Shut Up & Write!

by Judy Bridges

  Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet, lived through the Russian Revolution, the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and Stalin’s terror. Her first husband was executed by firing squad, her third died in a prison camp. When her son was jailed, she stood with other mothers outside Leningrad’s stone prison daily for seventeen months. Anna wrote a poem about it titled Requiem that became a popular epic. After that, she was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, her apartment was bugged, and the KGB kept watch on her friends and activities. Her work was banned. She wrote most of her poems while sitting on a window ledge. Her friends memorized them, and then she burned the poems in an ashtray.

  I think about Anna when “I can’t.” And I reread an article that appeared in a January 1996 issue of the Chicago Tribune about a guy named Paul Adams.

  For eight hours every day, Paul Timothy Adams slumps in his wheelchair before a computer screen at the Manor Care Nursing Home. A bright blue jawbreaker-sized ball rests under his lower lip, on his chin bone. The ball acts as Adams’ mouse and connects to a handle, leading to a stand with a cable running to his laptop computer.

  Adams was born with cerebral palsy. He was forty-three when the article was published. He had one book published, another under consideration, and another in the works.

  Still want to complain because your computer crashed? Or because you’re just too depressed to write?

  My junior year in high school, Sister Mary Grace gave me a staff position on St. Clara Academy’s award-winning journal, the Sinsinawan. Shortly after that, my little brother died from a congenital heart problem. I was devastated. When it was time to turn in my pages, all I had was a bunch of scrambled excuses—family problems, too much homework, I tried, but . . .

  SMG stood staring down at me (she was at least a foot taller) and said that if I couldn’t turn my work in on time, there was no point in having me on the staff.

  I remember trying to glare at her hard enough to make her crumble.

  Today I think the situation might be handled differently, that I might be given another chance. As it was, I learned a hard and lasting lesson: you do the job or you’re out. I look at it as my Yoda moment. “Do or do not. There is no ‘try.’”

  When it comes to writing—as in so many other things—you either do it or you don’t. The publisher can’t print “trying.” It doesn’t matter whether your life is going right or wrong, whether you have the right kind of support or not. You own the pencil. You can choose to use it or not.

  “Do or do not. There is no try.”

  When You Put It All Together

  Carol Wobig kept her mouth shut, first at home, where her sister did most of the talking, then in the convent, where silence wasn’t mandatory although it was preferred, then in a pizza factory, where no one expected you to say much anyway. Throughout most of her adult years, Carol spread red sauce by day and wrote in her journal at night. The nearest she got to being rowdy was driving with two girlfriends to a new home in California.

  Back in Wisconsin, in her fifties, she thought about her writing and decided it was time to take it seriously. She signed up for a writing workshop and was beset by the normal nervous worries: “What if they make me talk? What if I have to read my stuff?” They did, and she did, and nobody died. Thus began a whole new career for Carol.

  You met her in earlier pages, when she fell down the stairs and her friends from the writing workshop were there to help her and to keep her going on the work she loved. One thing she missed, though, even after several of her stories were published, was her family’s acknowledgment that what she was doing was pretty special. That changed when her workshop pals encouraged her to combine three monologues and submit them to a one-act play festival sponsored by Village Playhouse of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. When she won a place in the festival, her family came to see the production. She sat quietly, watching the stage. When the applause died down, her ninety-three-year-old dad turned to her and said, “I never knew you could do that.”

  Carol staked her claim, surrounded herself with support, focused on the positive, and “did it anyway.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SPIT-AND-POLISH

  No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

  —H. G. Wells, novelist

  Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God dammit, I split it so it will stay split?

  —Raymond Chandler, novelist

  Now that you’ve written something wonderful and nursed it through critiques and a dozen rewrites, it’s time to do the final edits. This is the spit-and-polish phase, when you go through the manuscript with the proverbial fine-toothed comb to make sure you have every i dotted and t crossed. Readers may forgive you for failing to describe the state of Connecticut, but they will not forgive you for spelling it wrong.

  “What?” you say. “I wrote it. I did all the hard work. Now you want me to do the editing, too?”

  Yes. That’s exactly what I want you to do, and that’s exactly what every agent, publisher, and contest judge wants as well. In an ideal world, you would send your “almost clean” novel to an agent, who would present it to a publisher, who would make you an offer you couldn’t refuse and, after the deal was sealed, assign an editor who would fix it so no errors saw the light of day. In the real world, it’s your job to see that the editing is done, and done well, before you send any type of manuscript anywhere.

  I learned the importance of careful editing when an agent taught a workshop at my studio. He demonstrated the way he sorts through hard copy submissions. In Pass One, he slits the envelope, draws the query or proposal pages halfway out and scans what is written on that first half page. If he sees typos or spelling or grammatical errors, regardless of the caliber of the writing, he slides the pages back into the envelope and drops it on the reject pile. Later an assistant will return the proposal to the writer, along with a nicely worded rejection. When the writers in our workshop gasped, the agent explained that he sees mistakes as a signal that “this writer doesn’t care enough.” To him, errors mean the writer might also be careless with facts or rewrites or critical deadlines. The agent has X amount of hours in the day to do his job, and he’s not going to waste them on a writer who doesn’t care enough to get it right.

  Tough, huh? But true in almost all fields of writing. The editor of the online journal doesn’t have much time, either. And no one likes using his precious minutes to fix another’s mistakes.

  Should You Do the Editing or Get Help?

  The answer to this is fairly simple. If you are weak in any area of the editing process, get help. If you are very good at it, you can do almost all of it yourself, but I’d still have another excellent editor make the last pass.

  I am not a great editor. I can spot the developmental issues—the relationship that needs depth or the point of view that’s dancing—but rules about commas and split infinitives elude me. I need help.

  My first line of defense is my husband. He’s one of the few people I know who can actually diagram a sentence. It’s also an advantage that I know him well enough to know when his heart is not in the job. At those times, I beg friends for help. Sometimes payment is required, perhaps lunch or help with their writing project, or even cold hard cash. Whatever, it’s worth it.

  The next step is to hire professional help. Professional editors work at several levels, from the early stages when you need help thinking through the concept, through development of the text, and on to the final line edits. Chris Roerden, an independent editor and the author of Don’t Murder Your Mystery and Don’t Sabotage Your Submission, says, “Everyone, even the professional editor, turns out clearer, more effective writing if someone else test-drives the draft, that is, if others review it before it is printed, posted on a blog, or otherwise submitted for publication.”

  The Part You D
o Yourself

  Whether you are editing a letter to the editor or your magnum opus, there are logical steps in the process. I recommend that you go through the manuscript five times, each time focusing on a specific area. It’s best to complete each step, following it all the way through the manuscript, before you go on to the next. This is like re-keying rather than a cut-and-paste revision—it sounds like it will take longer, but it actually takes less time because you do a better job of it.

  Before you begin, let the manuscript rest for a while—a few days or weeks or longer—so you can look at it with fresh eyes.

  Pass One: Read Through

  Pretend you are a stranger reading the manuscript for the first time. Are the names and places consistent? Are the scenes and events in the right order? Does everything make sense?

  Make notes in the margins near sections you think need help. Don’t stop to fix them now. Read it all the way through and then go back to do the fixing. You may have to let the manuscript rest and retrace this step a few times so you know you have the words in the right order before you go on.

  Pass Two: Grammar

  This time, ignore everything else and just pay attention to the grammar. If something troubles you, make a mark in the margin and keep going. When you finish reading, go back and make the corrections.

  Pass Three: Spelling

  Follow the same procedure with spelling. Read, circle questionable words, go back later to check and correct the spelling. One hazard with spelling is that we often believe the wrong word is the right word (affect and effect) so we don’t see our mistakes. Watch for tricky items, such as using “compliment” when it should be “complement.” If you question the usage, you can look it up in a style guide. For this purpose, I use the Associated Press Stylebook because it is easy to use and light enough to carry around. You can also use other style guides, or go online, or seek help from the friend who won the all-city spelling bee. (In a few paragraphs I’ll talk about other style guides you might use.)

  For prefixes and suffixes, I find a word book, the kind with thousands of spellings, to be more helpful than a dictionary.

  And sometimes I do an online search, typing in the wrong spelling to see what comes back with the question: “Did you mean . . . ?” Yes, that’s what I meant!

  Pass Four: Punctuation

  Definitely use a style guide for punctuation. Different guides have different rules. Use the one that’s appropriate for your publisher. There is a list at the end of this chapter.

  Pass Five: Outside Reader

  Ask someone who has never seen the manuscript—one who does not know your message/theme/agenda—to read it through. See if this someone understands what you have written or catches any errors you missed. Many errors slip in at the last minute, when you make a correction that changes something else . . . and that something else is now so embarrassing you could die.

  When fax machines were still popular, I prepped a flyer about a business writing class I was teaching. I put a fake sticky note on the front that said, “Do you know anyone who can use this?” A friend volunteered to design it on his computer and send it out overnight. When I walked into my office the next morning, there were several faxes in my machine. The top one was a copy of my flyer. The fake sticky note showed clearly, but instead of saying, “Do you know anyone who can use this?” it said, “Do you know anyone who can us this?” “Us” was circled, and alongside of it, there was the answer, printed in large black letters: “Yes. You!”

  The fax had gone out to six hundred human resource directors.

  Even if I had seen the flyer when it was ready to go, I might have missed the error. Obviously my friend missed it. A stranger, anyone who was unfamiliar with our project, would have caught it in an instant. And, oh, how I wished someone had.

  Style Guides

  My list of “books you must have” is short. If you are like most writers, you already have a houseful. But if you don’t have a style guide, get one. You can supplement and update information by looking online, but there’s nothing quite like turning the pages of a style guide to remind you that you still have a lot to learn.

  When it comes to grammar and spelling and punctuation, hardly anyone knows it all. Lay/Lie? Who/Whom? Does the comma go inside or outside of the quotation mark? When is a person’s title capped? Is a book title still underlined? Are the rules the same in print as online? If you do not know the answers to all of these questions, forgive yourself—I know only three people in the universe who do and they are professional editors. For the rest of us, it is far better to own, and use, a style guide.

  There are differences among the styles, including protocol for citation, so it is important to pick the guide that’s appropriate for your field.

  The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law (AP) is standard in the newspaper and magazine industries, and often used in advertising, marketing, and public relations. It is updated frequently and favored by many who attended journalism school because of the easy A-Z format and small size—this one fits in your backpack. It’s perfect company at the bus stop, where you can flip through pages and answer questions you didn’t know you had, such as whether or not you can abbreviate Governor, as in Gov. (Yes, with a capital G, if you use it before the name. No, if you use it after the name.)

  One hazard with using AP style is that some rules differ from those in guides used for other publishing venues. For instance, the AP recommendation on commas is to use them to separate items but not before a conjunction, as in “We came, we saw and we conquered.” In contrast, The Chicago Manual of Style strongly recommends placing a comma before a conjunction, as in “We came, we saw, and we conquered.”

  The Chicago Manual of Style is the gold standard for most non-journalistic writing. Published in hard cover by University of Chicago Press, Chicago is the fat, heavy, comprehensive bible used by nearly all book publishers and some public relations and business communicators. It is updated less often than AP—approximately every ten years—but that lack is more than made up for by an excellent website. Chicago also emails periodic Q&A updates you can use to sharpen your editing skills. I get lost in this guide and hate carrying it around, but I have to admit it’s the one I really should be using almost all of the time.

  The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) is commonly used for social sciences and other academic publications; however, many universities and academic organizations have other preferences or print their own guides.

  In the MLA Style Manual, MLA stands for Modern Language Association. It is used by scholars, professors, graduate students, and other writers of scholarly books and articles, especially in the humanities such as English and other modern languages and literatures. It is also referred to as the MLA Handbook and the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing.

  The American Medical Association Manual of Style (AMA) is a guide for medical publications. Oxford University Press and JAMA Archives (Journal of the American Medical Association) sponsor an online version of the manual.

  The Elements of Style simply must be mentioned, although it is not as comprehensive as the other guides. This is the tiny book you met in school and possibly still love and carry around with you. Otherwise known as “Strunk & White,” for its authors William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, it was first published in 1918; revised editions have been released several times since then. My favorite version, The Elements of Style Illustrated, was designed and illustrated by Maira Kalman and published in 2005. Imagine, a grammar book with pictures. You gotta love it.

  Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age is a guide to online usage. This pocket-sized manual deals with how you talk about cyberspace: is it E-mail or email, Internet or internet?

  The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World covers the basics of grammar and punctuation as well as topics with a web-specific focus. It includes word lists (and th
e suggestion that you make up a word list of your own) plus information about search engine optimization, user interface text, and eye tracking so you can shape your text for the web. The Yahoo! Style Guide is available in print and online.

  For Your Reading Pleasure

  A full citation for each of these style guides is included in the References section.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  GETTING PUBLISHED

  It’s a New Day

  After many seasons of study and contemplation (sitting lotus on my mountain of rejection slips), after years of talking to and dealing with scores of editors (and being an editor myself) I have discovered something momentous—nothing less, ladies and gentlemen, than the secret to getting published.

  Are you ready?

  Here it is: write something good.

  That’s it. Simple as that. Good writing. That’s all an editor wants. And the fact that every editor is going to define the simple phrase in a different way is not a problem, not really. If you’re making good writing—fresh, important, well-made, compelling, top-of-the-line stuff—someone out there is going to want to publish it.

  —Bill Roorbach, from Writing Life Stories