Just Like Chemistry Class

I am sitting at my laptop having spent the last few minutes wondering whether using the words “hefty” and “substantial” would be too much in a single sentence. Both words carry quite a bit of weight, in the metaphorical sense, and as I stared at the phrase I had the vivid sensation that I was balancing a chemical equation. As I continue to edit with more and more detail, this problem of weight occurs more frequently.

The specific sentence I was working with started out simply enough. I have a habit of using filler sentences when writing in order to get an idea out quickly so that I can move on before the rest of the information I have shoved between my ears vanishes like a northern summer. It read as so:

“He finished giving Erin a quick, but kind handshake and went on his way.”

Sometimes I don’t notice these filler phrases as I write them and only notice them (or someone else does…) when it comes time to edit. I have decided not to see them as sloppy work or a bad habit as they allow me to finish writing without getting stuck contemplating one sentence for hours. Of course, these simple sentences aren’t always boring; often they are necessary. However, the “he” in this sentence is an important character and this is his first appearance. He deserves more than to have his actions told; he deserves to have them shown.

In trying to breathe some life into this sentence I originally changed it to:

“He finished giving Erin a quick but kind handshake and exited through a hefty door that shut with a substantial hiss.”

This was better, but not right. It was a matter of weight that made me pause and feel like this phrase was unfinished. Here, I use both the words “hefty” and “substantial,” and the overall feeling of this sentence has become ultimately too heavy. Much like balancing a chemical equation, breaking up this sentence would yield an uneven and overall erroneous result.

The word “hefty” felt right. The imagined doors were thick metal, held shut with locks and akin to something you’d see in a hospital setting. That left me contemplating the use of the word “substantial.” Would a door be described as shut with a “substantial hiss?” This thought lead me to ponder what other sorts of objects made hissing sounds when active. I immediately thought of a steam pipe. As vapor exits venting along a series of pipes, wouldn’t that make a strong hissing sound? Yes, and it’d be substantial. Much more substantial than the shutting of a door.

Eureka!

I was able to fix the sentence quickly after this realization and felt greatly empowered as I did so.

Logic works with writing as well as chemistry; what a wonderful feeling! And so, after the addition of a few more words to balance the sentence, a weak filler phrase eventually became:

“Dr. Wallace gave Erin a quick, but kind handshake and pressed forward, exiting expeditiously through a hefty door that shut with a soft hiss.”

Ahhh. Feels right. Now I can move on….

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Kathryn VanderWoude on Editing

Hello, all! My name is Kathryn, and I am Sally's editor. Sally, my dear friend, has asked me to participate in a blog swap with her. Cue trumpets, and behold! My half of the swap.

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If you want to be able to call yourself a writer, you must allow others to edit your work. You may write a little story, poem or essay and feel that it is perfect just the way it is, and it’s okay to like your creation, but it’s arrogant to  believe that you don’t need to spend time scrutinizing and editing your piece. Sally and I giggle when we hear people say things like, “I’m a pretty good writer. But I don’t need a peer editor or anything ."

If you’re writing in your journal or simply as a means to express your feelings, with  no real interest in the art of writing, then go ahead and refuse editing. But if you want to call yourself a writer--if you want to improve as a writer--you must seek the help of others.

Often, you’ll write something and feel such an emotional connection to it that you can’t imagine tweaking it, rearranging its words or--gasp!--deleting extraneous portions. This is when an editor is useful.

When asked what my hobbies are, I usually respond by saying, “I guess I like to read and write.” It’s easy to tell others that I enjoy writing--they don’t have to know that, more truthfully, I like the idea of writing. I don’t have to write consistently to say “I write.”

When Sally asked if I would edit a manuscript of hers, I immediately agreed to help. But I soon learned that editing is not like writing. I can’t fake it. I can’t say, “Oh, I edit,” and then not edit. Sally was depending on me to thoughtfully work through her first few drafts of the novel, and for the first time since college English courses, I was held accountable. Which meant I had to stop thinking about doing, and actually do.

I’d had experience editing peers’ pieces in a handful of classes, and I used to help my brothers with their papers in high school, so I was no virgin to picking apart someone’s work, correcting grammar, and offering my critique. But I’d never been involved in such an intensive, long piece of writing.

Sally has asked me to share some advice for amateur editors like myself, and here it is:

One: Don’t hold back. Never, ever, ever neglect to offer your criticism. By withholding your thoughts and observations--even if they are negative--you are doing the writer a disservice. It’s insulting to neglect to disclose your complete thoughts, and ridiculous to say, “But I don’t want to be mean!”  When a friend asks you for help, she is inviting you to apply your knowledge. Don’t be a timid little bitch about it.

Of course there are tactful ways to express your findings. “Oh-em-gee, this is like such a shitty sentence, bro” is obviously inappropriate. But something like “That phrase is a bit overused and cliché. Consider something more original” is absolutely necessary. I think it’s honoring the writer to challenge him intellectually. It’s like saying, “I know you’re capable of something great. I’m here to help your work reach its full potential.”

Two: Let her know what you like! Because I follow my “don’t hold back” rule, the edited pages I would hand over to Sally were covered in ink with my scribbling. I’d often ask her to rewrite sentences or whole paragraphs. I’d write “not necessary--delete” by certain words, and I think I crossed out nearly every single one of her semicolons.

She’d asked me for criticism, but she’d also trusted me with a piece of writing that she’d spent hours of time working on. By showing me such a raw, unedited piece of work, she was giving me the most vulnerable parts of her--pieces from her imagination. Sharing a personal piece of writing is arguably as intimate an act as sex because it’s giving something from inside of one’s mind to another. Respect that.

It’s terrifying to create a unified piece of writing when there are such genius literary works out there already--like The Grapes of Wrath or Catcher in the Rye, for example-- setting the bar unrealistically high. I often read an astounding novel or brilliant poem and then try to write, and I hate myself, for I cannot create something with such a degree of excellence.

Every once in awhile, I would come across a sentence in Sally’s story that struck me as particularly well-written. It made me think of something I’d read in a successfully published book. I made sure to star those sentences and communicate to her that I was impressed. Because a writer needs encouragement to continue writing, unless he’s nauseatingly confident or dreadfully egotistical.

Bottom line: Offer all of your criticisms, but make sure to tell your writer what has merit in her work.

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Thank you for reading. Please come visit me at stumblingbuzz.blogspot.com. And hey, while you're there, let me know what you think.

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The Tea Ceremony

Last night, as I lay restless with insomnia, I considered an excerpt from Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird:Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” and wondered how it applied to me.

“Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony.”

This piece is a beautiful sentiment. All that Anne Lamott writes is beautiful—so gorgeous that I almost feel like I ought to give up this craft because the light my writing provides is nothing compared to Anne’s shining luminosity. I’ve felt what she describes here before, especially when I’ve written intimate and deeply personal pieces that I never intend to show the world. Some pieces are too personal to be exposed.

Recently, I wrote a short bit about one of my daughters. The prose itself was under five hundred words, but the impact the writing process had on me was profound. I had felt a deep unease, a suffocating tension like a heart attack for the better part of an hour. My life is hectic, and when I hold the child I pulled from my womb, after days of chaotic labor, and then placed on my warm chest to discover she was a chubby faced, blued-eyed girl, I feel like a part of my own spirit is there floating before me. At nearly three years old, she possesses the features or her father, but still, to look at her, I see myself. She lives joyfully, going with the flow when others would fight change. I rarely hear the word “no” from her—that is unless I’m asking her if she needs to use the potty—and when asking her if she’d like to join you in some boring household chore, the answer is almost always “ummm, sure!” She is an inspiration and reminds me that I should express my best traits. When I leave her, I feel like someone has ripped that bright wisp, a spirit that was once a part of my body, away from me. 

In my heartache, I put a bright blue pen to paper, hoping to relieve some of the pressure. I wrote a few sentences and suddenly, like the failure of the New Orleans dams, water rushed from my eyes, the tears so hot they nearly singed my cheeks. I continued to write, shooing my husband away when he kindly offered his comfort. I continued to write, even though my tears blotted out words on the cream-colored page, leaving circles of wet absence where once lay heartfelt words.

When I finished, I sat back and cried a while more. It wasn’t that I was sad; it was that I had just experienced one of the most cathartic experiences of my life. The pain in my chest was gone. I had taken the tumultuous emotions that had before burdened me, distracted me, and plucked them from my mind to create a beautiful piece of script.

But, although that writing of nonfiction experience was amazingly enlightening, my heart still lies in fiction. So, last night, as I fitfully turned to and fro, I wondered how this idea of Anne’s translates into fiction authorship. I’ve certainly had this massive emotional occurrence reading fiction, but I’ve yet to have this wildly intense experience in writing fiction—and that worried me. Now, I’ve definitely had a lot of fun, and I’ve been plagued with sadness over a character’s own turmoil but instead of weeping for them, I feel empowered and terrifically excited during the writing process.

Am I a sadist? I would feel terrible if there were some sort of Harold Crick/Stranger than Fiction thing going on here. No, I’m not a sadist; I just love the act of telling a story. It’s okay that there are sorrowful trials, because in the end, the story coming together in that one final moment is all that counts. It is the crafting of these tales that gets me going and fulfills me, but why?

Why is the act of writing a work of fiction so cathartic for me? Why do I feel compelled to do so? I have pondered this question for years, and even more intensely with my current project. I ask myself why I love fiction when I do laundry, when I’m driving into town, and, of course, when I reach for a book from my shelf. The only answer I can fathom is that I love to entertain, I love to be entertained, and I love the idea of something strange and new. This answer, however, does not completely fulfill my question. I still feel like looking for the answer.

And maybe that is why I write! Maybe that is why I need the tea ceremony—to create stories so that I might search through these outlandish tales to find myself!




* Update: So, I ended up posting that piece about my daughter for a blog swap. If you are interested, you can find it here.

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A Photographic Peek

"The sound of the creaking hinges echoed unnervingly into the cold, ceasing with rigidity at the trees that lined the road."

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Storytelling

Stories have always fascinated me, just as they fascinate much of the country. Americans spend hundreds of billions of dollars on books and magazines each year and well over ten billion on movies. However, my personal obsession with stories didn’t begin with books or movies. My love for good tale began with my mother, Mary Lynch, formerly Mary Jane Loux.

When I was a child, I’d lay in bed with my mother and say, “Tell me a story about when you were a little girl.” As the orange glow from my mother’s lamp lit the thick white and blue comforter that warmed our legs, she’d speak, her eyes weary from a long day of parenting. I’d listen, mesmerized by a silly account of how she’d practiced shaving with a spoon, but how even with the training, she’d still cut her legs and once cut them so terribly she removed chunks from her skin. She shouldn’t have been shaving in a hurry, she’d told me, but she was heading out to go bowling with friends. I don’t recall whether she chose to wear pants that night, or just slapped bandages over the wounds and braved a skirt.

When I’d ask for another tale, my mother would tell the story of how her sister ran away from home with a box of brown sugar when she was only three. She’d tell me about playing Barbies with her neighbor Rosy, which was short for Rosemary, who said she didn’t have a middle name.

Boogie

Her yarns were vivid and she’d recall each aesthetic detail with great clarity. I asked again and again to hear the story of Freda, her tiny, grey and white cat. My mother and her five siblings always had cats around the house, and those cats occasionally had kittens. Boogie, one of Freda’s babies, thought it was a person. But, no matter how many cats entered the hearts of the Loux family, Freda was my mother’s favorite.

Freda Lynn

It was summer when Freda vanished. My mother searched and searched for her dear pet and finally found her some time later in a neighbor’s “lovely, shaded garden.” Freda was so happy there with the flowers, the white picket fence and goldfish pond that my mother couldn’t take her away from her new home. I can still remember how sad I was hearing this tale for the first time; it broke my heart.

My mother didn’t just teach me to appreciate stories, she taught me to tell them. Without her encouragement and gentle prodding, I may have lost this story-obsessed pattern of mine.

One evening, while my father reveled in his masculinity at hunting camp, my mother turned to me and asked, “Why don’t you tell me a story?”

“I don’t have any stories!” I’d said, dejectedly. I was seven.

“You have to think of some because one day your girl might ask you to tell her a story.”

At first it seemed a silly thought. I was young, why would I need to recount a story from my childhood?

Because, she’d said, if I didn’t practice telling them, I’d forget.

She was right. The stories I recall most lucidly from my childhood are those that I’ve told again and again and the others have been lost or exist only as shattered fragments failing to make real connective plot lines. My mother’s encouragement also allowed me to begin experimenting with fiction at a very young age and the stories I wrote down as a girl, however frighteningly unworthy of future publication they may have been, I can still recall explicitly.

My mother has always been a great source of encouragement. When asked by my brother, in her company, whether I’d want help self-publishing, she said, confidently, “No, she’s going for the big-time!”

This is why I love her, with all the love I can muster.

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