A member of what will shortly blossom into the full-fledged Book Writing World–my online community, craft and coaching site for writers of books–had more than a dozen people read her manuscript, writing comments in the margins. Now what? she wondered, looking at this stack of xeroxed books.

First, I told her, open all the manuscripts to page one. Look at anything any one said on page one, and consolidate what is relevant and useful into one book. Go along, page by page, until you’ve reviewed and condensed the whole conversation onto one manuscript.

(On a practical level, this means that you go through each manuscript until you come to the first page that has a comment, and then you let it sit on your bed or floor or wherever you’ve spread everything out, until you get to that page in your review.)

She found it helpful to have this systematic approach, but then she’d finished going through all the pages of all the manuscripts. Now what?

So, what now that you have these comments transcribed?

1) Look through them and make a list of any structural or BIG issue comments that resonate with you but which will need to be addressed on a macro level.
2) These macro issues will take daydreaming, re-plotting, conversations with your character, ripping seams and pulling out nails. Re-visioning. Give them time. Ask yourself questions and let the answers percolate. Draw diagrams, read books, muse.
2) The rest of the comments will be easier: page by page, line by line you look at the comments. If you agree something needs to change, change it.
3) You have to go back to “first draft” writing mode in order to try something out. There’s no way to write something for the first time that isn’t, at some level, a first draft. Sounds obvious, but it’s hard to put first draft material in the middle of a manuscript you’ve been laboring over. There is, however, no other way. You have to experiment, see what works, be willing to get it wrong.
4) Once you think you have something that might work, go on page by page to the next site-specific comment or comments and address those.
5) Keep in constant communication with yourself. Do not fix what does not, to your way of seeing, need fixing. Do not assume that other people’s suggestions will be the right ones to fix a problem. Identify the problem underlying the suggestion and see what your own storyteller has to say about solutions.

I hope this helps others who are wondering how to move forward after a critique! How do you integrate feedback?

“Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say  yes.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

A client writes:

“I’ve struggled all week trying to modify/open/deepen/clarify/intensify [these] chapters. I agree that they would benefit from it. Yet every time I try, I wind up being didactic, expository, redundant. Never organic. Never fresh. Never vital.

“This is not a new phenomenon…I’ve always had a tough time acting on critiques. In fact the only time I’ve been able to modify my work is when it’s being published or produced and I’m dealing directly with the editor or director and even then the changes are usually pretty minor.

“It seems my writing is like a jigsaw puzzle and if I pull out a piece I just keep looking for something the same shape to fill the space. And go slightly crazy while I’m looking for it.  So this is really my own process dilemma. I’m in a bit of a quandary…

“Any helpful hints about how  to  better utilize a critique would be greatly appreciated.”

One of the most important ways to support yourself as a writer is to understand yourself, your way of working, and to support that way of working. Critique is a complicated animal. If it comes too early, it is often just a way of teaching a writer basic technique: how to turn ideas into action, summary into scene, how to cut what’s not dramatic and raise the stakes on what is. If it comes in too vulnerable a moment, a writer, anxious to please, may make changes in reaction, in fear.

In order to be helpful, critique must be absorbed. What is unhelpful must be disregarded, and a writer does well to build up a strong instinct for what must be disregarded. What remains, then, is an arrow, pointing to a hidden door in the text that needs to be opened, or a hidden wall that needs to be removed.

This kind of critique must be put in conversation with the storytelling instinct, processed until something vital and fresh emerges. This goes beyond response.

If one of my basic writing rules is “whatever works,” another is, “doubt efficiency.” Anything that seems easier or appears to be a short cut will inevitably frustrate, impose, divert. Instead, you must meditate, absorb, integrate and finally return to the creative state and see what emerges.

One final note: we rarely know if what we are writing is good or significant while we are writing it or shortly after. The voice that judges the work is not that of our deep reader self but the anxious harping of some face concerned about the public eye. So you will not know right away if the changes you are making work. That, too, will take time, will take absorption, will lack efficiency.

Breathe into it. You are writing, and that’s the point.

“Elizabeth Stark is one of the most astute readers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. She can read a manuscript, understand what’s working, what’s not working, and has the ability to guide the writer to the next draft. She’s smart, clear, gentle, and encouraging in her approach. She also knows a lot about the publishing industry and is able to address the complicated issues of the market. From now on, any new work of mine will go first to Elizabeth for her guidance and suggestions.” — Ellen Sussman, author of the bestselling On a Night Like This and two anthologies, Bad Girls: 26 Authors Misbehave and Dirty Words: a Literary Encyclopedia of Sex

In coaching a client last week, I articulated a trio of guidelines for what to keep in piecing together a revision. Now that I have to take my own advice (always a bitter pill no matter how cheerily helpful or accurate the advice), I thought I’d share this with any of you who might also benefit from some revision guidelines.

Keep it if:

1) It fits with your thematic statement. Be sure you come up with this thematic statement by reading through your actual material, not by forcing it or wishing it into being.

2) It presents an good and true obstacle between your protagonist and her desire.

3) It is required, on a “need to know” basis, for set up or because the question it answers has become so big, it’s time to answer it.

I just finished reading two books, in which the authors, very different stylists, both avoided the repetitive usage of the verbs “to be” and “to have” as well as other overdone usages of sentence structure and sentence subjects. They dazzled.

One, Annie Dillard’s triumphant latest novel The Maytrees, lays down line after line, precise, poetic, thick as slabs of homemade, whole grain bread:

Sometimes now Lou searched old albums to test her proposition that nothing so compels a woman as the boyhood of the man she loves. She saw a snapshot of boy Maytree in cap and knickers dwarfed by his cross-eyed father on a wharf. In the prints, Maytree’s cap’s shadow blacked most of his face. Here again he crouched on the beach, as at a starting block, between his hairy mother and his visibly half-dead grandmother, in a wind harsh with that present’s brine. In those prints she saw unease in the boy, as if he had been scanning the offing for the man.

Notice, too, no excess articles: ” in cap and knickers.” But “blacked”! Now that’s a verb.

And for contrast, we go to Junot Diaz’s Drown. I’d read a couple of the stories. One I taught in a creative writing course and another a student had brought in to class. But it was not until I adored The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao that I plucked my first edition hard-cover (bought back when that was the only edition available) of Drown from the shelf and devoured it. I think I’d convinced myself that the hype probably had it wrong; instead, I was wrong about the hype.

Check it out, looking again at the mastery of verbs:

He’s tired and aching but he looks out over the valley, and the way the land curves away to hide itself reminds him of the way Lou hides his dominoes when they play. Go, she says. Before your father comes out.
He knows what happens when his father comes out. He pulls on his mask and feels the fleas stirring in the cloth. When she turns her back, he hides, blending into the weeks. He watches his mother hold Pesao’s head gently under the faucet and when the water finally urges out from the pipe Pesao yells as if he’s been given a present or a wish come true.

“Urges” is not a typo; it’s Diaz’s twist.

None of these sentences eats its own tail, crushing meaning, curling in on itself. Neither do they plod, predicting each other. I’ve not picked the best passages or any in particular. I’ve merely leafed through, finding something to put down for you as representative of the whole.

I’ve just finished a pass through the novel I wrote at the end of 2007, starting in NaNoWriMo. The pleasure of editing is that it bolsters the writer, assured that these sentences can be revisited and strengthened. She can

replace “to be” and “to have” with better verbs,

flip the subject of the sentence,

cut excess articles,

move adverbs into verbs and adjectives into nouns by choosing stronger words.

Metaphors can be brought through a sentence, so that the verb alludes to the metaphor, too.

Cliché’s can be tweaked or excised.

Slogging through close editing reminds me that the first draft just needs to get on the page; it’s easier to fix it than to get it right in the first place, at least for me. I get, at the bone, that writing is rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting.

The good news about the ninety-nine percent perspiration–the secret news–is that the hard work pleasures the mind and the body, which want to pump, push and ache. The doubts and misery about the one percent inspiration melt in the face of the methodical effort that can turn out a perfectly juicy sentence.

This week, my revision course begins with Reading as a Stranger. I just posted the lecture and am reminded that anyone with a legitimate call to writing starts out (and continues on) as a reader first. Getting to be an ace reader of your own work rewards the inner reader that put you in the middle of this writing mess in the first place.

Oh–and I am going to get my monthly “writing tips” newsletter out this week, though there’s been both hell and high water, so if you want to get that in your email box (not more than once a month), sign up in the right side margin.

And if you have nothing to revise? Get something down. The worse it is, the easier it will be to make it better later . . .

We live in a wooded area. Dominating the landscape are groves of the fast-growing and non-native eucalyptus tree. There are also redwoods, pine, maple, cedar, and other trees whose names I have not yet learned. Sometimes, a tree will die. I suppose this is due to some sort of infestation, because along with a giant pine that died in our backyard, a youngish (for a tree) tree recently died, too. It went from green to orange. This is how we knew. This youngish (for a tree) tree was just a sapling when I was a baby. My mother says that she used to sit beside it, holding baby me, on the stairs leading up to our house.

It is costly to cut down a big tree. It is also dangerous. We had a eucalyptus that was close to our house cut down a couple of years ago, and in the middle of that job, a guy on the crew died felling a tree at another site.

Meanwhile, to save money, we decided not to have the tree people haul away the rounds. It turns out that those rounds are nearly immobile. Even quartered, they are not easy for a very strong person to carry. Angie’s father, bless him, came down a few times with a log-splitter and cut all the wood (which covered our entire yard) down to firewood size. He took a bunch, got friends and relatives to come take a bunch, and left us with a generous firewood pile, which has been drying in our driveway ever since.

Some of our neighbors feel that the non-native eucalyptus hold up the hillside. Others (and we’re included here) simply cannot afford the thousands of dollars that it would take to remove any of the trees. But recently, our westerly neighbor hired a landscaper and eventually cut down a bunch of trees, including the dead one on our property and its friend. They also lopped off the top of some bushy trees between our houses. Suddenly, we emerged from the dark forest and into the light. There is a huge sky up there. (We had no idea.) There is a cyclone-shaped opening through which we can see University Avenue running all the way down Berkeley to the frontage road, and then the bay–darker when it is windy, nearly silver when it is calm–and across some islands to the hills of Marin. If you stand in one corner of the dining room and sort of squint, you can even see the Golden Gate Bridge.

I think this whole experience has something to teach us about editing.

But before I go there, I should mention one more element. Recently, our insurance company wrote to say that they were not going to renew our house insurance because our house was not defensible against fire. Some of you may remember back in 1991–October 21st, 1991, in fact, which was my big drinking birthday–the Oakland hills conflagrated. I drove to Santa Cruz that day to meet up with friends, and I remember seeing the billowing black smoke to my left as I cruised along the frontage road, which I now can see from my living room.

My oldest sister, who lives in the Kensington hills, packed up her most precious belongings in a U-Haul she’d rented and drove to Bolinas. My mother came over and watered my father’s roof and put some of the paintings from the house in her van. My father ignored the whole situation. I think he just couldn’t handle it. He did say that my sister would have been the person leaving Germany in the early 1930s while the rest of us were insisting that we were Germans more than we were Jews. He understood that, but still he stayed in his study and worked on a paper. He had a friend whose house did burn down in the fire (as did Maxine Hong Kingston’s house and all available versions of an original manuscript she’d been writing), and that friend came to stay with him (and me) here at the house for some time.

But anyway, I guess that the financial crisis and the tendency of our hills to burn made my insurance company nervous about risk-taking, and they sent some guy out to photograph our brush-covered yard and then told us they couldn’t cover us anymore.

Unless we made some changes.

Needless to say, we have found ourselves some great gardeners and are contracting with an arborist as I type, and the brush is getting cleared. The fire department has a whole downloadable pdf about fire prevention guidelines, and this is where we come back to editing.

The fire department wants space between your trees. Ten feet between trees and six feet from the ground to your first branches. They want the area between your plants cleared, and the debris removed.

Today I was lying on my couch (as part of an exercise in relaxing from a book on creating balance in your life. Seriously), and I noticed a blue jay fly way up and land in the tallest pine tree around. The leaves on the maple are now golden and pink. The bushy trees with the lopped off tops look cheery, green and round. I’ve been rejoicing in being able to see the sky and the bay and the incredible sunsets and the tiny cars way down on the freeway, but today, I really noticed the trees. Because I could see each individual tree. There were no dead branches to look through and no layers and layers of trees blending into a wall of darkness. It’s still a wooded area. It’s still a forest, but it’s been edited. The ragged parts and the dead parts and the overabundance pruned back. Some space cleared between the trees. The shape of the ground, usually hidden below the pine needles and fallen eucalyptus bark, is visible again.

The next class I am teaching is about revision. Editing. Adjusting the landscape so that you can see the trees. Raking away what is no longer alive, even if once it was the most vibrant green sprig waiting to bloom.

It can be harsh to see a big tree taken down. It’s a little like going to the circus. There’s a guy roped to the top of a nearby tree by a kind of pulley system that keeps you imagining just how he’d fall, the trajectory of his swing on the rope if he happened to slip. He loops another part of the rope around a section of trunk or branch and then takes the chainsaw that he holds while balancing on the tree, and with a roar, the chainsaw zips through the tree like a letter opener, and the chunk of tree falls, the rope around it lowering it to the ground. All of this is happening four or five stories up, in the arms of the aged pine, say, that is being taken down. I think of my father, who lived in this house and loved those trees, and the doctors who hung on the towering trunk of his life and slowing hacked it into managable pieces and let them crash down.

It can hurt to edit, too. Those “darlings,” those hard-earned limbs and rings of wood. The firy pitch of the chain saw is addictive, though. It’s exciting. It promises room for the healthy trees, for the plants that will flourish with an extra bit of sun, for the space between that will allow what is there to be seen to advantage. And most of all, for the view that opens up, which is what the book points to, something beyond the trees, outside the forest, framed by the labor that allows to eye to look through to the other side.

In raising two lovely little boys, I have been thinking a lot about praise. People and books offer all sorts of advice about how to raise children, and one suggestion is that parents praise effort and persistence, rather than simply the child’s existence. Obviously, the idea is that if you reward the push, you’ll get a child (and then a grown-up) who keeps trying, who doesn’t give up. These qualities are required for success or even just for hobbling along in the world, so why not nurture them?

I was at a dinner party last night, and someone talked about praising children so that they would grow-up feeling good about themselves. I pointed out that “self-esteem” acquired from being told you are great is hollow if effort and persistence haven’t been encouraged. Someone else pointed out that praising kids for “trying” sometimes leaves us with people who feel good about making an effort even if they don’t actually achieve anything or gain the necessary skills to accomplish whatever they are trying to do.

As a parent, abandoning formulas which can never be proven anyway, I find myself praising all of it: effort that leads to failure, effort that leads to success, and just the downright praisability of their very beings.

In editing writers, people often forget the importance of praise. Here I do not mean empty or false praise. I mean praise, lodged in the middle of a rigorous critique, that acknowledges what is working (and perhaps why). Writers need to learn what we do right as much or more than we need to learn what we do wrong. Writers need to be guided by the light of their own visions along the paths they are attempting to hack through the jungle, rather than be pointed toward some far distant light or hounded off the path with complaints. A smart reader brings out a smart writer.

Self-praise

I can give you the harshest critique of “The Secret” and other like-minded new ageiness that makes all of us the authors of our own destinies. This logic can be cruel in many instances, and unhelpful. But in those moments of those lives that have a heck of a lot of leeway and privilege–like mine, knock wood, most days–a little dose of optimism surely goes a long way.

I’ll tell you a secret.

A writer friend of mine, Katia Noyes–hostess of the wonderful dinner party last night and author of an amazing novel called Crashing America–has been helping me structure my revisions of my third novel. First, I went through the whole thing (which I wrote in seven crazy, sleep-deprived weeks with two babies under eight-months old) and created a fifteen-page, detailed outline, a list really, of the book. Each day I had to go through a minimum of ten pages, and then report to Katia by email. In the email, I also had to include an affirmation to the effect that this novel does not have to be perfect, and that I know what the book needs and what I want.

There is a lot the affirmations cannot fix. But none of this–my hesitancy, my fear based on past experience and fatigue, my self-doubt–is one of those things.

I was supposed to post affirmations all over the house before giving birth, and you know, we never got around to it. Instead, Angie voiced them all to me throughout my labor, and that worked fine. I am not a devotee of affirmations. Or I didn’t used to be. But this daily reporting to Katia got me going. It shifted the way I felt about the project and its writer.

There’s that old story of Niels Bohr, the physicist. He had a horseshoe hanging over his office door, and a colleague said, “Niels, why do have a horseshoe there?” Niels said, “They say it brings good luck.” “Surely,” the colleague replied, “you don’t believe in that.” “No,” Niels said, “but they say that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

So, too, with affirmations. Try it. Not for curing cancer, you know? But for changing attitudes: at least your own.

What do you affirm?

A long time ago, a friend of mine was getting married in an empire waist dress with a garland of flowers in her hair. She asked me if I thought her wedding choices were silly. I told her that your wedding is like your bedroom: it only needs to feel right to you (and your spouse). So what about a short story? A memoir? An article? Who do we need to please?

Obviously, we write to communicate–even if we claim only to be communicating with ourselves. I come from a family that kept every scrap of paper I touched with crayon or pencil. As a result, there are ridiculous, inaccessible files crammed with a child’s art. I can safely say that at that age, I was more interested in exploring the media available than in reaching a broad or eternal audience.

My sons help me understand and appreciate conceptual art, because they are conceptual artists. Leo wants to stand in the middle of every manhole or grill in the sidewalk. He wants to stack things. Charlie wants to knock things down. He wants to taste things. Wrapping a bridge in toilet paper would make good sense to them, and so I’ve come to see the worth in exploring just how the world fits together, in ways that don’t line up with the relationships we are painstakingly taught–on Sesame Street or by our parents or in books. Charlie points to an orange and says, “Ball.” Whereas I point to an orange and say, “Fruit. Orange.”

Let’s face it; I am in the business of helping them learn to communicate. If Charlie retains the ability to point to an orange and say, “Ball,” he will be a conceptual artist, no thanks to me. Frankly, all of us–the boys and the moms–are excited when someone says a new word or when someone understands one. We’ve been getting along for over a year now without a lot of help from language, but the boys’ acquisition of English thrills me. Mastery of the collective meanings brings us closer to a communication I cannot help but value. Words are my medium.

Which brings us to critique. I suppose conversation is a kind of critique, perhaps the ideal critique. In a conversation, one person says something, and the other person responds, and the first person may then clarify or amplify or backtrack, and so it goes. (Of course, dialog is famous for showing how, in a conversation, each person may be absolutely on his or her own track, with little regard for what the other person is saying, but that’s another blog . . .)

Writing critiques, which is to say, critiques of fiction or non-fiction or poetry, tend rarely to follow the easy and efficient flow of a conversation. There is a simple reason for this: readers do not know how to respond to a text as readers. Because we gather, as writers, in workshop settings to discuss each other’s work, people have evolved a habit of responding to text as writers rather than as readers. We say, “Why don’t you make the man nicer?” “Why don’t you make the homeless lady and the cab driver into the same person?” “Why don’t you have it rain? Rain would add to the mood.” “And cut that scene in the garden.”

What we need to learn to do is go back to our roles as readers. I don’t know about you, but I am a reader first, before I am a writer. And even as a writer, I function best when I allow the pleasure-loving, image-hungry, story-obsessed person who loses herself in books to set the tone.

Here’s how each of the above questions and comments would translate, if asked by a reader instead of a writer.

“Why don’t you make the man nicer?” becomes “I didn’t like that man. He was so mean. Why did she like him?”

“Why don’t you make the homeless lady and the cab driver into the same person?” becomes “The homeless lady seemed a lot like the cab driver to me, and the second conversation seemed to replay the first. I got a little impatient with him for having the same conversation with everybody.”

“Why don’t you have it rain? Rain would add to the mood.” becomes “I didn’t have a sense of the mood, and I wondered about the weather. What is she noticing in this frame of mind?”

“And cut that scene in the garden.” becomes “I didn’t understand why she stayed in the garden or what happened there that was important to the story.”

What happens for the actual writer of a piece when s/he gets to hear from readers is a marvelous thing. The story opens up as something separate from the writer, something with a life of its own that inhabits the brains and hearts of those most wonderful of beings, readers. And how it feels to read something we’ve written is precisely what the writer cannot know without the help of a workshop.

There is another way to say this: readers do best to identify problems in a work rather than to offer solutions to those problems. There is always more than one solution to any story’s problems. Perhaps the writer does not want the reader to like the mean man; maybe he needs to be mean. But maybe the protagonist’s attraction to him–even to his meanness–is lacking in this version of the story. The writer thus can find his or her way to a solution that the reader may not have imagined. That is the way to encourage original work.

The ace editor learns to paint a portrait of her experience reading something, so that the writer can test that against what he or she hoped to accomplish, and then go back to the computer and try again.