On Working with an Editor

A few months after my husband’s death, I told close friends I was going to write about my life with him, cut short two years after we married.  I felt blindsided, but by what I didn’t know.  By John?  By my own naivete?  I had to figure it out.

A writer most of my life, I was comfortable putting pen to paper.  Aided by a journal I’d kept and a boatload of emails I’d written during John’s last months, I set out to tell my bittersweet story.  After two years of grieving for my first husband, I’d been swept up into a whirlwind romance by a younger man who was a rocket scientist.  We married and created an adventurous new life together.  We were supremely happy – and then I lost him to a brain tumor.

Day and night, in Santa Fe and Reston, Va., I sat at the computer, my fingers flying across the keyboard, capturing the essence of my two-year odyssey.  Friends read my drafts and came back with questions that caused me to re-think and re-write.

Over tea at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, I handed my manuscript to editor Morgan Farley.  “I’ve been writing for three years, and this is what I’ve produced,” I said.  “I know there’s something missing but I don’t know what it is.”

“I know what’s missing,” Morgan said in a phone call a couple of weeks later.  Relief washing through my body, I grabbed a pen to schedule another meeting.

“You have three books in one,” she began.  “I’ve made a note of the pages devoted to each and would suggest you go with the one that has the most pages because that seems to be where your strongest energy is.”

I’d started off on the energized track, but a close friend who’d known and loved my first husband Joe suggested I also write about my life with him.  Once I’d done that I thought, Why not write about my life before Joe – about Nikos in Greece and while I’m at it, my troubled mother?

Back on track, I listened to Morgan talk about the craft of novel writing and how it applies to writing memoir.  She explained that a story comes alive when you create scenes to show action, and use dialogue to reveal personality and character.  We talked about using description but not too much, to allow the reader to use her imagination, and pacing by relieving highly charged scenes with narrative while keeping the story moving.  It was a lot for me to absorb. A history major in college, I hadn’t read many novels; I’d read original sources and become practiced at critiquing authors’ premises and their use of sources to back them.  Later, in my professional life, I did a lot of business writing – press releases where scene-setting meant naming the place where a meeting was held and dialogue meant adding direct quotations by speakers that revealed neither personality nor character.  Rewriting my memoir to give it the missing ingredients sounded challenging.

“If you choose to do this, it will be transformative,” Morgan said.

Over the ensuing months, Morgan frequently asked, “What were you feeling?” – inviting me to dig deep for my interior emotional state.  She helped me to confront my story as I lived it, subjectively, and to reflect, time and again, on the significance of my feelings, thoughts and actions.  Looking deep inside to find my truths, when I wasn’t by inclination introspective, challenged me.  Having the courage to put them on paper, even those I might not like, meant overcoming my own inhibitions and ignoring the advice of well-meaning friends who believed personal publicity of any sort should be limited to births, marriages and deaths.  “It’s too personal,” a good friend confided after reading the first several pages.

The greatest joy in writing Banged-Up Heart was hearing Morgan say, “Beautiful, beautifully expressed.”  Or, “I just kept reading, forgetting I was supposed to be editing.”  I also heard from Morgan, “Shirley, I’m sorry but this doesn’t work.”  And I’d toss eight hours worth of carefully crafted prose.

​The successive joys of landing a top-notch agent, Liz Trupin-Pulli, and a publisher, Terra Nova Books, are more than icing on the cake.  They’ve made it possible for me to bring my years of hard work to fruition.

 

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