Editing tip

I was preparing the handouts for my fiction editing workshop at Willamette Writers Conference in August, and read up on a tip from Dave Browne and Rennie King that intrigued me: To make your writing more sophisticated, avoid participial phrases and “as” clauses; instead move your sentences straight into action. 
Here's the example from Browne and King:

Ripping off several large, dripping hunks of burrito, she pulled up a chair to the kitchen table and took a large bite. As she chewed, she wondered who she was maddest at. Clark, she decided.


The doorbell rang. “Heather, it’s me!” boomed a deep, authoritative voice. “Clark!”


Spotting her favorite red silk kimono crumpled on the floor, Heather stooped over and picked it up. As she pulled the kimono over her shoulders, she said a prayer of thanks that the wrinkled look was in.


As her fingers unfastened the chain lock, she wondered how Clark had gotten her address. It wasn’t listed in the telephone book.


“Good evening,” Clark greeted with a small bow as the door swung open.


“The bug man came last week,” Heather said sarcastically, refusing to budge from the door. “I thought he’d exterminated all the pests in my life, but I guessed he missed one. A big one.”


“Funny, very funny,” Clark said, clearly not amused as he leaned an arm against the door jamb. “Now you’d better let me in before I start causing a scene.”

Their edited version:

She pulled up a chair to the kitchen table and took a large bite of the burrito she’d found behind the stacks of Tupperware in the fridge. Who was she maddest? Probably Clark.


The doorbell rang. “Heather, it’s me!”


Clark. It had to be.


Heather sighed, stooped over, and picked up her red silk kimono from the floor. Thank God the wrinkled look was in. But how had Clark gotten her address? It wasn’t listed in the telephone book.


“Good evening.” He made a small bow.


Heather didn’t budge from the door. “The bug man came last week. I thought he’d exterminated all the pests in my life, but I guessed he missed one. A big one.”


“Funny, very funny,” Clarke leaned an arm against the door jamb. “Now you’d better let me in before I start causing a scene.”

This has given me some good ideas for editing of my own work and that of my clients. Let me know if it works for you.

Honoring your own rhythms and style of working

I lead writing support groups, helping writers get started, get going, stay going, get finished. And in two of the groups, we've had conversations lately about finding your own style of working. We creatives are often looking outside ourselves for formulas that will work, and there are plenty of them. We may read that successful authors like David Huddle or William Stafford write/wrote from 4 to 6 am before his family gets up and he goes to work as a college professor. And we try it for a week, cursing the alarm and nodding off over the laptop, and we feel a failure. Or we hear that another author writes every day right after her day job and is putting out novel after novel. But we always go to the gym right after work--it's our only time for exercise. And so we've failed again.

Conventional wisdom says write an hour a day. Write early while you're fresh. But what if an hour a day isn't enough of a time period or an hour in the early morning is hard to come by?

I believed for a ridiculously long time that I was not a real writer and wouldn't ever be one because I didn't write every day in the early morning. But I have a series of well-honed routines in the morning for my spiritual practice and I don't want to change them. They were hard enough to put into place.

Then I began to realize that I just needed to find my own way. My drawing teacher Phil Sylvester often repeats one of his principles: Do whatever makes you want to keep drawing. And that's what I try to do. Do whatever makes me want to keep writing.

Here's what I do:
1. An average of 3 Fridays a month, I write for 5 hours with others in my home.
2. About every 3 months, I spend most of a week on a writing retreat with others. We find an affordable retreat location or rental house and share expenses. We write for 5-6 hours a day in silence but in each other's company.
3. I keep outrageous projects going, challenges to myself. Currently I'm writng 100 one-page fictional bits from prompts (a suggested word or phrase). My end date is Labor Day and I need to write one a day. But I don't. Instead, I write 2-3 several times a week.

Doing this, I've written a lot of poems, a lot of prompts, and two novels in the last 3 years. It's what works for me. What might work for you?

Found that prompt!

This week I wrote about a lost prompt. Shortly afterwards, my friend Jan, who attended the retreat in December, wrote to say she had a prompt with that title. "Keep looking," she said. So I did.

Years ago (2002-2004), I filled several Clairefontaine notebooks with one-page stories and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I had had one of those books on retreat, maybe thinking I'd write some prompts. I didn't have a clear memory of that but it was a possibility. In the fourth notebook, which had entries only in the beginning section, I found a prompt with a 2010 date and then I found the one I was looking for. I've attached it here. It still sings to me. Could this be the start of novel #3?

Broken Promise



Broken Promise was the name on the sign—it hung down low on one side, unhinged. The weather had cracked the paint, some odd shade of blue. The two words had been crudely burned into the plank in that Boy Scout wood-working way.

There was a chain across the entrance to the road but it was rusted, nearly worn through in spots. She realized she could probably bust it loose with a nudge from the car. A heavy metal gate lay flat on the ground to one side just beyond the chain.

She pulled out her sketchbook and a couple of pencils and drew without stopping, without thinking for about 20 minutes. It wasn’t art she was looking for, it was a vision. When she looked over, she saw that the boy had fallen asleep—she hadn’t heard him slump over, hadn’t heard his breathing change.

She reached in the back for her heavy coat and draped it over him, then quietly opened the car door and stepped out into the slushy snow that had filled the muddy tracks that led to the gate.

Her mother had been born here, somewhere in that space ahead, within walls, under a roof, beyond a door and a window that had stood on the concrete slab that she could see a hundred yards in the distance. The slab stood bare, as if picked clean by vultures or swept thoroughly by the handmaidens of the wind. At one end, there was a neat stack of bricks and a low remnant of chimney.

She had a sudden sense of being watched and she turned slowly towards the stand of trees to the north but there was no one visible. She heard no sound of water running. Her mother had talked of a stream not far from the house where she had played in the water. But her mother’s memory was intermittent now fading like the blue of her eyes.

Charlene wondered if you could see the color fade out of your own eyes.

The frustration of notebooks

Last New Year's on a writing retreat, we wrote from prompts at some of the afternoon circle gatherings. I write one from the prompt Broken Promise. It was a really intriguing story start and I filed it away in my mind as a potential for a longer start or even a novel. Both of the novels I've written so far came from prompts that became short stories that became novels.

For the last week I've been looking for that prompt. I'm ready to start considering the characters and topics for my next novel (novel #2 has been through several drafts and is now with early readers). Long ago I stopped having separate journals for each of my various activities and I keep two journals now. One is my daily journal, where I do my Morning Pages, and the other is my creative/spiritual/idea journal. They travel with me wherever I go and I always do circle work in the creative journal. But reading it cover to cover did not find me that prompt. I've emailed other participants on the retreat to see if anybody remembers the prompt but no one so far has.

I've been tempted to think that I dreamed it, but I remember the characters too vividly, I remember the setting, but there was something about the tone, the voice that I fell into in writing the prompt, that I can't retrieve in my memory. It's been six months, I never reread it, I didn't internalize it, it was just an inspired piece. And haunting enough to be still alive as a possibility. And I don't know how to get it back.

I don't remember having other notebooks with me but I must have done. I'm going to keep searching.

Between-projects slump

Today is Writing Friday, at least 5 hours ahead of me to write and I'm in a slump. I finished draft 2 of novel #2 earlier this week and it's in the hands of two trusted early readers. No feedback yet. There are a number of things I could do. Write a number of blog posts so I have a stockpile for busy weeks. Write prompts in my fiction notebook. Go through my 100 poems and begin to revise and shape them into a collection. I could read in the two new technique and style books I have. I could write some more poetry. I could write a short story. I could take notes for a nonfiction book on intentional living.

But in my creative heart of hearts, I want to be deep in the writing of a novel, moving forward in a story that is unfolding as I write it. Hooked by characters and circumstances and crafting marvelous detailed sentences that please me. So I'm going to honor that impulse and spend at least part of the day going over my big notebook of story starts and seeing if any of them speak to me. I've one notebook from 6 or 7 years ago that I may not have harvested for ideas. So maybe this is a day of sitting, ruminating, thinking.

We have sunshine for the first time in forever so maybe I'll go sit outside and get a great idea!

Moving the novel to first readers

Last Friday I spent additional time on my first chapter, then took an informal poll to see whether first-person was more effective or third. The unanimous response was third person, which was the way I was leaning so I felt reassured. I also did a little work on the last chapter and made a couple of reordering decisions but I realized I was tweaking the tiny stuff and that I need to have some reader feedback.

So today, I gave it one more look and then sent it to two trusted readers to see what they think. This is rather nerve-wracking as I want them to find it as intriguing as I do and of course I'm so close to it that I wouldn't be able to tell any more if it didn't work. So now I wait.

I'm ahead of schedule on this, having hoped to finish the second full draft by Aug 1. That means at the upcoming writing retreat, I can turn my attention to the poetry I wrote last winter and do revisions and begin to send some out. Or I can start a third novel, which has way more appeal to me.

In these last couple of months of rewriting and editing, I've missed the creative joy of first draft work, where anything goes and you can let the story lead you on in various directions. And I'm looking forward to getting back to that. I have several ideas for the next book but none have truly grabbed me yet. I'll keep you posted.

Opening chapter dilemmas

We all know that the opening chapter is the most important of the book. If it's the smoothest, the most interesting, the most gripping, the most intriguing, and a whole lot of other superlatives, then it will hook the agent, the publisher, the reader. There's a lot riding on that first writing.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a killer response to a prompt about an older woman who walks into a bar in New Mexico. It had a good zing to it. A few months later, I wrote a short story out of it and it was even better. She meets a cowboy who proposes to her on the spot. It's told first person, the narrator is clever, self-aware, kind of funny, and the end is enigmatic.

I liked it so much that I began to wonder what could happen next for this pair and so I started my second novel. Ellie, the narrator from the first chapter, has many adventures and the book went in a whole different direction than I had anticipated: from romance to mystery and back to romance. Two weeks ago at the beach, I jumped into a second draft. And here comes the dilemma:

The narrator from that much-loved first chapter isn't quite the same woman as in the rest of the book. And since most of the rest of the book precedes the first chapter, she doesn't fit. So I'm in the process of creating (not just rewriting) a new first chapter that fits this book. And it is quite the challenge.

I've decided to write at least two versions: third-person and first-person. And I think I'll do a third version in third person from another character's point of view. I like challenges like this. I know it's really going to stretch me to do this.