Take every sentence or longer passage and read it aloud well, lovingly, but looking for how to improve it. Keep fiddling with it till it feels right in the mouth and sounds right in the ear. In short, don’t use any conceptual knowledge about what makes for good sentences. Use only the mouth and the ear to guide you.

Strong writers, he concluded, harbor no prejudice against spoken language; on the contrary— they are able to hear and feel (in the mouth) the frequent superiority of spoken discourse over written.

Application:  For me, this rang true and played well with several conversations I have been having with myself and others. I am working with a woman on her memoir, and we are maintaining much of her African-American urban patterns and vernacular. It is her story, her life, and while my intern and I were careful to “clean up” anything that might be embarrassing to her on a “correctness” level, it is important to the integrity of her story not to clean it up too much.  Also, I recently began reading Neil Young’s autobiography, which I obtained from a friend (not in the business) who insisted that the musician had no editor.  Well, that speaks volumes for whomever over there at Penguin’s Blue Rider Press had that task, (I know it was someone!) which, based on the beautifully circular, occasionally stream of consciousness design of this work, was extremely complicated.  That Young’s voice- or what the reader could believe was his voice- was maintained throughout, is a thing of beauty.

Thursday night was the VIDA prom at Daisy Buchanan’s on Newbury Street. If you don’t know VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, you should. Cheryl Strayed (and others) read, but the audio was terrible at the bar and I couldn’t hear a thing.

On Day 2, I attended Purpose and Practical in Historical Writing at 9 am, with Zachary Lazar, Emily Barton, Peter Ho Davies, and others. This was a wonderful panel and I learned a ton, not the least of which is that I must read Sway, Lazar’s 2008 Little Brown release. Writing historical fiction is all about creative acts of imaginative empathy, the panelists emphasized. As writers, we must find a personal route into the character, make them feel more available, and like all writing, it is about occupying the other. So how true to the historical record need you be? True enough so as not to remove the reader from the fictional dream. The verifiable facts combined with the imagination make the character come to life for a reader. If a reader knows the rules you’ve created, then you can play fast and loose with the facts.

Day 2, at 1:30 I found myself at Editors as Readers as Writers~ a different kind of reading presented by Fourth Genre, an uber cool non-fiction magazine. The magazine’s editors read their own written responses to the pieces they had acquired for the magazine. It was here that I heard and fell in love with “the taco-Tuesday guy,” Michigan writer Richard Hackler. His voice and pacing and of course the attention to language, the effective way he used repetition… very impressive. I did not flinch paying the special AWP rate of $18 for the fall 2012 issue that contains his piece “Come with me to Taco Tuesday.” I hope I’ll be seeing more of his work. If non-fiction is his bag, perhaps he’ll submit to Under the Gum Tree.

The last panel I attended on this second day was Write Short, Think Long: Exploring the Craft of Writing Flash Nonfiction: a panel with Brevity’s Dinty W. Moore, the wonderful Sue Silverman (who I first heard at AWP Denver 2010), Judith Kitchen, who literally wrote the books on flash non-fiction, and others. It was inspired, at least in part, by the release of Rose Metal Press’ new release, edited by Moore, The Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction. What does digression, so important to a longer piece, look like in a piece that doesn’t go much longer than 750 words? There must be associative connections, a double exposure in each sentence— the voice of innocence and the voice of experience compressed. The images must convey the totality of experience.  I enjoyed the discussion of the second person in a flash non-fiction piece: It is a disguised I, also an epistolary form, a way of addressing the reader, and this is what I found new and interesting— a way to avoid sounding like you’re delivering a eulogy of the subject.

At happy hour, I cruised over to Bukowski’s for a Belgian beer. The beer hit the spot and seemed an appropriate venue but, honestly, I don’t think the man would be caught dead at the place. Dinner at the Trident Book Store and Cafe… what’s not to like? Well, the falafel (it was rather like a hockey puck), but it’s a cool indie bookstore (the breakfast was better).

Creative Nonfiction Editors Explain Logistical Challenges, at 9 am the final morning, helped to remind me that an editor is a mediator who helps the writer put his or her best foot forward. The reason a non-fiction editor includes fact checking as part of a copy edit is because they want both the writer and the magazine not to look foolish. You don’t want to jolt the reader out of the experience.

In Changing the Sheets: How Best to Get Sex on the Page, four writers read sex scenes from their books. They were very different from each other, and after a Bloody Mary lunch, extremely entertaining. How often is a sex scene really about sex? When does vulgar make sense? All of these questions were raised, and no clear answer was ever given, as it seemed the panelists intended to have us answer them for ourselves. I most enjoyed the “panel’s designated prude,” Chris Bachelder.  His theory was that guilt and shame are the existential bits of sex, and the aim should be to defamiliarize the action, to complicate it. In literary fiction, there has to be a balance between psychology and anatomy so that it isn’t sentimentalism and it isn’t porn. The stifled want is way better than the sex in a literary work, they suggested. A takeaway message: A sex scene must always advance a plot. And panels are better after a Bloody Mary.

Shadow Show: The Influence of Ray Bradbury, during the last session of the final day, was a panel inspired by a new anthology of the same name produced by panelists Sam Weller and Mort Castle. Alice Hoffman was also on this panel, and she delivered some lovely one-liners, including “Stories are really the only thing that matter,” and the recognition that “stories can save readers.” The panelists reflected on how Bradbury influenced them and other writers and how he fought against category and crossed genre. He “refused to be bound by the sales department.” He is credited for telling other writers: your first audience should be you. My take away:

Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.

Beautiful.

I took this shot at the AWP booth with friends Janna Marlies Maron (writer of Bold is Beautiful, and publisher of Under the Gum Tree) and Peter Grandbois (author of Nahoonkara, winner of the Gold Medal in literary fiction in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards for 2011, and the forthcoming short story collection Domestic Disturbances –Subito Press 2013).

Today’s the last day of the conference, and I feel like there’s still so much to do! I never got my hug from Stephen Elliott over at the Rumpus booth, GOT MY HUG-at the top of the escalator! Thanks Stephen (hugs ARE analog) I did enjoy a chat with the Rumpus poetry editor, who was hawking Write Like a motherfucker mugs. I met up with Red Hen Press author, Kelly Davio, then enjoyed a chat with a novelist I worked with over at AHLM in 2009. I picked up my candy cigarettes from Smokelong Quarterly where they had spent an unbelievable amount of time cutting and pasting (in the old school sense) stories onto candy boxes! That’s a labor of love.

Just had a Bloody Mary with Craig Bueltell…

It’s fun, if a bit overwhelming. And I don’t want this to turn into some kind of namedropping exercise.

I am taking notes and will post relevant details of the panels after I’ve had time to decompress.

It’s damn hard to decide! Writing craft with Peter Elbow, writing craft with Debra di Blasi, writing craft with Carole Maso? Or publishing with JA Tyler? A reading from Georgia Review or A Capella Zoo?  Incredible variety. Do I have to pick an iteration of myself? An identity for the duration in order not to feel schizophrenic?

Too bad NM is not on the List of Exhibitors.  I’d represent.

 Write your next novel. With experience comes …well, experience. Oh, and wisdom.

Did you know that “debut” fiction that we see in the catalogues of the big publishers are rarely the first novel that writer completed? The “debut” success stories in the New York Times often have two or three unpublished novels under their belts. It wasn’t until after they worked out some of the kinks that were hard to put a finger on in their first manuscripts, some of the issues of craft that kept the reader at bay, whether it was working through those uncomfortable autobiographical elements that so often rear their heads in first fiction, handling them so they could be looked at directly or ignored completely, that their work really began to shine. Their experience made them better writers. So much so that sometimes these writers, looking back, don’t even consider their early attempts to ever have been finished.

“Quantity produces quality.” ~Ray Bradbury

Case in point: Anthony Marra’s debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, being released in April 2013 by Hogarth, is not his first completed novel. His first novel, he told me in an interview last year, was about Ireland. But he hardly recognizes that as something he even finished. He had another novel in there too. Also he completed a collection of short stories (which has also been picked up by Hogarth and will be released next year). He has been working full time at learning the craft of writing, and it has paid off for him in a relationship with a traditional publisher.

Nathan Bransford‘s 2011 blog: The case for putting the manuscript in the drawer. He writes: ”The best thing about self-publishing is that no one has to put a manuscript in the drawer because they couldn’t find a a publisher. The worst thing about self-publishing is that no one has to put a manuscript in the drawer because they couldn’t find a publisher.”

#1 mistake, according to Kristen Lamb: Publishing before we’re ready.  She ends on this note: ”Sometimes there are reasons we are being rejected and we need to take a hard look and be honest. Self-publishing is suffering a stigma from too many writers publishing before they are ready. If you really want to self-publish, I am here to support you and cheer you all the way, but remember, we have to write better than the traditional authors.”  I love Kristen. She is very wise. And funny.

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self… is the test of their power.” ~Toni Morrison

Need another reason to wait until you finish another book before you rush to self publishing? Say you really do have the perfect book already and you self-publish it and you do all the work to self-publish right and you get readers who love your book. It would behoove you to have another book waiting in the queue for them to buy. Readers are extremely brand loyal. This is why series books sell so well. (Though I am not suggesting you should write a series!) If there is time between your first and second book, you will have to find those readers all over again to remind them who you are. Besides the fact that this just makes so much sense when it’s said out loud, this advice is also given by Kristen Lamb in her blog.

So, congratulations on finishing your first novel! If you’ve worked with me or another editor to locate and deal with weak spots, you’ve got an advantage in the market. If your goal is traditional publishing, and if you’re convinced it is the next great American novel, write a query, do a targeted pitch to agents, keep building your relationships with writers and readers, and start to work on your next book.

In a year, you’ll have a lot more to work with than if you spend the next year marketing the hell out of your only book in the self-published marketplace.

]]> http://www.twosongbirdspress.com/2013/02/what-to-do-when-youve-finished-your-revisions/feed/ 0 http://www.twosongbirdspress.com/2013/01/have-you-writers-seen-this-short-fiction-contest/ http://www.twosongbirdspress.com/2013/01/have-you-writers-seen-this-short-fiction-contest/#comments Thu, 31 Jan 2013 02:57:33 +0000 queenofbirdpress http://www.twosongbirdspress.com/?p=1349 Continue reading →]]> I get The Kenyon Review on my Kindle and think it’s a really cool lit mag. This is a group of folks I’m hoping to connect with at AWP in Boston because they’re doing some innovative and inspiring things, like sending Weekend Reads so I can re-read stories they’ve sent me before or read ‘em for the first time if I never got to ‘em. They have beautiful covers and photographs, not unlike Under the Gum Tree, but they have fiction and poetry too. And they have stories read out loud, a lot of them, on KR Online. And the magazine has seventy four years of storied existence. Ha.

For you readers out there, you should grab an issue and read it. For you writers out there, you should grab a copy, read it, then consider submitting a story to this contest. 

One assignment from my first master’s-level creative writing course with him required us to share our favorite short story by a published author. Each day, one of us would bring in one of these stories and we would critique it; we’d workshop it like we were concurrently doing with each others’ stories, but of course we had the knowledge that these stories were published stories that were loved by at least one of our colleagues in the class and likely a multitude of other readers in the world.

When it came time to share the story I had chosen, by a little known writer published only posthumously- Mary Ladd Gavell’s “The Rotifer”- a short story that had been influential in my deciding to enter graduate school for creative writing, I became acutely aware of all of the adverbs throughout, and I got scared for my writer and scared for myself. Rice rails against adverbs, can rant about their overuse for hours, replete with flying saliva. But instead of sharp criticism, I remember him asking me: “How do these adverbs work for this author, this voice, this piece?” And he said it kindly and invited us all to explore what was working so well. I left that class not with any shame about my taste or my lack of intellect or lack of sophistication but with a better understanding of critique and audience and purpose.

This exercise created new ways of reading and responding to literature. It enabled us to see “the rules” and how and when a writer successfully strays from them; to resist dogma and snobbery when evaluating a manuscript. This, of course, has been a foundation for me in my work with Narrative Magazine and Under the Gum Tree, and with my clients.

November 1st saw the release of The Addict Among Us, my second book as a developmental editor with prescription drug abuse activist Bradley V. DeHaven. In this picture to your left, the completed proof sits upon some of the hardcopy work I did, as we took the manuscript from 100,000 words of stream of consciousness writing and copied/pasted emails to an organized self-help book about how to prevent, detect, treat, and live with opioid (or any) drug addiction. This is another excellent book on the subject by Brad, who has been on the go spreading the word about how this epidemic sneaks up on the most unsuspecting of families, and of course, spreading the word about his book as well.

The Under the Gum Tree editorial staff selected the next group of pieces for Issue 6 from a nice batch of submissions. The mag is getting designed as we speak and will be on the newsstands in the first weeks of the new year.

During November, I also began a substantive edit on a 600-page mainstream fiction manuscript with an author I began working with in November of last year. At that time, I did an evaluation and critique on an earlier draft, which he took to heart and spent nearly the next year revising. I really enjoy seeing a writer develop his or her craft, being receptive to feedback about plot and character, point of view, and the finer points of language. And I enjoy seeing the result of hard work on the page. While this writer was planning on going directly to self-publishing, I am going to encourage him to seek a traditional publisher because I think the manuscript could attract interest in the current market and he doesn’t really seem that interested in becoming a publisher/marketing professional.

Speaking of this, I have two other clients heading on a traditional publishing path. Of course, I’ve advised them to stop querying agents now, because agents like to have a holiday too, you know. But these writers have had some promising attention and I have high hopes for them.

Meanwhile, three of my former clients have successfully self-published their novels in the last few months, and my friend and mentor Andrea Hurst has done so as well. There are many paths to publication, and everyone has to do what feels right to them. I don’t want to spend time here discussing the choice between traditional and self-pub, as there are so many excellent bloggers out there doing it for us. Let me just say I believe there are very good reasons to pursue either one, depending on one’s goals and resources. The debate is, frankly, getting pretty stale. Just do what you’ve got to do.

I guess I feel the same way about NaNoWriMo. For some people, attempting to meet a writing goal with 300,000 other people is the way to go. Just the motivation they need. For others, not so much.

Panneton interviewed about fifty people, many of whose engaging stories appear in this book. I attended her book release earlier in the year at Time Tested Books, and enjoyed being introduced to several of the people she interviewed and enjoyed hearing their stories read aloud. Check it out!