Stage 5 - Help

I read an article many years ago about the value of critique groups for writers.  The only thing I really remember about the article is that it seemed to be picking on my grandmother.  It said a lot of things like, “Your grandmother will love what you write no matter what,” and “Your grandmother thinks she’s being kind when she says your book is perfect the way it is,” and “Your grandmother doesn’t want to admit to herself that your book has flaws, let alone say that to you.”

I know what a generalization is and I know why that one exists, but I still sort of wanted to introduce the article’s author to my grandmother.  She was a retired English teacher.  She was sharper than the best cheddar and not afraid of hard truths.  Her belief that letting students see her smile would make her appear soft earned her the nickname “Stoneface.”

When my grandmother read one of my early works, she only said, “The past tense of lie is lay.”  Then she changed the subject.

While I’m not going to lie and say I wouldn’t have enjoyed a little praise mixed in – because this was my grandmother – she did actually tell me exactly what I wanted to hear.  She gave me something concrete and fixable.  (The only thing that would have made it better was the page number where I made that mistake.)  Concrete and fixable is usually what I’m after when I look for help with my books.  Once I have a book to the point I’m pretty happy with it, I find as many people as I can to read it and tell me about the things that shouldn’t make me happy, the mistakes I can’t see because I’m too familiar.

Imagine that someone pushed text under your nose that you know by heart, maybe the Lord’s Prayer or favorite song lyrics.  You wouldn’t actually read it, would you?  You might be looking at the words, but they’d already be printed on your brain.  You probably wouldn’t notice if something was misspelled or mixed up unless you forced yourself to go slowly and study each word.  I try.  It’s hard to do that for an entire book.  This is when I need help from those who don’t have parts of the book memorized.

So I ask for help. 

And I get help.

Comments from other family members have included: “I just don’t think that would happen.”  “Is it too late to suggest changes?”  “You can call that a style thing, but it bugs the heck out of me.”  “I stumbled over and reread that sentence many times.”  “Your characters are so nice I want to gag.”  “Can I have a copy of that manuscript so I can try to fix it for you?”

I didn’t need that article I mentioned above to convince me of the value of critique groups.  I truly value any feedback I receive.  I try to listen for valid points even when those points are stabbing holes in my pride.  I have made changes based on some of these suggestions.  But that’s not what Stage 5 is supposed to look like. 

Stage 5 is about polishing.  It’s about getting typos and concrete mistakes pointed out.  The help stage is about people telling me specifically where I’m wrong.  People handing me a list of mistakes.  People making sure I know how perfectly human I am in nice, simple lists.  I could call it proofreading.  I call it help because everyone loves me enough to be more honest than I ask.

Stage 4 - Acceptance

I am the first person to proofread each of my books.  When I’m sure I’m done with any significant editing, I begin to read the story looking for typos or inconsistencies.  I clean up dialog, adding or subtracting tags to be sure it’s clear who’s speaking and still flows smoothly.  I rearrange sentences, check comma placement, consider synonyms and just get as nit-picky as I can make myself.

In truth, I don’t have to make myself nit-picky.  I’m naturally a detail person.  (Doesn’t detail person sound nicer than nit-picky?)  The danger of this phase lies in the fact that it could have no end.  I could find something to change every time I look at the project because I’m not simply looking for errors.  I’m looking for anything that might sound a teeny bit better another way.

There was an adverb in a recent book that would not sit right for me.  I changed it over and over, usually back to what it had been on the last pass.  At some point though, I need to be able to close a book.  I need to be able to say to myself, “I’ve done my best.”  I need to be able to say, “If there is a person out there who is going to judge this book entirely on whether I said someone did something casually or carelessly, there’s really nothing I can do about that.”

This is what acceptance is all about.  Acceptance is getting to a place where I feel as though I’ve fixed what needs to be fixed and can let everything else go.

Let’s review the steps.  Stage 1 is Floundering, when I brainstorm ideas for a book.  Stage 2, Insomnia, is when I try to get all those thoughts on paper before I forget them.  Stage 3 is the major editing, the Pain of admitting where I’m wrong and sometimes working backwards.  Then comes this 4^th stage of Acceptance.  Last month I wrote that I hoped to be on this stage with the last Coffee and Donuts book by now.

I confess that I am not.

This is actually good news.  I have so far left out the most important part of my writing process.  This part is not a separate step but the overall driving force behind my writing.  It’s called Doing Whatever the Heck I Want. 

As my own boss, if I want to backburner the last Coffee and Donuts book to work on a Stories From Hartford prequel, then that’s what I’m going to do.  And it’s what I have done.  My next release will be Hearts on the Window (Stories From Hartford#0.5).  It’s set about two years before Andrew’s Key and tells the story of how Jill met her husband.  Because it’s shorter than most of my work, a novella, it will only be available as an ebook.  It should be out by the end of this month.  An excerpt is already posted on goodreads.  Enjoy!

Stage 3 - Pain

Remember all that stuff I knew in stage 2? How I said I knew exactly what happens at the most important scenes in my project before I even start writing it? At some point I usually need to admit that I didn’t know everything I thought I knew. Something in the book doesn’t work, or isn’t working, or won’t work no matter how hard I might want to make it work.

This is Pain.

Pain has taken many forms.

Pain has caused me to delete pages of text, text I lost sleep over. Pain has removed characters, added characters, sent me back to stage 1, demanded an extra 10,000 words and even killed off a dog.

I don’t like Pain.

This 3rd stage doesn’t even know that stages are supposed to be linear. It doesn’t wait until I’ve finished writing out the draft of stage 2. It just shows up uninvited at some point, like someone at my front door with a clipboard and really long sales pitch. He calmly explains to me what I’m doing wrong. I call him Pain because I don’t like to admit when I’m wrong.

But Pain has also made me laugh at things I thought were good ideas. Pain turned a book into a series. Stage 3 is the point in each project when I force myself to look for ways to make improvements. Even when those improvements make a lot more work for me.

Everything I write can always be better. I pray for guidance when Pain hits. I pray that the final book will reflect my best ideas, not necessarily my first ideas. But it’s nice when there’s a lot of overlap.

So where am I in this process with my current project? The 4th Coffee and Donuts book has already given me plenty of insomnia and pain. I hope to be solidly in acceptance by the time I write about that next month.