot my husband had held close to his chest a moment before. I could never relax when coming into the house or getting up in the night time, when slipping my foot into a shoe or opening a cupboard. I once found a dead one in the dishwasher and another in my china cabinet. The specter of the evil things haunted the house. I sensed them seething behind the walls. The “Scorpion Slayer” we hired (his business name) could only marginally keep them at bay. We moved after five years. I still worry about the young family that snapped up the house in a short sale in 2012.
On a footnote…if you happen to be thinking of moving to Arizona someday, read this NY Times article on the reality of sharing space with these truly creepy critters.
May 4, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) include insects in a story. Periwinkles, bees laden with pollen, ants building hills. What can insects add to a story? Do they foreshadow, set a tone, provide a scientific point of interest or a mystical element? Let you inner periwinkles fly!
So, here’s my flash.
The Sting
Cleaning day in the new house. The feel of fine grit in the bathtub. She scrubbed, like a woman she’d seen in Oaxaca grinding corn on a stone metate.
Then, Ow!What the hell? A sliver of glass? She turned to the sink and threw her rag down. Inspected the finger. No blood. Only a suffusion under the skin, as if the tip were blushing.
She did other chores. The finger grew numb. Still she didn’t realize. Returning, she picked the rag up. The evil thing lay in the bowl, flat, segmented, pincered, its barbed tail ready to strike.
Ugghhh. I can hardly bear to look at a picture of it.
One of the few compensations of being a four-eyed girl was the knee-jerk assumption on the part of others that I was bookish. And I was. By the time I got glasses at the age of eight—when a compulsory eye exam at school revealed to my overworked parents that I was nearsighted as a bat—I had been devouring books for three years. No wonder I loved libraries from the get-go.
Not that we didn’t have a few resources at home. One of the very few valuable items my parents invested in when I was a young child was a set of encyclopedias. Diving randomly into a volume was, for me, as engrossing as surfing the Internet on an iPad is to a child today. The only other place one could get access to so many fascinating words and stories was through the periodic delivery of cheap but entertaining Scholastic Books at school, or . . . the library.
When I think of libraries, the first one to come to mind is the two-story converted house on dusty Eva Street in Sunnyslope Arizona in the early 1960s. It was probably a much smaller house than I remember, but walking up the front curved staircase to the second floor made me feel I was a guest at a country manor with rooms of hidden delights. Indeed, the stacks where I hunkered down pulling books from the crammed shelves were just that: vast chambers where my imagination took flight. On Eva Street I discovered my first Arabian Knights, endless books about ballet, early historical fiction—one I remember is The Oregon Trail—stories from different lands, and biographies for youngsters. It never mattered to me that I’d have to trudge home balancing my load of six or seven or eight books. That one could take as many books as one could carry—and for free!—was more license than a child could hope for.
Other libraries came and went. By high school the public ones were cleaner but rather institutional brick-and-mortar buildings. By then I was mixing more serious fiction (the English and American classics) with Gothic Romance: Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn (the classic governess-falls-for-the-master-of-the-house tale) was one I reread a dozen times. To balance that frivolity, I remember checking out Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. Libraries are nothing if not pluralistic.
Then there was the vast Carl Hayden Library at Arizona State University in the late 1970s, where I struggled with the Dewey Decimal system to find texts on Spanish literary greats and Latin American politics. And the narrow, secluded stacks in the back of the building on the top floor of the campus library at Beppu Daigaku (University) a decade later, where I had no competition checking out the works in English of one Japanese master after another: Mishima Yukio’s heartrendingly simple tale, The Sound of Waves; Kawabata Yasunari ‘s Snow Country and The Old Capital; Oliver Statler’s delightful history, Japanese Inn.
I still love libraries today. For a decade or so, Borders and Barnes and Noble stole me away, but before long both chains betrayed their original promise, revealing their insensible, market-driven hearts of mud. Navigating paths through Star Wars toys and shelves of YA Hunger Games knock-offs does not, for this reader, make for a positive book-browsing experience. And though I turn to Amazon from time to time, it’s the library that calls me, with its quiet shelves of books, its diversity, its knowledgeable and universally helpful staff, and it noble mission to advance literacy and thinking in the nation’s people, no matter what our origins or means.
Today I am fortunate in that I inhabit a fairly decent library of my own, thanks largely to “the professor” (aka Tom, my husband.) Tom was so devastated at having been forced to sell his Encyclopedia Britannia during a particularly bad stretch of “down-and-out” back in 1978 that he has never parted with a book since.
One wall of Tom’s Science Fiction Room. The magazines on the left are a recent addition: 350 issues of Galaxy Magazine going back to the first one in 1950.
The professor in his study (previously known as the front room.)
A “Room of My Own”…the reading corner in my study. I have since added another large bookshelf to the left of the one present.
And the blogger’s desk. A larger bookcase has replaced the small one here.
This post was inspired by Charli Mills’s flash fiction challenge over at Carrot Ranch: March 2, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that includes a library. You can honor the libraries in your own experience, dream about libraries of the future or explore a community without one.
I’ve chosen for mine, a particular kind of community…
A Free Man
The Protective Custody yard wasn’t quite solitary confinement. He could hear inmates in the other cells. Could call out to them. One hour a day he stretched in the barren exercise yard. The rest of the time, it was the eight-by-ten cell. Time seemed to stop.
Except when the book cart rattled by. Beats me, he thought, how a prison can have such a great library. The Brothers Karamazov, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Vonnegut. Joseph Conrad. It was the only thing keeping him sane. The only thing reminding him he was, where it counted, a free man.
I was doing my fifth circuit of the small city park when I spotted the woman with the snow-white hair. She was holding a small child up to one of the hardy desert pine trees that punctuate the perimeter. As I power-walked by, the wild-haired little thing gave a cry of delighted wonder. She slapped the bark of the tree and kicked the trunk with her small, ineffectual foot. I left the two of them looking up in wonder through the needled branches.
I was happy to think of the myriad pleasures and lessons from Nature that the child would, like all of us, go on to experience. And I delved into the depths of my own memory to recall the time in my youth when I first confronted Nature as a wondrous, awe-inspiring force.
I was five when my parents piled my four siblings and me into their pink and white, jet-ship of a Dodge and relocated us from Minnesota to Phoenix Arizona. It was July of 1961. Of that trip, I mostly remember being condemned for three endless days to the middle of the back seat between my two brothers and older sister. Yet, my first intimations of the power of Nature date to that first remembered journey: my mother pointing to the sky on a midnight rural highway in North Dakota, calling us to “Look!” as shimmering curtains of emerald and gold rippled across the heavens; my brother Jack at age ten standing dangerously close to the edge of a precipice in the Rockies, below which sheer walls of pine-encrusted rock cascaded down and down and down to a winding thread of river; a sea of buffalo and choreographies of antelope under immense skies, clouds sailing above like voluminous ships.
From the left bottom: Jeanne, Peggy, Patty. From the left top: Danny and Jack. 1961.
Over the next decade and a half, we made the round trip from Arizona to my parents’ home towns in North Dakota three or four times. Eventually it was just my twin and me in the back seat, equipped with Almond Joys and Paydays, Juicy Fruit and Spearmint gum, Planters peanuts and playing cards. Up and back on different routes, passing from Arizona into Utah or New Mexico, on to Colorado, through Nebraska or Wyoming, and then into South Dakota. For three days we journeyed, straight as an arrow over flat eternities of desert; skirting towering rock formations and deep, layered, chromatic terraces; climbing vertiginous, pine-ridged Colorado peaks and plunging precipitously into cool, deep valleys. After the mountains and meadows of South Dakota, the fecund farmland of North Dakota finally welcomed us into her ample arms, her prairies rippling to the horizon like the gentle swells of an infinite sea.
I had a chance to revisit those vast, dramatic landscapes last August, when my North Dakota cousin Tommy invited me along to ride shotgun in a car he’d bought in Arizona and wanted to drive back up north. Tommy is a talented photographer, so I’ll retrace that trip photographically with you here. Note that there are no cute and furry creatures—I dislike anthropomorphizing animals. (Though I admit to taking multiple shots of a pair of mountain goats in the Black Hills the year before on a trip with my sisters.)
The famous red rock formations of Monument Valley in northern Arizona. Many classic westerns, such as John Ford’s Stagecoach, were filmed here.
The photographer and his “horse-powered coach’ outside Moab Utah.
The phenomenal Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
An enchantingly placid and pristine stream in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
The blogger drinking in the beauty and looking like a startled deer in a meadow near the stream.
Darn! They snuck in. Mountain goats near Mount Rushmore.
North Dakota: infinite horizons and the subtle music of wheat waving in the wind.
This short tour of the West and the flash that follows were inspired by this week’s prompt from Carrot Ranch: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about wild spaces. Is it a wilderness or a patch of weeds in a vacant lot that attract songbirds. What is vital to the human psyche about wild spaces? Bonus points for inducing something cute and furry.
The post and flash were also triggered by the ache in my heart for those separated from the beauty of nature. The shells and tiny mouse skull in that very top photo were collected by my son, now serving time in a minimum security prison on a drug-related charge. On trips we took to the coast years ago, he was always the one to find unbroken anemones or sand dollars, buffed and scoured sea glass, even a melon-sized moon snail in Washington that, much to the consternation of the park ranger, he began to dig up before he realized the shell was still occupied. Always an avid naturalist by instinct, his world has shrunk to a stark space devoid of all natural grace except wind, flat land stretching to the horizon, and sunlight. Even the stars at night are drowned in the glare of megawatt lights.
But not for long…
Here’s a flash on nature…
Absolution
He didn’t look back. Not as he walked to the car. Not as we circled back onto the highway. Behind us the towers melted into the horizon.
The road steepened. Pines appeared, grew thick, drank the sunlight. Outside a mountain town we stopped.
Resin and rain keened the air. Wind soughed in the high branches.
I waited while he walked into a clearing. He tilted his head. Palmed the rough bark. Drank the sweet air. When he returned, needles fell from his hair.
“Any place you want to stop?” I said.
“Nah,” he said, looking straight ahead. “I’m fine.”
Menu from a swanky restaurant, Phoenix, Arizona, 1960s
When Charli Mills posted a piece the other day based on a fellow Rough Writer’s memoir challenge, my own writing juices immediately started simmering. A link led me to Irene Waters’ Times Past blog, where Irene has started a new monthly challenge for writers. What immediately marked this challenge as something special was its sociological bent. Participants are asked to state which generation they belong to at the beginning of their piece, so that in responding to the prompts, and reading others’ posts, writers will gain “social insights into the way the world has changed between not only generations but also between geographical location.” The first prompt is one that has been the crux of numerous conversations I’ve had with fellow Baby Boomers, most of whom have vastly increased their incidence of dining out since childhood. Here’s the prompt: The first time I remember eating in a restaurant in the evening.
The prompt immediately sparked a memory from about 1968. I was twelve and feeling very grown up with my stylish pageboy haircut and straight lime-green shift with a faux belt at the hip. I may even have worn fishnet stockings that night, held up with that queer relic called a garter belt. My mother had only recently allowed me and my twin sister to advance to a one-inch heel on our shiny patent-leather shoes.
You guessed it; the green dress
It was some special occasion, perhaps my parents’ anniversary or my mother’s birthday. The seven of us had piled into my father’s boat-like Chrysler sedan for the ride over to Giordano’s Italian Restaurant on Central Avenue—upscale indeed compared to Sunnyslope. Russ Giordano was a friend of my father’s, a fellow veteran from the VFW club (Veterans of Foreign Wars). Along with our church, Most Holy Trinity, the Club constituted my parents’ primary social circle.
The burgeoning Southwest hub of Phoenix Arizona, ca. 1960
The Chrysler was a recent luxury. My father’s paint-splotched Dodge pickup had served for some time as both his work vehicle (he earned his living painting houses all across the rapidly growing “Valley of the Sun,” as Phoenix is still referred to) and our family transportation. It was in the bed of that pick-up that we five kids had, until recently, ridden to our modest suppers out. Those were at one of two places in the north part of town where we lived, Sunnyslope, at both of which our play clothes were entirely respectable:
Sunnyslope in the late 1950s, early 1960s
The most regular spot was the fish fry in the big hall at the Monfort post of the VFW Club on Friday nights, where permed and padded-hipped women called us “Hon” and sashayed loaded paper plates to the long folding tables. We squirmed on our metal chairs just long enough to eat, like skittish colts, the din of voices ricocheting off bare walls. Nickels for the pop machine embedded themselves in our grubby, hot palms. A hulk of a bald man named Tiny could be seen through the cut-out window at one side, manning the sizzling fryers. Our hunger pangs subdued, we were off to the park across the street, but not without searching out the wizened old vet who always teased us through a little box on his throat.
My family’s other go-to spot was the Northway Fish & Chips in Sunnyslope, where we dug into flimsy cardboard boxes of (yet again) deep fried cod squares or chicken or splayed butterfly shrimp served with a white bun and limp French fries. We gathered round a picnic bench under a festoon of fishing nets and glass baubles, jockeying for a place in the jetstream of damp air blowing from the swamp cooler .
That was before the change. Before the advent of my parent’s business venture. Before the five-bedroom, ranch-style house with the pool. The new Chrysler sedan and matching bedroom sets bought at auction.
And . . . a first grown-up dinner at Giordano’s on Central Avenue in Phoenix. The sophistication of the dimmed lights, the white linen tablecloth, the glass water goblets, the chilled oval tray of chilled crudités (celery sticks, radishes, carrots and fat green olives with pimentos) and salad served before something called an entrée. I sat straight and proper on my heavy wooden chair, dabbing the corners of my mouth with a cloth napkin.
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.
