What Turns Around, Comes Around

(NOTE: The following is a memoir and as such is told using lies, misinformation, faulty geography, and plain BS. Dialog has been invented and obscenities added for greater dramatic purposes. The moral compass is pointed in a southerly direction to Rebecca Woolf, novelista and mom and blogger at www.girlsgonechild.blogspot.com, who hassled me about not posting more regularly. Thanks for the kick in the pants, GGC.)

Once a manuscript is sent to the publisher and put on schedule with an editor and designer, the best a writer can do is forget about it. You’ve done your job. The pages take their place in line behind the daily emergencies of squabbles with printers, writers not as cool as you, and office flu epidemics. Let’s avoid mention of the staff trying to maintain personal lives outside the business.

I forgot about DOG WALKED and dived into the deep end of the freelance pool. Kate had a novel without a title, Rebecca was going through a complete rewrite on hers, and Doug needed another run at his dialogue. Everyone had billable hours and paid promptly, bless them. Then the UPS man rang the intercom in December with a box from the publisher. I let the package sit for a week before fumbling at the strapping tape with a box cutter. Being edited is different from editing. In my early days as an editor I had a manuscript returned from the writer with “WRITE YOUR OWN F**KING BOOK” scribbled along the margins, and the outrage sparked by asking politely for active instead of passive sentence construction. Like I would be as creepy.

In the July 2005 issue of WRITER’S DIGEST, there is an article by Jenna Glatzer about receiving the publisher’s edited manuscript, “Nice Work-Just Change Everything.” Glatzer recommends to find a fume friend, back away from the manuscript, know the red ink means an editor cares, start simple, prioritize your arguments, compromise, keep a happy file, and picture the rainbow. I’d be damned if I would picture the rainbow. Cynthia Frank had been kind enough to include an Omron HEM-432C manual blood pressure monitor, complete with four AA batteries. I slipped on the cuff and squeezed the inflation bulb until the numbers appeared in the LCD display. My systolic pressure was 120 and diastolic at 80. According to the instruction booklet, these were swell numbers. I read my edited manuscript and by page five the numbers shot up to 140/90 and stayed there.

Where did those contractions come from? What about the dippy formatting, quotes shoved into italic, sentences combined and truncated? The editor was wrong, I was an idiot, the world was a horrible place, and I had no right to a pen, never mind a word processor. How much of a disaster had I gotten myself into? Glatzer said I should have a fume friend. I called Mr. Detroit.

“This is a complete unmitigated disaster, my fault and their fault, and I’ll never get work again. Desolation! Horror! Vicious fate!”

“I’ll jump in here and guess who. Sal?”

“The book is royally boogered!”

“Stop with the exclamation points. Pop volume 27 of BRAZILIAN DEBUTANTES into your DVD player. The corsets will calm you down.”

The much-appreciated corsets failed but Cynthia Frank came through. She told me what I told writers: If you disagree with an edit, change the damn thing and quit your unseemly whining. Her in-house editor had actually used a very light hand. I spent four days with the manuscript and corrected my mistakes, especially the convoluted sentences knocking around the furniture like a child’s balloon freed from its knot. The editor is the first audience for a book. He or she comes to the manuscript as a stranger and if the writer’s argument is muddy when clarity is needed, the writer needs to shut up and listen.

Anyone who edits themselves has a fool for an editor, regardless of those nifty books about self-editing. I also should have had a book midwife to call with my panic instead of bothering Mr. Detroit and the publisher. No one is exempt from overreacting to the publishing process, not even me. Systolic pressure is now down to 130 with no hope of going lower until DOG WALKED is in print.

NEXT: Covering the Cover and Worrying Over the Title

How Writing is Written

(NOTE: The following is a memoir and as such is told using lies, misinformation, faulty geography, and plain BS. Dialog has been invented for greater dramatic purposes, like having the publisher use the word “weenie” when she has more class. The moral compass is pointed south where the food is better.)

Turn off the stereo, stick the television in the closet, let the answering machine pick up the calls, and plant sciatica-prone backside in chair. Make lots of coffee. This is how the writing begins. Easy, right?

My favorite writing tool is a four-drawer filing cabinet crammed with hanging files and manila folders. I grabbed the files marked “Terrors of Publishing,” “Fun Stuff,” and “Contractual Oblongata,” and spread clipped articles from newspapers and magazines around the apartment in search of a start. The publisher and I talked through the contents of DOG WALKED, and if I had kept the notes the work would go faster. I wrote the chapter heads on three-by-five file cards and stuck them on the bulletin board above the desk. “Introduction,” “Contract Shuffle,” “First Draft,” and “Book Covers” stared at me with malicious yellow eyes glowing in the dark to disturb my sleep.

I started writing one word at a time. A half page was cause for a celebration, a full page gave reason for joyous shouts. Let the neighbors complain about the noise. I was writing. Mr. Detroit dropped by his DVD collection of BRAZILLIAN DEBUTANTES IN DESHABILLE, volumes 1 to 43. “Concentrates the mind,” he said. My friends in Switzerland, Caroline and Jürg, sent a pound of coffee and a carton of Francais cigarettes, and Franklin Market around the corner kept me in meatloaf sandwiches. Elmore Leonard says the secret to writing is four good pages a day. This is fine if you have a year to write a novel and you’ve already received a big check for the film rights. I did a minimum of ten, and woke at six in the morning to rewrite the previous day’s output before starting on the next bit.

Writing and editing are different disciplines. With editing, the words are there. Writing has to find the words, a sure way to expose self-esteem issues. Knowing I knew nothing made the going harder. Grammar rules clashed with content in my head. Did I have anything to say? Had smarter people said it before? The conceit behind DOG WALKED was immediate answers to writer’s questions without going into the soft mush of creativity, art, and voice. Cut away the high-sounding nonsense and every writer is a storyteller, whether fiction or nonfiction. A story needs a beginning, middle, and end. I wrote the first two and scrambled for the last.

The number of finished pages slowly increased. I had to go through the introduction one more time, pound home how important rewriting is to the process, and talk about writers selling their books. On November 12, the manuscript needed another thirty pages. I paced the floor at all hours to the consternation of my downstairs neighbor, and cranked out copy needing an edit or the delete key. November 13 tripped over the stacks of books I was considering for the reference section. I had too many goddamn men and not enough women in the recommended reading, saved only by Flannery O’Connor and Marge Piercy. One of them still lived and counted for two. What to say about the books? Each had landed on the list by merit, and I wanted to sleaze by on title information and forget any commentary. No way. Cynthia Frank would catch my laziness, another reason to only deal with publishers who are strangers.

By the afternoon of the 14th, the manuscript was finished along with the writer. I sent the file to Cypress House, had a shower, and slept. The UPS deliveryman rang my doorbell two days later. Inside a box protected by Styrofoam pellets sat two apple muffins, accomplishment muffins baked by Ms. Frank to acknowledge the receipt of the manuscript one day early. I had made the deadline and now she could deal with the rest of the problems.

NEXT: What Turns Around, Comes Around