Eyes On Your Work

What do you do with a manuscript once you finish it? I always try to get someone else to look it over. I am about to reach that stage where I will be finding another pair of eyes to read and see where the story needs revising. I have a few more pages on my last story to do and then I will be ready to get another perpective.

You can go about finding readers several ways. One avenue I have taken is to go to my MFA mates that I still stay in touch with and offer to switch manuscripts–I read one of theirs, and they read mine. Both of you get a new perspective. and all you’re out is a little time. Cooperation is a wonderful thing. Maybe you have a writing group or people you met in a conference or workshop. A swap can really work in your favor.

Getting different perspectives from your readers is something else to think about. I am getting another writer’s thoughts from my MFA friend. I have another friend who dabbles in writing but also reads voraciously. He can give me a reader’s perspective–does the story hang together? Where is he tempted to put it down because it’s boring? Etc.

Free options are the best options–but if you want a little more professional opinion, Facebook groups or Twitter searches are always a option to find a professional developmental editor. Be sure to vet someone first–see if other books they have worked on have eventually sold or if they are good enough editors for their own work to sell. If you’re paying for it, make sure it money well spent.

So when you finish a manuscript, celebrate your accomplishment however you choose. But know that the work is not necessarily done; getting other eyes on it is the next step.

Fear Redux

I am trying to finish the last two stories in my manuscript this weekend and have been panicking every time I open the document. Thinking that I’m an idiot for believing I can finish a big fiction project like this again. Thinking that no one will ever bother to read it and care about the people I’m writing out or about the story I’m trying to tell.

I am just going to treat my self-imposed deadline as a hard one and pretend it’s going to be published do-or-die the day I finish it. We will see how well I can hoodwink myself into believing that. Fear is strong. Fear has bedeviled me my whole life. But I am going to be strong, and I am going to defeat the fear. No matter what.

Fear

So why was I afraid to pick this project back up and write on it when I got the idea for linked stories several months ago?

Number one was fear of failure. Would I start it only to find that it was unworkable? That it wouldn’t turn out as I envisioned? That fear is largely gone. I have ten stories completed in the conversion–several of which had been published in stand-alone form over the past few years. I need to have faith in my ability to craft something new out of what was already strong material.

Number two was fear of the blank page. This one is harder to fight. Where I have had to create almost an entire narrative from near-scratch, I have had a ton of problems. In fact, I have two stories left half-done after I pulled source material out of the main manuscript that have been a challenge to work on.

Number three is imposter syndrome. Many of us writers, when faced with a challenging task, can draw on past success at our craft as a reason to believe that we can face this new challenge, too. So why don’t we? Often it’s because we live in a culture that says simple success in completing a project is not enough; more must be done to make it “successful” by someone else’s standards.

Number four is fear of wasting time. This belief whispers to me that my paid work is more valuable than my fun work because it pays off financially. When I have paid work pending, it’s really hard to give time to unpaid work. This fear tells me that I am only a valuable writer when I’m earning money. I still work to overcome this obstacle.

Number five is fear of losing my mind. Many writers write from a place of trauma. I do so in my memoir work. Well, the first writing on this story came out of the trauma of Hurricane Katrina, which ultimately consumed me and resulted in a psychotic break. Many writers report re-experiencing their trauma when they write about it. I don’t want to go back to that some place I was when first crafting this story.

How am I working to overcome these fears? I remind myself that I am successful by my own lights and that is all that matters. I remind myself that computers come with a delete key to erase a poorly written sentence or paragraph or whole scene. I remind myself of Anne Lamott’s advice that no one cares as much as we do, and others do not live to tear apart our work.

Concrete steps I have taken have been to sign up for an extended flash fiction writing workshop where I can learn more about my craft and get used to the flow of writing fiction again in a low-stakes environment, one where my work is supported, and I am not writing only for my own satisfaction but for others who want to see me succeed. It basically comes down to getting my own confidence back.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Where We Are

So I picked “Hurricane Baby” back up this year to try to make it work as a series of linked short stories. I took the most dramatic episodes in the novel manuscript and am rewriting them to show how the hurricane affected the lives of various characters.

Wendy and Ray Magnum have to deal with the fallout of Wendy’s encounter with Judd McKay. Mike and Holly Seabrook work to overcome the damage done to their home and lives with Mike undergoing a serious crisis of faith. And James and Lisa King suffer through a dissolution of their marriage after Lisa decides she is never returning to the Coast again.

Each of the three storylines is told in four installments, alternated throughout the manuscript. Each of the twelve stories is told from a slightly different point of view. Wendy and Ray each have their own story, Mike’s point of view is illustrated through three stories, with Holly closing their narrative with her own story, and James and Lisa’s stories alternate from one to the other.

Writing The Story

Long story short–these characters have been alive in my mind for quite some time. The story has undergone many, many permutations since I completed that first story draft. In 2010, in anticipation of the Hurricane Katrina fifth anniversary. I took the story and adapted it to a stage play, which is when the title went from “Still Waters” to “Hurricane Baby”. That stage play won third place in the Eudora Welty New Plays Festival at New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Mississippi, where a stage reading was performed on May 1, 2010.

I kept working at it and revising on it until I wondered if I had taken it as far as I could. I finally gave up on fiction almost entirely and started concentrating on blogging, setting up a blog about my life with bipolar disorder in 2014. In 2015, I enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at the Mississippi University for Women, concentrating on nonfiction. But even with that as my concentration, I kept flirting with fiction stories.

I took two semesters to write in fiction classes under Mary Miller, an up-and-coming short story and novel writer from Oxford, and Diana Spechler, a writer based in Mexico City. I wrote new fiction in their classes and experimented a great deal with flash fiction, discovering a had a knack for compressing a story down to its bare bones.

Characters

I did not plot out the novel and follow a script to write it. I simply kept asking the question: What happens next? I didn’t even ask why? that something would happen. I never told why! that something had happened. I tried to make sure each twist of the story was organic to the first characters as I had conceived them.

Wendy Magnum was a tough-as-nails working-class Southern woman. She worked part-time in a daycare taking care of three-year-olds because she seemed to not be able to have children, although she desperately wanted them, and worked her off days in Ray’s shop. She and Ray began dating when she was fourteen, not long after she lost her daddy in a drunk-driving accident and had married right when she finished high school. They had been married ten years when Katrina came through Hattiesburg. She loved the men in her life and knew how to handle guns but could not handle herself when she thought she was going to die in the hurricane without Ray to protect her, as he had throughout their life together.

Judd McKay was a wild one from Mandeville, Louisiana. He had gone to LSU and had lived and worked in Hattiesburg until his father died, leaving him his childhood home. He moved back home and began working as a traveling salesman selling first chainsaws, then generators, for Jackson Equipment Company. He and Ray had known each other for years. He had been married for three years to Laine McKay, who matched him in wildness and meanness, recognizing what he could do for her as well as what he couldn’t. He never had any sense when it came to a good-looking woman–something that had been his undoing more than once in his life.

Ray Magnum was four or five years older than Wendy and had been a baseball player in high school with blond hair and brown eyes. He owned his own business, Magnum Hardware, with his partner, Tommy Cade, and also worked as a professional firefighter to have a steady income. He was a stoic man who was capable of great love, moving into his mama’s house with Wendy to take care of his mama until she died. But working at the firehouse forty-eight hours on and seventy-two hours off at the shop, he could only do so much–when Wendy needed more.

They were a combustible mix–and I keep lighting fuses.

Even So

In fact, Judd and Wendy, along with Ray Magnum, and Rosie and Lee Oswalt. and Laine McKay, became so real to me that even after I let Judd McKay have his say about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the entire cast of characters decided they wanted to take ten pages each to decipher their emotions, too. I started several weeks later writing about how Ray, Wendy’s husband, suffered from PTSD from being on a firetruck after the storm. I talked about his struggles with increased alcohol use and survivor’s guilt.

By this time, I had started counseling for my own feelings of desperation and anxiety that overwhelmed me after the power came back on and the damage was cleared from my neighborhood, which had experienced Katrina as a Category 1 hurricane over 120 miles inland.

I had let my writing friend Lori read the original story, and I sent her this next ten-page installment from Ray after I finished it. She wrote an in an email back to me that she could see how I was “processing” my own feelings about the hurricane through Ray and thought I needed to talk about his actions, rather than his thoughts. I called her up.

She and I talked for a while, and she crystallized a sentiment for me that I took to heart as I continued to write: This story was not about how people attempted to learn to cope. It was about people who had been destroyed inside by what they had faced. Her exact words (as I remember them) were, “This story is not about Ray’s struggles and victories in AA.”

So I ditched those ten pages and instead wrote instead about Judd and Laine McKay’s meeting with a lawyer to finalize their divorce. Again, I let these characters hurt each other and say hateful things they truly meant. I didn’t get into their heads–I let their actions speak instead. Slowly but surely, I was developing this storm story into a novel that would consume my life for the better part of five months.

Where It Went

I drafted the first short story feverishly in my notebooks until I finished it, then I started typing it into our computer. I revised as I went, tossing in twists of the knife at every point I could find to heighten the dramatic tension. The final scene that took five minutes of story time turned into three days of wondering how to end it and get Wendy and Judd apart again. I went through draft after draft, trying to make it sound “honest” to my concept of the characters.

When I finally solved it, I felt spent. It had taken we two weeks to finish it (I think). But I had a ten-page short story, all told from Wendy’s point of view. But while I thought I was finished with Still Waters, it was not finished with me.

I let my husband read it, and if he wondered about why I had written it, he didn’t ask. He only asked why I had them sleep together. I told him that I was trying to show how far fear could take somebody. I sent it to a few of my writing friends. My friend Christine Parisen said, “Wow! I had to smoke a cigarette after this one!”

But Judd McKay wasn’t finished talking. I kept thinking about that character, and he wanted his ten-page say about the events of the story. So I wrote how he came back to Hattiesburg and discovered Wendy was pregnant, and how he became convinced it was his child. Another month of one gut-wrenching scene after another. I had never written fiction like this, where the characters became much more than thinly-disguised people I knew. Judd McKay and Wendy Magnum became real people in my mind, and they had a greater story they wanted to tell.

How It Started

So this project grew out of my experience during Hurricane Katrina. I was reading stories in the news about the impact of the storm–destroyed homes, businesses, landmarks, streets etc. I started wondering where stories about people were. Everyone has a story, right? So that was where I started trying to orient my own writing about the storm that I was doing for the news outlets I worked for.

But I wondered if I could do a storm story another way–so many people had stories about being safe that always ended like, “I lost my home and my business and my livelihood, but my family is safe and that’s what’s important.” Those comments had a poignancy that appealed to me. Then I thought of something else–what about a storm story where, miraculously, everything was fine except for mental well-being? What about a story where the people involved lost nothing–but were destroyed psychologically?

I came up with a story, set in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where no one thought the hurricane would ever reach. But it did–the Katrina winds and rain came through as a Category 3 storm. In my story, two people, Wendy and Judd, holed up together in the storm have an intimate encounter, with the attendant regret and emotional pain that came as a result of betraying their spouses during the lapse in judgment.

(I had never read Katherine Chopin’s short story, “The Storm”; it wasn’t one of her more well-known works. I read it years later and had an “oh of course” moment that nothing is new under the sun. Interesting side note: the story was never published in Chopin’s lifetime, only to be included in a collection of her work published in 1969–the year Hurricane Camille destroyed the Mississippi Gulf Coast as the most powerful storm on record.)

Once the idea took root, I couldn’t shake it. I drafted it in my notebook by hand while waiting for power to be restored–working on it in fits and starts while negotiating life with three children, a husband, a house, and my freelance news writing. I had no idea where I was going with it or where I would end up.

Hi There

So here’s the scoop. This page is where I will document my foray back into fiction. The working title of the short story collection I am writing is Hurricane Baby: Stories. Here I will talk about the progress of writing it, how the story came about, and who the characters are; in short, as a reader, you get a front-row seat to the act of creating that is writing fiction. Why am I offering this kind of look into the process, pitfalls, and perils of doing the hard work of writing fiction? I’m glad you asked. 😊

I’ve had a lot of fear about starting this project. I decided the best way to get past the fear is to face it head-on and acknowledge it. I will write about fear. About the hard stuff. About being scared I’m going to invest a lot of time into a project that may not ever see the light of day. About being scared of being judged for writing what I am writing. About being scared of what folks may say.

But it occurred to me that I can ensure that the labor is not in vain by offering to share the journey with readers. Craft, perseverance, encouragement are qualities many writers say they wish they had more of. So I am going to be showing those moments with you, the reader. I hope my vulnerability in this process is encouraging to other writers, who may see themselves in my struggles. So. Join me. I can’t wait to meet you all.