In Praise of Editors

This week I'm working hard on the first set of edits suggested by my editor Sarah Harvey for my next YA novel for Orca Book Publishers, currently called Feast. I say currently because one of the first things Sarah suggested, was a new title for the novel. I was not pleased about this. Luckily because I have worked with Sarah on three previous novels I know how this will play out: eventually I will see the beauty of each of her suggestions. Sarah is not only a great editor, she's also the author of several books for children and young adults, including her current title Spirit Level.

Working with an editor is an interesting and humbling experience. For a year or more, I work by myself, quietly at my desk, or more frequently, on my laptop on my couch. My characters form in my heads like imaginary friends, and their problems and goals blossom as I type. I start with a voice and dialogue. My characters argue and discuss and from there, I find a structure to chart my character's development. As I write I often have other writer friends read short excerpts for me. For the most part they are supportive and say nice things about my writing.

Orca Editor Sarah Harvey

And then there's my editor. Her job is to make my book the best it can be. And so often when I get back the first draft of comments I'm overwhelmed. Sarah finds things in the story that I had no idea weren't working. Then I am briefly annoyed- what does she know? This is my book. Next, I have a moment of sadness. I realize Sarah is right. My book which seemed perfect, is hopelessly flawed. I mumble incoherently in my car on the way to work and complain to my husband about how bad my book is. I sleep poorly and worry I'll never have a solution to my book's endless problems. This lasts a few days. And then I get down to work. At this point I realize just how brilliant Sarah is, how she can see my whole book in her head in a way that I can't. I praise her vision, and the way she cuts out all my verbal tics, the "sighs," "shrugs," "wells" and "ums," that litter my writing, like tiny crutches. I start to see how her vision is really my vision, but better.

When the manuscript becomes hopelessly marked up with changes and I think I can't improve it anymore, I send it back to Sarah. I know she'll send me another raft of comments for the next round of editing, but the second session is never as hard.

At this point in my editing I still haven't changed the title of my book, but I'm starting to come around to her suggestions.

The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook

This week in the in the mail I received The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook by  Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner. This might not be to everyone's reading taste, but if you need first hand information about Victorian households in India, this is a good place to start. In particular I wanted to know more about what Victorian Brits in India actually ate. This book has meal plans and recipes for everything from Brains au Gratin, to Creme Frite and Dal Poorie.
 

 

Flora Annie Steel

Coauthor Flora Annie Steel is unlike the more common images of the Victorian memsahib as a retiring, delicate flower. Instead Steel took on India with great energy. She married Henry William Steel, a member of the India Civil Service, and lived in India for twenty-two years, mainly in the Punjab. Not only did she learn the local languages, she urged educational reforms, was interested in Native women's lives, including their handicrafts and stories. She also worked informally as a medical practicioner and wrote many books about India including On The Face of the Waters, about the Indian Mutiny, and Tales of the Punjab, a collection of Punjabi folklore. 

 

Illustration from Mrs. Beeton's Guide

Lucky for anyone interested in the daily running of the Victorian woman in India's household, Steel also co-authored The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, a practicial guide advice for young women setting up a household in India. It includes details on how to handle servants, plan a menu, manage young children as well as general hints for the preservation of health. Who can resist gems like Steel and Gardiner's suggestion for women to get enough exercise: "A languid stroll from drawing-room to your carriage and back is not sufficient to keep your organism going." The book is like Mrs. Beeton's Guide for Household Management but specific to the sub-continent. 
 
Like any good primary source reserach material, the book offers more than just specific research details; it reflects the attitudes of the Empire, specifically of British women living in India. Although these attitudes often make the modern reader uncomfortable (the book includes a section on "managing native servants"), it is still fascinating research material. 

Re-reading

My friend Marg recently told me that she plans to make at least one third of the books she reads re-reads. She recently picked up Ian McEwan's Saturday, and was looking forward to going back to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. I thought this was a great idea and recently re-read Coetzee's The Age of Iron, which I adore. Other books I frequently re-read are: Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, Herman Hesse's Siddartha, Helen Humphrey's The Lost Garden, Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev, and AS Byatt's The Children's Hour. I'm planning a list of re-reads that I'm hoping to sneak in between the new books I'm also looking forward to.

With this in mind, last night I set myself the goal of trying to remember the name of a book that I'd like to re-read. This might seem like a fairly modest goal, but I'm avoiding editing a novel with what feels like irreparable problems. So instead of tackling my character's uneven mental health issues, I looked to recover a lost book. This turned out to be a fairly easy, despite being frustrated by finding the title previously. Laurie Colwin's Goodbye Without Leaving was  published in 1990. Colwin, an American author who died at only 48 from a heart attack, wrote for Gourmet magazine and published several cookbooks as well as other novels.

 

Goodbye Without Leaving tells the story of Geraldine, a bored graduate student who is invited to tour as the only white backup singer for Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes. She spends a year as a Shakette before going back to school, getting married, having kids and doing all the other adult things people do. My parents gave me the book when I was twenty-one and home from university recovering from the Hepatitis A I had picked up traveling in Morocco. I enjoyed the book, but mostly remember it because my parents and I had such radically different reactions to this light humorous read. I was horrified that Geraldine had given up her singing career to be a bored mother. I distinctly remember my mother replying, "You can't be a Shakette forever." I wondered, "Why the hell not?" Tina Turner was still performing, Madonna was still out there, the Stones were barely mid-way through their career. I had no interest in singing myself, but I had just had my first taste of travel (albeit with somewhat disastrous results) and had started to write seriously. The last thing I wanted to hear was about the importance of settling down to a financially beneficial career.

 

These days, like Colwin's Geraldine, I find myself solidly mired in mid-life responsibilities- jobs, kids, and house repairs. (Nothing says you're middle-aged like being excited over a new roof!) I'm curious to know how I'll feel re-reading Colwin's Goodbye Without Leaving. Books mean different things to us at different stages in our lives. When I was twenty-four I was sure Bruce Chatwin's Songlines was going to be a book that spoke to me my entire life. Now I'm pretty sure it's not. I think I'm closer to my mother's 'You can't be a Shakette forever' comment than I ever imagined, but I'm good with this. You can be a Shakette forever, but you can't be a Shakette (or whatever your art goal happens to be, in my case, an unemployed writer) and save for your kids' university education, go on ski vacations and afford a new roof- all things which are also important to me. Writing is an essential part of my life, but as one of my sons likes to remind me, he is much more important and interesting than any book I'm reading or writing. I must agree.

 

Transparent

A friend who read one of my  earlier blog posts about transgender novels recommended me Casey Plett’s excellent article about transgender fiction, The Rise of the Gender Novel in The Walrus.  Plett argues that transgender characters in contemporary fiction (such as Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab, Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy, and Kathleen Winter’s Annabel) are written like tortured heroes and lack the dynamics of full characters. Their transgender story takes over the novel at the risk of other elements. Plett clearly has issue with transgender stories written by cis-gender authors, and I get this. Can cis-gender people really understand the trans experience? I'm not sure. However, the books that I really loved from my original list of transgender reading were written by trans people: Ivan E Coyote and Rae Spoon’s Gender Failure and Kate Bornstein’s A Queer and Pleasant Danger.
 

So why am I thinking about this again? Well, a few years ago at a writing festival a student from the audience asked the panel I was hosting if any of the authors would write a transgender novel. The panel all agreed they felt ill-equipped to write a trans story, but I was intrigued. (My mind instantly went: Jewish trans person!) The student clearly had a desire to be represented in a book, and hadn’t yet had this experience. I started reading about the trans community with the thought or eventually writing a trans character.
 

All this was before Orange is the New Black and before Kaitlyn Jenner came out and before my own students started asking me questions about trans people. I’m hoping the trans community will fill the YA book world with diverse books about the trans experience the way they are filling the media world, and I can stick to things I know.     

In the mean time I’m become obsessed with the Amazon show Transparent. I don’t often binge-watch a series, but my brother recommended this show to me. He said, “You’re going to wish you wrote it.” And he’s right. Transparent is the stuff of my writing dreams: a show about a Jewish family delving into their queerness. Mort Pfefferman is the trans-parent who reveals himself to his children as Maura, a woman. Yet the show goes way beyond any YA coming-out tropes. All three adult Pfefferman children cope with their father becoming a mother (from Poppa to Moppa) differently, but it isn’t his queerness or gender

Jeffrey Tambour as Maura

transition they care about. The Pfeffermans are too selfish for that kind of questioning. Sarah Pfefferman discovers her father dressed as a woman while starting a lesbian affair in her father’s bedroom, and her own sexual journey will always be more important than her fathers. Similarly, the youngest Pfefferman, Allie, uses her father’s transition to continue her own sexual adventure where queerness isn’t an issue but a landscape to be explored. When Josh Pfefferman does mourn the loss of his father in the final episode of Season Two, (with a rescued duck floating in the bathtub behind him), his grief is so long in coming it feels fresh and unexpected.

 

Carrie Brownstein and Gaby Hoffman as Allie and Sid

Not only is Transgender beautifully written and filmed,  it portrays a Jewish family in a way I found irresistibly familiar and outrageously dysfunctional. These people are my people-they celebrate the same holidays, talk the way my relatives speak, intermarry the way my community does, and are shadowed by the Holocaust in a familiar way. At first I wasn’t sure about the Holocaust references, but I think the writers are saying something more interesting than the usual concentration camp history. Their linking of the suffering of transgender people by the Nazis with current transgender stories feels new and ususual. 

I can’t wait for Season Three. I'm hoping Angelica Houston will be in it, and Didi Conn (Frenchie from Grease) and Carrie Brownstein (from Sleater-Kinney and also Portlandia).  I hope Jeffrey Tambour as Maura will continue to be as compelling an actor and character, and I long for more scenes with Judith Light (from Who's the Boss) who plays the Pfefferman's mother, a character both meshugannah and familiar.

Finding The Narrow Point

November is National Novel Writing Month. Although I've never participated in the NaNoRiMo, I think about it every year, and it spurs on my writing in some way. NaNoRiMo, (short for National Novel Writing Month) flies in the face that it takes years to write in a novel. Instead, they believe a novel can be written in the thirty days of November. Valuing "enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline," NaNoRiMo isn't necessarily about quality writing, but about getting the deed done. Nowhere on the website does it say your novel has to be good, it just needs to get written. And really, sometimes when I'm working on a first draft, I'm just trying to get something, (anything!) down on paper.

 

 Although I won't be participated in NaNoRiMo this year-it sounds like a great way to develop carpal tunnel syndrome- I will be attempting to plunge deep into a novel I've been hovering around for all too long. (And perhaps I will be indulge in a little NaNoRiMo pep-talk reading. Who can resist a topic like, Five Steps to Building a Propulsive Story Cannon?) I think I've finally narrowed in on what the book is going to be about. Prior to this, the novel stretched out over 110 years in the life of one person. Really, you say, isn’t that impossible? Why, yes it is. I wanted the book to include Victorian factories, women travelers, rural childhoods, sister rivalry, fifty years of Indian history, World War 1 and 2, Indian Independence and separation, and British people staying on in India- just to name a few. When I envisioned the book, I saw not just stories, but lives scrolling ahead of me. I had so much rich research in my head (and computer), that I wanted to put it all in. Not only would this make a very big book, it would also be very thinly spread. I’m sure there are other writers who could write a rich book with such a great breadth, but I when I thought about it closely, I realized what I really knew about was Victorian women travelers and governesses.

 

Knowing deeply about one small part of the book was a very good thing. This helped me find what I call the Narrow Point. This is a small or pointed wedge that finally dives into the novel. Instead of traveling wide and thin, I now had a narrow groove to go deeply into my characters and their lives, and write a book that will be character driven, as opposed to a rollicking and-then-this-happened kind of book. (Those kids of books are great too, it’s just not what I wanted my book to be.)

Getting to this narrow point isn’t always easy, and sometimes I’m not sure how to get there. Mostly a great deal of thinking and mulling over occurs and just when I’m about to give up, I find I know how to start. Usually I find walking (or sometimes swimming or biking) helps too The past couple of summers I’ve found my narrow point by walking behind my cottage. Throughout the school year I sit at my desk and write on a morning schedule. During that time I don’t look at email or answer the phone, I just write. When summer comes my schedule falls apart. I travel, play with my kids and visit family in July. In August there are guests to hang out with and canoes, bicycles, swimming and yoga to distract me. I don't have a desk to work at, so I spend a lot of time walking up and down the hills behind my cottage and thinking about intractable writing-related problems. I talk to myself a lot on the old hill, running through all the novel's possible options. Should I start at the beginning of my character’s life? Should it begin with the death of the character’s protector? Is the book going to focus on her marriage, or what about the end of her marriage? Should I just start at the beginning and work my way through? What is the beginning story for this character? I re-read the hundreds of pages of notes I have and look through my research notes. Nothing is clear at first. Sometimes it takes days, other times months. And then I see where the story has to start, what the confines of the plot have to be, and a great sense of relief comes over me. Working within set limits and narrow areas of plot makes the writing come easier. Then I can can come up with a list of scenes to write, the kind of writing that works well on a set time frame at a desk during the winter months of writing concentration.

Mapping your Novel

My new YA book, Feast, is almost ready to go to my editor, Sarah. This is a good place to be! I’ve done the frantic early writing where my ideas feel fresh and new, and the long walks up and down the hill behind my cottage when I can’t envision how it will all fit together. I’m past the stage where I have to force myself to write scenes and new dialogue. I’m even past the stage where I’m reading the manuscript to eradicate unhelpful words like “really” “very” and “something.” The book feels complete, like it’s a story I’d be happy to show others. I’m sure Sarah will point out weaknesses I didn’t see, and I’ll have more work to do this winter, but for now I feel satisfied.

Novel Map for Feast

One of my final steps is to make sure all the various plot lines are developed logically. This involves a lot of jumping around in the text to find different scenes and read them sequentially. Most of the time my book feels bigger than my head and I can’t hold all the parts inside it and see if it progresses in a logical order. That’s when the writing program Scrivener is amazing. You can corkboard your scenes and then flip back to your outline easily. I used to do this on giant sheets of thin paper over my desk, with colour-coded scenes. I recently took down some of these posters, one for a book I won’t write, another for a long finished project. The wall is very blank now.

 

Somehow, my Scrivener scene list felt like not enough. When I merged my book into a Word document, I stopped updating my Scrivener Corkboard and was without a map to the book. I missed my giant wall posters. So, I decided to create one by hand for Feast. This was a great way to reacquaint me with a book I’ve taken a break from for the summer, and also allowed me to see where there were holes in my story development. And somehow, it was easier to have old-fashioned hand written notes to refer back to.

Bottle and Glass

I'm going to a book launch party for my friend, neighbor and fellow author, Morgan Wade tonight. Morgan has published in various journals and anthologies and tonight he'll be launching his second book, Bottle and Glass.  He's asked me to introduce him, which is a great honour.

I’ve already had the good fortune to read the meticulously researched and moving Bottle and Glass. The novel tells the story of two young English fishermen forced into service with the Royal Navy towards the end of the war of 1812. The two young men, stationed in Kingston, spend most of the novel trying to escape the military and return home. Many of the scenes in the novel take place in historic Kingston places, especially taverns. This  is because according to Morgan much of life in Upper Canada took place in inns and taverns. Apparently in 1812 there were a whopping 78 taverns in Kingston. The novel's title, Bottle and Glass is from one such notorious tavern, "Violin Bottle and Glass."

 

When I was reading the novel, my mind kept imagining an earlier Kingston. It made me think of Anne Fadiman’s essay from her collection Ex Libris, called You Are There. She describes the magical feeling of reading a book in the place it describes or is set in. For example, you go to Greece, you read Homer. In New York you read Salinger or Joseph O’Neil. When reading Morgan’s book, I had the sense of It Used To Be Like That Here. I could so clearly see the landscape I know, both as it was then, and it is now.

 

Not only does Morgan knows a few things about early Kingston, he also knows a lot pubs and drinks. I consider him my personal bar tender. He mixes a  mean Martini, he’s generous with his Scotch and he's always willing to make my personal drink of choice, a White Lady. He’s also a great neighbor and a wonderful friend.

 

Morgan's launch is tonight: Friday, September 25th, 9:30pm at the Queen's Inn, Kingston, ON.