Your Story

by Joanne Fedler

  By making the reader care. Structure a series of hooks or unanswered questions that keep your reader emotionally engaged. As soon as the reader stops caring, you don’t have a reader.

  By avoiding anything fancy. Aim to write like you talk.

  By staying in the active voice, unless the passive is serving a useful purpose of making the agency of the subject invisible or sublimated. Every sentence should have a subject, verb, and object, in that order. If you use the passive voice, e.g., “The door was opened,” rather than “He opened the door,” make sure this is a conscious writing decision.

  By going light on adjectives and adverbs, which are often accessories cluttering our sentences when their meaning can be absorbed by a more potent verb or noun. If an adjective or adverb is casting a surprising or ironic light, then keep it, such as in “killing me softly” as opposed to “killing me brutally,” or “a cold beauty” rather than “a stunning beauty.”

  By working out when to show and when to tell.

  By keeping tenses stable: hold on to the reins of your tenses so they don’t stray mindlessly between the past and present and confuse your reader.

  By always writing for and toward a reader (remember Mary?). Don’t be obscure or pretentious. Stand in the reader’s shoes. Read through her eyes. Is what you’ve written fascinating, useful, or entertaining?

  By zooming in and out. Good writing is textured—it moves from the specific to the universal and from the abstract to the specific. If you’re writing about the impact of bad eating habits on general health, you can describe a McDonald’s burger and the person eating it. If you’re writing about taking out the trash, make it about a deeper truth—that every so often, we have to get rid of our emotional junk.

  By staying in one skin. Pick a point of view and stick to it. If you’re writing in the first person, you can’t know what other people are thinking or feeling, but you can imagine or suspect, e.g., “It was as if she was looking for faith, scrambling and failing.”

  By remembering that when you’ve finished writing, you’re not finished. Rewriting is a crucial (and fun, enlivening) part of the writing process where you bring left-brain thinking and ask logical, analytical questions like: Does this make sense? Have I left something out? Does one line follow logically from the next? Can I say this better? Is there a more perfect word to describe this? Reshape, resculpt, eliminate. Writing generally improves with every word we cut.

  By applying the “mattress principle”—sleep on it. Step away from the writing and let it settle. Writing needs time. The time a grain of sand needs to turn into a pearl.

  By asking yourself when you’re done, What am I really saying here? Sometimes we change in the writing, and what we end up saying is several degrees off what we began wanting to say. You then need to pull the narrative threads tightly through the text to make your work appear seamless.

  By reading it aloud. Sometimes you can hear what works and what doesn’t more easily when you hear the words read out loud rather than just reading the text on a page.

  If you’re wondering how long your story should be, apply the Goldilocks principle. Most books are between 60,000 and 90,000 words. But it’s never the quantity of words that counts. It’s the quality. When it comes to each book, there’s a Baby Bear in there somewhere—where it’s not too short and it’s not too long (though I would always err on the side of less).

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  The third eye

  Our tragic first drafts are now ready for The Third Eye.

  The first eye is, of course, our first draft. The second eye is our own editing and rewriting. But there comes a time when we need a third eye. Like of another human being.

  It’s hard enough to be brave and heartfelt and spill our guts on the page. Now comes a new round of resilience. We’ve had courage in private, when our writing was for our eyes only. Now we have to go public. And this is where many great writers falter. The fear of what others will say or think is crippling. They shy away from the edge.

  There will come a time in the life of your book when you think, That’s it, I’m done. And what this is, is the heart saying, “I have given everything I have to this work.” While you may be “done,” your work is not. This is exactly the point in time when you need fresh eyes on your words. Eyes of someone who does not love you as a brother, sister, spouse, lover, or friend. But someone who will look at your words dispassionately and let you know whether your words “work” or need more work.

  Successful writers seek feedback on their writing. Until and unless you have given your work to a person who is qualified to comment on the quality of your work, your writing exists in a vacuum. You cannot know if it works for a reader, or just for you.

  Pick that person carefully. Just like you wouldn’t ask your sister to diagnose whether those spots on your legs are chicken pox, you shouldn’t ask her what she thinks of your manuscript. In the same way as your hairdresser is not qualified to fill a cavity in a tooth, he is equally unqualified to pass judgment on your writing.

  I always choose carefully those to whom I show my work. Family members, husbands, and best friends are out. Why ask your spouse or girlfriend (who has never read a memoir) to appraise your work? We will learn nothing constructive from indiscriminate praise. When we show our writing to someone, we need suggestions about how to improve our writing, not blanket assertions about how gifted and talented we are.

  Find a professional. If you value your work, you must pay a professional person who charges for their time to give you their feedback. Find someone whose work you respect. A connection with the right person is essential. You have to trust their feedback. Find out what they’ve written. Find out if they’re published authors themselves.

  Brace yourself to hear that your writing still needs more work. Feedback builds resilience. And to survive as a writer, you need to be a warrior.

  This next phase is called “the rewrite.”

  Hidden peaks

  I hope it’s helpful to know up front that the first draft hides the rewrite. Please don’t be put off, as overwhelming as it may feel. Trust me when I say that you will find the resolve and energy to re-tackle the manuscript. It’s almost as if only by finishing our first draft and standing there looking ahead do we manage to pull together the muscle, spirit, and heart to forge ahead.

  A manuscript assessment will give you a structural edit. This is a big picture analysis of whether:

  our characters are believable, sympathetic, interesting enough, and the character arc works;

  our plot has flaws, holes, or logic issues;

  our writing voice works;

  the pace, setting, and point of view all feel right; and

  the structure (how we’ve chosen to tell our story) is effective or could be changed.

  The assessment is not necessarily an edit or a proofread, because your book is not ready for that yet. It will only be ready when you have done your rewrite.

  So what is the rewrite?

  The rewrite is where you take your raw draft and you make it stronger. You create more sinew in the text, you weave more deftly, you deepen your voice, you shorten your waffling. You find one better word for the four you have chosen to describe the weather.

  How to rewrite

  There are a couple of ways to learn to rewrite:

  keep working at your own writing and rework it;

  do a short course on editing;

  get professional feedback (it’s hard to learn to rewrite on your own);

  step away from your work so you come back fresh (or trick yourself into making it look new by changing the font or printing it out and reading it on paper instead of on the screen); or

  read your work aloud and listen to how it sounds.

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  Toughen up

  When we’ve been brave enough to seek out the third eye and we’ve given our writing to someone to review, we may expect a reward for our courage. Like positive feedback. Sometimes their feedback will feel lik
e a dagger to the sternum. That’s because we were hoping to hear that this is the best thing that’s ever been written.

  Invariably we will be told that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. Feedback will include valuable suggestions about how to improve the manuscript. It will feel like a personal affront. It isn’t. It’s just feedback. We can choose to use it or not. When deciding whether to use it or not, we need to park our ego outside.

  Here are some ways I’ve learned to respond constructively to feedback on my writing:

  Brace yourself: I’ve made the mistake of expecting praise, and I have learned that it takes much less time to recover from the shock of an editor’s report if you have no expectations. No matter how many years you have worked on a book (my first took me 10 years), expect to do a rewrite. Assessors do not modify their responses to manuscripts based on how long it has taken us to produce it. They probably don’t have a clue about how long we’ve worked on our book. The manuscript is assessed on its merits. So the fact that we feel we’ve “done the hard yards” is irrelevant. There will be more work. And this is not because assessors, editors, and publishers are mean. They want our book to be the best it can. With fresh eyes on our manuscript, we’ll get invaluable perspective that we, having lived inside the forest of our manuscript and unable to see the wood for the trees, simply don’t have.

  Be realistic: Every single manuscript benefits from a good edit. We know that as human beings we are works in progress—all of us profit from a little work on ourselves, whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually. Treat your manuscript as a work in progress. I received a 23-page report from my publisher on the first draft of my book Things without a Name. Twenty-three single-spaced pages. By the end of my rewrite, those 23 pages had become my map toward a book I could never have written without that feedback.

  Keep your poise: Never take critique or feedback personally. Any feedback that is not pure praise makes us want to scuttle back into the shell of our craft and hide there forever. Because writing is an act of courageous self-disclosure, our egos are intricately tied up in our work. But this is where we have to exercise the greatest self-restraint and maturity. The feedback is on our story, not on us.

  Some editorial feedback can be undiplomatic and harsh. Some editors need to show how clever they are. Others are gentler and understand that it is more helpful to offer useful suggestions than to bludgeon someone’s manuscript. Expect the worst. If necessary, do as I do and get your husband or someone near to you to read the report first and to prepare you with “This is gonna hurt,” or “This isn’t so bad, really.”

  Give yourself time: Step back and give yourself at least a week to absorb the feedback. If a report has really hurt you and damaged your self-esteem as a writer, you need to let the sting pass so you can look beyond the hurt to the substance of the report. As with all things that make us feel small, we need to give ourselves a little time to bounce back.

  Evaluate dispassionately: This is only one person’s opinion, and all opinions are subjective. Who wrote the manuscript? You did. Well done! What did the assessor or editor do? They read it. Anyone can read a manuscript. Not everyone can finish one. If you hate everything in the assessment, accept that your opinion is equally valid. However, there is the small factor of your hurt pride, which could be clouding your judgment. The auditions for the television series American Idol show us that sometimes we don’t know we can’t. Let someone more objective than you read the report and ask them, “Is there anything valuable here?”

  Use methodology: Work through the critique with a highlighter looking for gems. Do not dwell on the words that have hurt you. Look for constructive suggestions about story line, characterization, use of language, and keep notes as you go through the report. Make a list of suggestions in the report that you do not agree with. If, for example, you feel the editor has not understood the point of the book, use this constructively to ask how you might better have crafted the manuscript so that your intention was clearer. We are in control of the story, and so if someone fails to respond to it, we need to go back and look at how to rework it so we can successfully communicate our story.

  Become unattached to your previous ideas about the book: Sometimes we need to let go of what we thought would work best in the story. If the editor has suggested that your story needs to start in a new place, while you may not agree, why not try to start the story here this time round and see how you go? It is not useful or helpful to be adamant about things that are not crucial. Ask yourself if it would totally distort the story if you started it in a different place. Would it matter very much if you cut out that section the editor thought was gratuitous? Some things can be shifted without us losing our sense of what we are trying to achieve in the manuscript.

  Fight for the heart of your story: While the aim should be to work openly and constructively with feedback, you do not have to roll over and accede to all the suggestions in the report. This is still your book. And your vision for it is what drives it. While a story can have a limb moved here and there, a bit of plastic surgery, fight for its heart. Fight to retain what you think is crucial to your story. There may be parts of the report you just don’t agree with or that reflect the editor’s own agenda and not yours.

  Recommit and begin again: When you’re ready, take a deep breath and start on the rewrite. How badly do you want this book published? How hungry are you? How hard are you prepared to fight for it? Does your book deserve your attention and devotion? Then get over the editorial report and use it as a stepping-stone to a more wonderful manuscript.

  Finally, keep these things in mind:

  It’s just writing—it either works or it doesn’t work.

  Don’t take feedback personally.

  Don’t be precious about what you’ve written.

  Be grateful for feedback; it gives you the chance to look again. Writing is all about looking again, going deeper.

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  The last word

  Tell a story so you can give it to another person.

  A story is a public act of communication.

  — Maxine Hong Kingston

  One of the most important books I ever read as a law student was Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights. The book opens with this line: “Since subject position is everything in my analysis of the law, you deserve to know that it’s a bad morning.”

  What Professor Williams is saying right there is: there are no right answers in law. It’s all about subject position—how I see it, where I’m coming from. It’s quite an incendiary statement because lawyers and legal professors believe that objectivity and certainty are the cornerstones of legal thinking.

  I was a terrible lawyer. A tragic legal thinker. I had too much empathy, was distracted by “irrelevancies” such as the fact that an accused person had been beaten by the “victim” (her abusive husband) for years before she shot him in the back of his head (unprovoked, in the eyes of the law).

  So critical legal theory was formative for me because of the way it challenges legal norms of logic and structure that merely reflect and reinforce existing (and often invisible) power relationships in society. It taught me that in all matters of thinking, there are many paths. Writing is no different. There is no one way to write, to be inspired, to become a success. There are many ways, and probably the best way is your way.

  If you’re like me, you love to read about how your favorite authors work, what their writing rituals and habits are, how many hours they spend at their desks, or how many words they write in a day. When we’re starting out, we may think to copy them, imagining they must have the magic formula for how it’s done. This is a good place to begin, but as we mature as writers, we become more conscious of our own processes, and this is when we start to make our own path. I express this in When Hungry, Eat:

  What others can teach us through their experience is only useful to a certain point. When we recognize where that point is, that’s when our authentic experience be
gins.

  Understanding how we write, how we become inspired, and what works for us is part of the writer’s journey. No one can tell you how your creativity works. No one can offer a formula that will show you how to work your voice. Trust yourself. Learn everything you can from others. Then walk your own path.

  For your story to touch others, write fearlessly. Write through your pain. It is the prism through which your story is refracted. In the moment of your honesty lies your greatest power. Resting in your pain is the key to every other heart that has been broken.

  Never doubt that your personal story can change someone else’s life. Our stories, fearlessly told, are lanterns that light the path for others to be fearless.

  I believe in the power of writing. We script our lives by the words we choose, the way we line them up one after the other, like glass beads on a page or screen. When we write our journey, we learn more deeply who we are, we share our insights with others, we help others make meaning, we stay close to who we are inside, we help others find bridges across experiences, we help hold the world together in an invisible web of words.

  Writing is an act of sharing—we work hard to get the right words onto the page so that we can share emotions and experiences with others. We reach people in faraway places, we meet people who have long since died, and we enter our own inner worlds—worlds we could never have reached had we not written our story. Writing gives us the chance to be generous; we can make the world a better place, by sharing.

  Writing and sharing our stories is the bravest, most generous act of service we can perform.

  Go be brave.

  You are braver than you think.

  Appendix