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Salem Willamette Writers

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At the Salem Willamette Writer’s monthly meeting I’ll be presenting my workshop Research and Empathy: Writing Across Cultures.

The vast majority of published fiction writers in the US are white, yet readers come in different shades and colors. This is especially notable in the children’s market where more than 90% of writers are white and more than 50% of readers are children of color. The long term answer is to mentor a generation of writers of color, but the short term answer is to encourage all writers to include characters from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds.

In this hands-on workshop I’ll will cover all aspects of researching a story outside your own cultural experience and will explain how to use our own experience to gain insight into another culture.

Revision from the orchard tenders point of view

I have the wonderful luck to live in a historic home in Portland, Oregon. It’s the best preserved example of a gothic farmhouse in the area, and it has big yard which contains historic fruit trees. We have cherries, walnuts, apples, peaches, plums, and pears. I love working with trees that are probably more than 100 years old and I love having fresh fruit for pies and jams for my family. But to be honest, fruit trees are a lot of work.

aaadownloads 001When I’m taking a writing break in the summer I’ll often climb down from my treehouse and get out the old orchard ladder and spend some time on my back yard orchard. Because I don’t spray the fruit, I lose a substantial amount of the harvest to insect or disease damage. The sooner I get those blighted or undersized fruits off the tree the better. And then comes the harder task. I need to pick perfectly good fruit before it’s ripe and throw it away.

I know. My inner skin-flint cringes at the waste. But the truth is a tree will put out more fruit than it can ripen in a season. So I will go along the branches looking for clusters of 3 or more peaches, pears or apples and remove one or two from the cluster so that the remaining fruits get enough light and water and energy from the tree to ripen fully.Unknown   I hate to do it but when I’ve neglected this task I’ve come away with a crop of apples or pears that never fully ripens and the entire harvest is worthless.

This year I learned an even harder lesson. I only have 2 peach trees. It’s a challenge to grow peaches in Oregon’s cool climate, so some years I get no peaches at all or less than a dozen. But for some reason this year I got a bumper crop. I love peach pie. Lavender peach jam is a big favorite with my whole family. So I didn’t thin the peaches as aggressively as I should and my peach tree broke under the weight of the crop. The whole tree fell over–a complete loss.

imagesAnd what does this have to do with writing? I’ve learned the hard way that just because a section of my story is good and fun and beautiful doesn’t mean it belongs in the book.  My first pass in revising is of course like the first pass in orchard tending–get rid of the rotten. Cut what’s not working. I might need the help of my critique group or editor to recognize what’s not working, but once located it’s not hard to ditch spoiled fruit or lackluster prose. The tricky part is cutting what is beautiful and without fault in the service of the larger story.

Here’s an example from a story I’m still working on. It had two characters who were too strong to be in the same book. Both characters had and interesting arc and strong emotional pull. The voice of my main character at several points was overwhelmed by this second character. The result was that the book as a whole didn’t work. It was a fallen tree of a story and I didn’t know how to fix it. I pouted about this for a while. But I came to see that there was no way both of those characters would ripen on the same tree. And here is where writing books is better than tending an orchard. I wrote two books–started over with different settings and adjusted premises. I let each character develop without having to compete for reader loyalty in the same book. I’m still in the thick of working out these two stories but with a little luck and a lot of hard work, I hope to have two viable fully-ripened stories instead of one.

 

The Death of Copyediting

I’ve heard about the death of copy editing many times, both from authors and librarians, lamenting the lack of time for copy edits and the multiplicity of errors in books. I can only speak from my own books at Random House, but in my experience copy editing is alive and well—distressingly so.

This might not be everyone’s experience. Perhaps it’s just my own manuscripts that go out emblazoned with the words Not Written By An English Major upon their foreheads. My most recent manuscript was copy edited by no less than three people—each with her own color of pencil. As I read through it was clear to me that Violet and Indigo did not like each other very much, but Green, obviously the middle child of the group, was there to say, “Come on, girls. Can’t we get along? It’s just a hyphen!”

I was left with my highly-embarrassed Scarlet pencil to follow after my much wiser sisters of syntax who marked no less than a dozen items on every single page of a manuscript that ran longer than 160 pages. It’s nearly 2,000 copy edit marks!

My job for and entire week was to think about every single one of those marks and make a decision. Often it was the fairly easy. “Duh, of course the comma goes there. Why didn’t I notice that ages ago?”

Although to be honest, sometimes it’s more like, “Fine, what ever you say! Who cares if concertmaster is one word or two?”

And I confess that from time to time it’s even, “Seriously? There’s a rule about that? Dang! I should have been paying attention in English.”  Lucky for me Violet, Indigo, and Green were paying attention. In fact, they were the honors students, I’m sure of it.

Every now and then I have to say, “Now look, I know your suggestion is technically superior in every way but no kid would say or think this. Ever. Not in any century or any other planet. Sorry.” For reasons I do not begin to understand this is abbreviated STET.

I can see why copy edits get neglected. It’s difficult, often tedious work, it requires not just technical excellence from the copy editor, but also artistic sensibility, and it is frequently accomplished on a tight deadline.

And so, dear Violet, Indigo and Green, Thank you for your diligence. Thank you for your depth of knowledge in English, and for this book, German, French, Russian and (no kidding) Estonian. I am completely dazzled that you found a speaker of Estonian! Go Violet! Thank you for your probing questions, your willingness to hunt up accurate maps and even do the math on rates of exchange. I’ll never make fun of an English major again! Most of all thank you for respecting my reader enough to help me make Second Fiddle the best book it can be.