Almost there ...

Plot map for my next book.

Among the many ways I torture myself (besides stringing real cranberries and popcorn for the Christmas tree each year): rereading passages from my finished books while I’m in the early stages of writing a new book.

It’s like that scene in the movie Crimes of the Heart, where the sisters regularly sneak peeks at their father’s medical text, Diseases of the Skin. They know it will horrify them but they Just. Can’t. Stop.

Now, I realize how that sounds, and no, I’m not saying my finished work is akin to leprosy. But my “unfinished” work sure is.

First drafts and early exploratory journal entries into new worlds and new characters are terrible to behold. Well, mine are, anyway. I flounder. I grasp. I struggle to understand: who are these people and what the hell are they trying to do? I write barely comprehensible fragments, or run-on-paragraphs that lead nowhere good. I use adverbs. Lots of adverbs. Stephen King would have a field day with my use of –ly.

Somehow, miraculously (well, it’s not really a miracle, it’s called REVISION) all that bad writing eventually rights itself into a story arc; visual scenes; dialogue which isn’t cringe-worthy. You shift the tectonic plates of your imaginary world and kill off characters left and right until you can focus on the small stuff. Tweaks. Like, Is that really the verb I want here? Should I use a pronoun or proper noun here? Should I change her ring tone … ?

Yesterday I wrapped up the almost-final draft of my next book (I say “almost final” because it still has to go to a copyeditor, who checks for typos, inconsistencies, the sort of nit-picky stuff that drives me crazy but can absolutely sink your book if you miss it so yay for copyeditors!) which means I’ve been living with The Small Stuff for a few weeks now.

Coincidently, my writer friend, Paula Bourque, asked via Facebook for other writers to share their late-stage revision tips, and a treasure trove of terrific suggestions poured in. A few I knew/already used, but several were brand new to me, and turned out to be super helpful. Here are a few of my favorites:

From Lynda Mullaly Hunt: Set a day aside and read the entire thing out loud. You hear things you don’t hear when reading silently. (Thanks, Lynda! I read myself hoarse.)

From Cynthia Lord: Change the font and print a copy. It will look different enough that your eye will read every word again … if it looks familiar your eyes sometimes read what you think it says, not exactly what it does. (This was a great idea, Cindy. I swapped Times New Roman for Arial and found all sorts of errors.)

From Sarah Albee: Do a ‘find/replace’ for words you suspect you use too much. (Wow. My characters frowned and shrugged way too often! Glad I checked.)

From Lynn Plourde: You can delete “that” most of the time. (THAT is so true, Lynn!)

From Megan Frazer Blakemore: Give yourself breaks and walk around, even if it’s just around your house. (I don’t think I did this enough, as my aching back will attest ….)

From Kate Messner: When I review copyedits, I take a blank piece of paper to cover up everything beneath the line I’m reading – helps me to slow down. (I will definitely do that when the dreaded copyedits come back!)

My own late-stage tip is to hunt down adverbs and the verb “to be,” replacing them as much as possible with vigorous, transitive verbs. Examples of writers who “do verbs” brilliantly: Anthony Doerr in All the Light We Cannot See and E. Annie Proulx in The Shipping News. I’m a big believer in verbs.

Okay, now: to follow Megan’s advice and get out of this chair.  No, better yet: vault from this chair!  (See? Didn’t that create a picture in your mind?)

In Praise of Verbs

I can name the author, book, chapter, page number and very sentence responsible for transforming me into an Ardent Believer in Verbs. We’re talking Saul-in-the-Blinding-Light-of-God epiphany here, and my writing has never been the same.

The book was The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. Chapter 32, “The Hairy Devil,” page 254.

Up to that point, ie. the preceding 253 pages, I had ridden the delightful waves of her buoyant, unpredictable prose without quite realizing its effect on me. I’d smile when I read her descriptions of a rainy wharf: “Rain sluiced over the upturned [boat] bottom, pattered on the stones. … A man leaning in a doorframe, hands draining into his pockets.” Or a scene inside the offices of the The Shipping News: “Car doors slammed outside, Billy Pretty’s voice seesawed. Nutbeam snapped up alertly.”

Proulx’s rain didn’t fall: it sluiced and pattered. Hands weren’t thrust into pockets: they drained. Voices didn’t get louder and softer: they seesawed.

Assertively and efficiently, the author employed verbs not only to tell me what her characters were doing, but also how things looked and how they sounded. She was also telling me a little about how her characters felt: a man whose hands are draining into his pockets is in a different state of mind from a man whose hands are balled into fists and jammed into his pockets.

Then, at page 254, one of the main characters (Tert Card) approached a deli platter, and my writing life changed:

“He plucked at the plastic wrap, seized a handful of ham, and shoved it into his mouth.”

I stopped. I reread. I counted: plucked, seized, shoved. In three verbs and one line, Proulx told me all about Tert Card’s state of mind and foreshadowed the brutish events to follow. No adjectives, no physical descriptions, no annoying adverbs. Just simple, unequivocal language.

Maybe if I had chanced on the sentence out of context I wouldn’t have thought much of it. But the whole novel had been working on me for 253 pages, and finally, with that single sentence, something clicked.

Verbs rule. Verbs are the bomb. Verbs have got it goin’ on.

Granted, The Shipping News has some pretty rad adjectives, too, and more than 300 pages of take-your-breath-away sentences. One writer friend of mine asserts that the final line in this novel is one of the best final lines of all time … more on that later … but for a Writer Apprentice like me, who reads not only for joy but also to improve my craft, this book taught me an important lesson.

My words don’t approach the richness of Annie Proulx’s language, but I’ve got a few ideas for strengthening my verbs. First, I whip out a red pen, and hunt down every “to be” verb on a page. Any time is, was, are or were occurs, I ask myself “What’s the action here? Can I substitute a better verb which gives the reader more information and enhances the scene without piling on adjectives? Sometimes the answer is no: to be just simply must … be. Other times a wonderful verb will flex its muscles and step into the sentence. Amazingly, the sentence sings.

So, I’m a believer. Better yet: I believe. Drinking that Verb Kool Aid and working toward better and better writing.

Oh, and about that final line? The question circulated on Facebook not long ago, and folks voted for their favorite all-time-best-last-novel-line. I vacillated between the last line in The Great Gatsby and the last line in James Joyce’s short story The Dead. But then my friend reminded me of the final line in The Shipping News and despite the presence of the “to be” verb I had to agree:

“And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”