Insecure Writers Want to Know: How long do you shelve your first draft before you begin revising? Is this dependent on your writing experience and the number of stories/books under your belt?

Always good questions to contemplate each month with IWSG. The only book-length manuscript I’ve ever created is my college memoir. I’ve taken a few months before revising and creating yet another draft. The book is finally being beta read now. Yay! 

When I create short stories, however, I usually wait a week or two before revising. I request a few writer friends to offer critiques to help in revision. Then after revising the story and making it the best I can, I swallow—hard—and send the story out. Praying all the while that I have something marketable in the eyes of the gatekeepers. 

As a writer, I need to be careful not to get stuck in the vicious cycle of constantly revising my manuscripts. Has this ever happened to you? 

I was concerned that my problem with constant revision was happening with my college memoir. I was hooked on all my funny anecdotes. I loved them. I still do! They make me laugh in all the right places. But memoir needs to be more than a collection of funny anecdotes. People look to memoir to learn something about the writer/protagonist as well as themselves. Universal themes the editors call it. 

I didn’t wish to “use up” my generous beta readers’ time by sending them a lengthy manuscript that needed a lot of work. That’s why before I sent the whole manuscript out to beta readers, I had an editor help me finetune it. Have you ever used a developmental editor or book coach to help you write a strong draft of your story?

I’m also in the process of getting my website together. Victoriamarielees.com through hover. I hope to have it ready by July 2021.  

It will be interesting to see how you’ve tackled this month’s question. It’s wonderful having a topic to share our thoughts on each month. I am extremely thankful for all of you for being my sounding board and advisors in this writing and publishing journey.

Thanks for visiting! And be sure to stop by Adventures in Writing again.

This post was written for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. I’d like to thank our co-hosts for June: J Lenni Dorner, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, Lee Lowery, and Rachna Chhabria! Please visit them if you can. 

Our group posts on the first Wednesday of every month. To join us, or learn more about the group, click HERE. 

Story Genius Writing Course: The Origin Scene

Sometimes I feel so small in revision.

If you think about it, all stories begin with relevant backstory. For just as real people deal with the present based on their past, so too must our characters deal with the story problems based on their relevant past experiences. The key word here is “relevant” past experiences. Jennie Nash and Lisa Cron in my Story Genius course asked:

What was the pivotal moment in your character’s past that changed her outlook on life? This will be the “origin scene” that sets the character up for interpreting the present story problems. Even in memoir.

In my memoir about attending college as a mother of five, I felt highly inadequate for college—and amazingly so at the Ivy League level. Attending college is not something rational people do on the spur of the moment. Not even when the prospective college student is a mom challenged by an all-knowing educated person who determines that her child shouldn’t attend college because she’s not good enough.

In my mind, people who attend college spend years preparing for it. At the Ivy League level, students spend their entire lives in preparation for it. No, college isn’t something to take lightly. After all, I could fail out, proving that educated person and extended family members that I am, in fact, unable to succeed and therefore my child might be as well.

It all came back to me. The origin scene for my college memoir, that is.

It was early spring in 1973, and I was perusing the high school curriculum booklet given out by the counselors, dreaming of going away to college. At that time, I thought everyone who attended college went away to be able to concentrate solely on their college education. At least that’s what they did in movies and on television.

Boy was I naïve! We never heard of community college or college loans. My family had no money for college.

I sat at the kitchen table, selecting college prep courses from the curriculum booklet for high school. I was the second child of four in my blue-collar family, the first who wanted to attend college. Then my father, a machinist by trade, the realist in our family by necessity, took note of what I was doing.

“Vic,” he said. “What makes you so sure you can handle college?”

My hand went numb, the course selection form blurred on the kitchen table. Why couldn’t he forget about my earlier struggles in school? I tried to.

“Dad,” I choked out. “I’m on the honor roll now.”

“It takes more than that to succeed in college, Vic.”

The scene continues as my father hammers into my consciousness that our family goes to work after high school. As someone who struggled earlier in her education, I should accept that I wasn’t college material and move on in life.

Finally, Dad’s realism became my realism. I wasn’t cut out for college. I was inadequate to those attempting higher education. It ate away at my confidence to succeed in life. I needed to settle, not strive. This was my present, my future, my life.

This origin scene works in conjunction with a post on the ticking clock of a story.  

It wasn’t until I was a mother of five with a special needs daughter that I finally realized if you don’t take any risks in life, you have already failed.

I think the choosing of my high school curriculum scene was the first “relevant” past experience, the origin scene, that formed my belief of not being good enough for college. I also feel it shows the effect a significant adult can have on a child. It forced me to be sure not to do the same to my children.

Please offer any comments or questions regarding this scene or your own college preparation, for they truly help me to define the moment and improve the writing. Thanks again for stopping by Adventures in Writing and leaving a note. It’s greatly appreciated. 

Story Genius Writing Course: One Ticking Clock in Story

Crawling along in the
Story Genius method for
my college memoir.

A story is one external problem that grows, escalates, and complicates from beginning to end, Lisa Cron says in our Story Genius class.  Jennie Nash concurs. And, the ladies tell us, the writer needs to develop one overarching ticking clock with real life consequences. 

Right!

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Try it in memoir.

So I started with my misbelief that I shouldn’t attempt college because I’m inadequate to those seeking a college education. This was instilled in me when I was growing up and struggled in school. This belief kept me out of academia and away from failure, humiliation or displaying incompetence. Or so my father told me. I chose the successful path of secretary with a regular paycheck and married and became a mother like my mom, sisters, and friends.

I was safe in my cozy box of motherhood, safe from any fear of failure until my disabled daughter signed up for high school classes. Then I needed to choose whether to be a failure at guiding my children or disabled child or a failure at attempting college.

The ticking clock begins as I am forced by a comment made from a high school guidance counselor, an educated person respected in society, to either re-teach my daughter as best I could, the material needed to pass high school by educating myself first through college classes, or condemn her to only special education classes in high school.

So you may ask why I was so afraid of failure in college.

Because, in my mind, if I fail at my attempt to obtain a college degree, I have wasted the time I could have spent with the family, trying to achieve a goal that was not possible for me. My father would be right. I am not college material. 

But my family is everything to me. If I failed college, I would have wasted my family’s time, which is more precious to me. It’s ok to waste your own time but not someone else’s, especially when you love them.

So what do you think of my memoir problem and ticking clock? Any comments you offer are greatly appreciated. 

Story Genius Course: Internal and External Plots

I'm still hammering away at
the Story Genius course. It truly
is a difficult but impressive way
to analyze your writing.

Besides the constant thinking of “why does [anything and everything] matter to the protagonist” in the Story Genius method of writing and creating story, Lisa Cron and Jennie Nash, the two key editors and writers in the course, want us to develop an internal and external conflict for the protagonist to battle.

            I have no problem with this in my fiction. In my YA short stories, my protagonist is always battling some familial or friend issue on the inside while she is traipsing through a national park battling real life problems trying to save both herself and usually a younger sibling on the outside. These two conflicts, the internal and the external, converge and sometimes clash at the epiphany or “aha” moment where our hero discovers how to overcome both problems and save the day. 

            But in my memoir about attending college as a mother of five, it’s not that dramatic. In memoir, everything must be true. I can’t make it up.

            So I told my editor, in order to find resolution to my internal and external problems and struggles with inferiority in the memoir, I graduated from Penn.

            Guess what she said? …Right! “That’s just surface,” [wait for it] “go deeper.”

The internal problem must become a new way for me to look at a particular situation in life.  In other words, the editors of Story Genius want to know what college MEANS to Victoria.  What is pushing and driving the protagonist to go on – what’s making Victoria go to college? What keeps her continuing to complete a degree?

College was a method to better educate myself in order to help my children, especially my firstborn who is perceptually impaired.  She was the impetus for me to begin college at that time.  Ever since the school counselor implied that my daughter couldn’t handle college, that the special education department felt she would never be able to obtain a degree, I decided to be sure she can at least have that opportunity because I never had the opportunity to attend college.   

What does college mean to Victoria?  Although Victoria always wanted to attend college herself because in her mind college equaled intelligence, by the time she is a mother of five children, college equals the voice of reason in the educational journey of her children.  Teachers, counselors, and the learning consultants at school gave their educated opinion that my daughter, with her learning disabilities and ADHD should not go to college. But she wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. How can a mother not allow her child the opportunity to at least try to see if she can do it with my assistance as I’ve helped her all through her school journey thus far?

Fellow faithful blog followers, did I go deep enough this time?  What does college mean to you?  Thanks so much for any insight you may offer. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! 

Story Genius Course: Starting with Backstory

The Story Genius course started
as a book. Lisa Cron uses concrete
methods to guide story creation.

That’s right, fellow writers!  Before you begin to write forward in your story, you need to understand who your protagonist is and why she acts the way she does.  What happened in her life before the story opens that makes her think and act this way?  Just like real people, characters are molded by prior life experience. 

Understanding the backstory of the protagonist [as well as secondary characters] is vital for fiction writers to create believable characters for their stories.  And that helps readers to connect with the characters and care about them.

Lisa Cron of Story Genius believes that writers must understand their characters before they can even begin to write the story present.  Cron believes stories are character driven as opposed to plot driven.

Cron’s concept of a character-driven story helps me to see that a particular story can only happen to this character because of how the character was raised or because of specific events that have happened to this character in her life before the present story action occurs.     

It’s a concept of specifics:  this particular story can only happen to this particular character because of her past and how she interpreted it.  It’s the character’s beliefs that drive the story forward and help the reader to connect to her.   

A particular character with her own beliefs and specific backstory works in memoir as well, although I must admit that I feel like I’ve been on a therapist’s couch for weeks now.  Looking for the “why” of my insecurity in college is giving me a complex—now, in my life’s present story. 

I need to discover why I didn’t attend college right after high school and how and where my insecurities developed. 

Oooo!  I thought.  I can tell you why I didn’t go to college right out of high school.  We didn’t have any money for college.  And my family didn’t believe in loans for college.  We went to work after high school. 

My editor writes back:  “Think deeper.  Why?”

My response:  I was signing up for high school courses at the time I found out there was no money for college.  It was the early 1970’s.  I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood.  This was the norm—especially for females.  

The editor wrote again:  “A deeper why?”

Me:  Dad said you only go to college if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer.  [But we still didn’t have any money for it.]

Editor:  “Why did he think that?  How did this make you feel?”

…Do you see why I’m developing a complex over this? 

“Dig deeper into your feelings and memories,” the editor said.  “Pull out how you developed your insecurities.”

I wanted to write back:  Stop picking on me!  You and Story Genius are adding to my insecurities.  I might require a real therapist couch at this rate.

But I didn’t. 

Thanks so much for stopping by.  Feel free to visit Adventures in Writing again to learn how I make out with all these questions that are invading my dreams right now.  Please leave any insight you may have.  It is always greatly appreciated.  

Intense New Writing Course: Story Genius with Lisa Cron and Jennie Nash

It’s time for a new draft of my memoir about attending college as a mother of five.  I’ve been tweaking and revising the same version, but I think I need a fresh start.  So I signed up for Story Genius with Lisa Cron and Jennie Nash. It’s the science behind story—brain science. 

This is an intense 10-week Writing Workshop

…I’m overthinking the application process already.    

            I'm a scene painter.  I enjoy reliving and fleshing out the scenes [the stories of my college experiences] in the memoir.  I think that I am showing the reader my home life, my experiences, the characters who are myself and my family.  I am progressing through college and hope that I am taking the reader along for the ride.  I think I’m inviting the reader into my life at that time so that he or she can experience this journey.

This memoir is supposed to be the insightful, yet humorous, adventure of an inexperienced and obsessive mother with young children trying to navigate the world of academia.  I feel it would help other parents/mothers or older non-traditional people who always wanted to go to college but who might think they can't juggle the responsibilities or might feel it's too much trouble to begin or too late to even try. 

This is my journey of attending college as the primary caretaker of five young children, the oldest being special needs. I had never attended college, knew nothing about how to begin, and worried that my brain no longer worked after being home with those children. I began at a community college close to home when my youngest, twins, started second grade and my oldest started high school. I received several honors and won scholarship to the Ivy League to complete my B.A.

            We had to fill out an application to begin the course.  One of the questions was what’s your book about?  And I wrote this:

Victoria is your average mother of five who never went to college. She always wanted to, though. So when her youngest starts second grade, she jumps in with all her insecurities and a few skills she learned from her children: whining for help from her college-grad husband, falling asleep on textbooks while doing homework in hopes that osmosis works, and peppering professors with questions until her brain wraps itself around a new concept.

Through awards at the community college level, Victoria earns the opportunity to attend the University of Pennsylvania to complete her bachelor’s degree in English.  With this major success, all the insecurities just overcome to obtain her associate’s degrees rush back to haunt her. She wrestles with her belief to never let opportunity pass her by and tries to conceive how she can possibly handle the Ivy League.  It’s not a casual four-year institution a mother of five attends, right? 

Victoria realizes that the only regrets in life are the opportunities never taken.  How can she be content to stay as she is while opportunities flourish around her?  She goes down to the wire, signing up and choosing classes at another university that offered her scholarship before finally accepting the University of Pennsylvania’s invitation to study.  Victoria recognizes that she can’t retreat back into the home and be content with what she has.  Not when the world of academia graciously invites her in to stay a while with scholarships to further enlighten her mind.

            I’m in the second week of Story Genius and all my insecurities are firmly in place as I try to come up with the point of this memoir.  How about: The only regrets in life are the opportunities never taken like I said in my application?  What do you think?  Your insight is greatly appreciated.  

An Academic Foundation Can Be Had

Remaining positive for the

  new draft of my college memoir

All I needed was time.  But that’s what I lacked.  Or so it seemed.  Many times, the older students have fulltime jobs and/or a family to care for.

            I fell under the “family” category—all five of them.  As I’ve said before, my oldest daughter is special needs.  She required more of my time for her education to be a success.  My children were my life.  Their future was in my hands.  I couldn’t mess it up.

            But so was mine.  I couldn’t mess up my future, my education either.

            So I started studying the college’s idea of basic math that summer before I began college.  I bought a used math textbook at the college’s book store and tried to figure out percentages and fractions and basic algebra.  I even took the text and a notebook on our family’s camping trip.    

            Somehow, the math didn’t seem so basic to me.

            I drove my poor husband nuts each night for two weeks.  After days of hiking the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia with young children, after trying to feed seven people with one old two-burner Coleman stove, after campfires, telling stories and putting them all to bed, he was not in the mood for math.  [Imagine that!]

I needed to wait for the basic skills math classes to begin at college.

Luckily, some of that basic math helped out in a funny little requirement called college-level science because there wasn't a basic skills class for science.  The only drawback with my college science course was that Chemistry was all new to me.  It’s true, ladies and gentlemen; I didn’t know what a periodic table was.  And don’t even ask me what all the little numbers meant!

            Then there was the literature.  No basic skills classes here either.  I mean I heard of Shakespeare.  Not Homer.  Never read either's work.  I hadn't even read Hemingway.  I didn’t have literature in high school.  I didn’t know people wrote books about journeying through Hell.  I read mysteries and adventure stories.  I needed to start collecting literature and begin reading before classes.

            The traditional college students, the ones entering college directly from high school, possessed all this foundation.  I couldn’t cope in college without it.  I needed to make the time to obtain it. 

Did you find your college preparatory classes in high school truly prepared you for college?

Inferiority Comes to Live at My House

           

Looking across the chasm of

   confusion to a new version

      of my college memoir.

 And she was worse than a newborn baby, draining my concentration so.  Inferiority was in my face constantly.  Every time my younger classmates, like experts, maneuvered around the websites or programs in the new technology during class, there she was, laughing at me as I tried to jot down notes and perform the steps necessary to complete the task, desperately trying to keep up with the class. 

            Inferiority would hide inside my book bag and sneer at me as I racked my brain trying to come up with some concrete connection to the literature text at hand, or find some philosophical theory that could explain the actions of historical public figures at the moment of crisis or even explain the historical context of a poem.  Where did my younger counterparts come up with all these ideas?  Why were they so much braver than I?  

At home when I tried to write my critical papers, I had to shove Inferiority into a cupboard.  You could hear her scratching at the door and rattling the doorknob.  I’d post a note on the cupboard door: “Beware, Mom’s Inferiority is trapped inside!”  I didn’t want the kids opening the door to find out what all the noise was and then have Inferiority escape only to fly to my fingers at the keyboard and keep me from writing. 

No, I needed to get past this feeling of inferiority.  I needed to learn to speak up for myself during class if I had a question, ask why something was wrong if I didn’t understand, and challenge a grade to see how to improve for the next time.  This is something I had been teaching my children their whole lives.  Now it was time I did the same. 

Believe in myself.  I needed to believe in myself.  But that blasted inferiority.  I felt that everyone knew much more than I, had read all the appropriate texts prior to enrolling in the class, or at least had the foundational courses necessary to excel in the present class.  I was twice their age and never heard of half the technology used at college, never mind the pertinent movies or literature.    

To gain that belief in myself, I needed a solid college foundation.  But I wanted to attend college classes.  Now.  Playing catch-up becomes a reality.  Everyone knows foundations take time.  And time is another issue for the older student or parent attending college. 

As I begin a new revision of my memoir, please pose any questions you may have about my college journey as a mother of five or share some insight from your college journey.  It would be greatly appreciated.  

Framing the Memoir: How Does Motherhood Fit into the College Experience?

Fall frames the world in color.

A writer friend asked me if my memoir was about how motherhood influenced me as a college student or was it how college influenced me as a mother.  While I realize that this is just one aspect of the memoir, it is a good question for it helps to frame the memoir. 

I think the memoir is more about how motherhood influenced me as a college student.  Yet the reverse can also be true.

            Let’s take the first part of the equation.  How did motherhood influence me as a college student? 

            Parenthood is a lifetime career.  It’s not something we stop doing once the children become adults—even if we wanted to.  At the time I started college, I was the primary care-giver to children in grades 2^nd through 8th.  It was my job to help these children become successful in their education and any life obstacles they might encounter.  This was no easy task with my oldest daughter having learning and social problems.  I needed to be there for them. 

I took the parenting job seriously, maybe even obsessively.  I wasn’t free to think only of my own trials in education.  I had to be home for them in the beginning.  This is what made attending college so difficult in the early years of my ten-year journey.  After devoting my life to my children, I needed to allow time for college work.      

            Yet motherhood affected my college journey in other ways, too.  Because I was older, because I was a mother, sometimes I saw the wants and needs of my fellow students at the community college.  I would ask their questions in math class, study with them, help them with their essays.  My husband said that I had gained more children going to college, and perhaps he was correct.  I didn’t mind.  These young students helped me with technical difficulties and math or science concepts I hadn’t experienced recently in the basic skills classes I needed to supposedly bring me up to college entry.  My children were too young; hadn’t had this upper level education. 

           

            And because I was a more mature student, running her own home and family, I brought a commitment to my college education that a few of the younger students may have lacked at the community college level.  My fellow students permitted me to be the group leader in projects.

            Now because I was a mother, I brought home my newfound knowledge to my children, not that they always appreciated it, of course.  I took the notion of parents being the first teachers of their children seriously—again obsessively.  It was my job to be sure the children could survive in today’s world.  I also wanted them to be properly prepared for college as I was not.  I demonstrated time and again what professors were looking for in essays, what was necessary to study to do well on a college exam. 

            Wow!  When I look back on all this I can see why my family is glad that I graduated.  Hopefully the children will see my mothering skills as a good thing in their lives.  Only time will tell.

            What do you think?  Did I answer my friend’s question completely?  Do you have any questions for me about my journey as a mother of five attending college?         

Memoirs: More Than Just What Happened

Memoirs require depth and not merely what transpired during the slice of life being recounted through story.  The writer needs to look up from her reminiscing, and explain the wider experience and the meaning of it to the reader.

College wasn’t for me or my siblings.  We were not encouraged to attend college right out of high school.  There was no money for higher education in my house growing up.  We four children were told we had our education, and it was time to enter the workforce.  My siblings and I accepted it; we had no other choice.  Most of the children in my neighborhood did the same thing in the late 1970’s, especially the females.  My family didn’t know about community college, never went looking for it.  

Through light backstory, intermixed with feelings on this, I could expound upon what it felt like to be left by the roadside on the journey to a formal degree.  I always wondered what it would have been like to live on campus and study.  Of course at that time, I had no idea how extensive a college education was, how expensive.  It looked exciting to me because it was just outside my grasp.  College was for the wealthy, my family had always said. 

On a personal level, I looked for education wherever I could find it, wherever I could afford it.  The law office where I worked talked about sending one of the secretaries to paralegal training offered locally.  I jumped at the chance and told the office manager I would do it.  But then the lawyers decided against it.

To add depth to my memoir about going to college with five children in tow, I could research the history of my local community college or perhaps the birthing of community colleges in general; the two year colleges that possibly helped make higher education more affordable for the masses, and then add snippets of information--not in a solid block, but rather throughout my experiences.  In a later section of the book, I could compare the idea of local community colleges to the 300 plus year history of the University of Pennsylvania, an international university, an Ivy League, part of the ivory tower in education that I thought I could never reach.      

Let's take a look at a few of the memoirs I’ve been reading and see how well-known writers interpret their stories.  I find the writers connecting beyond their own experiences in order to make sense of the larger themes of belonging, of learning from those who struggled before them.  

In Beth Kephart’s Still Love in Strange Places, Kephart describes the very land where her husband grew up and connects the volatility of the land to the political tensions of El Salvador.  The turmoil of the country mirrors Kephart’s trial to understand her husband’s culture, to feel a part of her husband’s culture. 

In Colleen Carroll Campbell’s memoir My Sisters the Saints, Carroll Campbell connects her experiences grappling with her Catholic faith in the context of personal difficulty and tragedy with various saints down through the centuries, demonstrating that Carroll Campbell is not alone in her struggles.   

These thoughts dance across my dreams as I continue to read memoir and hammer away at my revisions.  Your thoughts are always welcome and greatly appreciated.    

Beginnings: As in Where to Begin My Memoir

            

On a journey to a better
beginning for the memoir

Beginnings are the most important part of books, I feel, be it memoir or fiction.  Writers lose sleep over this. 

*Yawn*  [Excuse me.]

Writers need to pull readers into their stories.  Up till now, I’ve been starting my memoir with the decision to begin college.  With what my life was like before I started college. 

            I understand the in medias res concept, opening the story in the middle of the action.  I open chapter one of my memoir with a crucial scene from a YA short story I had published in Cricket Magazine, but I intersperse it with motherly duties to show my conflicting time:  writer/mother.  Then I [seem to] dump the reader into the reality of picking up the children from two different schools on a rainy day.  I allow the reader to interpret the children’s personalities through dialogue and interaction or offering one line quips that speak volumes about them.  Still, I can’t help but think this is a clumsy way to introduce my children to the reader.

            While I ask what I feel are probing questions about myself in an attempt to convince myself to sign up for courses at the local community college, I wonder if maybe my present first chapter should be a prologue instead, minus the opening writing scene, of course.  What have you found the purpose of prologues to be in books?  Reading memoir, my experience has shown that some memoirs have them and others don’t, and that these prologues tell of the essence of the book.    

            Chapter two starts with my toting the children along with me as I sign up for courses at the community college.  Perhaps I could show the children’s personalities there in that scene.  Maybe this is a better way to show in medias res, the actual beginning of my college journey.  Jump right into the journey instead of thinking about it.  Instead of showing what my life was like before I started college.

            Do you feel there is a need to show the pastoral setting of my life before the decision to attend college?  I do offer glimpses of my life with the family throughout the college journey as it affects my journey.  Thanks for any advice you may offer.

The Voice in Memoir

Be true to your voice in memoir

Restructuring the memoir is fine.  Works in progress go through many revisions.  The first draft is usually…ahem…vomit, anyway.  Okay, at least mine are.  And I need to remember not to compare my “drafts” with the finished, edited work of other writers. 

But as I redraft and restructure my memoir, I keep coming back to the same sticking point.  Every time I grab a new blank document and try to open the memoir pithily, enticingly, I lose my voice.  My memoir is not a philosophical tome.  It’s meant to offer advice and humor to parents contemplating lengthy endeavors, taking time away from the family.  How a parent can cope with this.  How they can succeed.  It’s meant to inspire and show others how to take courage and attempt something they may feel inadequate to accomplish.  And, of course, it is meant to entertain.

Humor helped me get through ten years of attending college part time while raising a family.  It simply has to be part of my memoir.

The thing about my writing style is my voice.  Whether I’m giving presentations or writing memoir, it’s the same.  It’s me.  If you’ve read any of my camping adventures on Camping with Kids you get the idea.  A few critique partners, professors, and writing facilitators noted that they enjoy my dry wit. 

In my memoir, I have the voice of innocence and the voice of understanding or experience.  Memoir needs these two voices.  The narrator must discover something from her journey through memory and share that information with the reader.  I must take the reader into the scenes of my struggles as a parent in college.  I can’t seem to move forward in my memoir any other way.  I can’t babble on in thought.  I’ve condensed scenes dramatically and left others bleeding on the floor and added much, in the first two chapters, by way of insight.  Perhaps this pass through revision will leave me feeling better prepared for beta readers. 

Oh, by the way, my short stories don’t share this humorous voice.  Not everyone, characters or people, can be me.  And this is probably a good thing.  Just ask my family.

The Need for Universal Questions or Themes in Memoir

Darlings everywhere!  Where's the meat?

The necessity to attend college brings to mind the universal questions through which to filter my story.  To build suspense, I need to show the search for the answers to these questions through my writing, my internal dialogue, in order to offer the reader insight into any journey he or she may be planning. 

Possible Themes: 

Making the right decision.  The idea of seemingly selfish ambitions of a mother at odds with the demands of motherhood. 

Taking the risk.  The tension between being a responsible wife and mother to 5 children and a college student. 

A sense of belonging.  Feelings of being an outsider at college.  It's not just the younger students who suffer from this.  Older students can feel they are starting behind the traditional college students because of a lack of college preparation. 

As my darlings lay, kicking and screaming on the library floor, I contemplate these questions and possibly redrafting my entire memoir.  No one ever said writing was easy.  And if they did, throw them on the floor with my kicking darlings.

Any insight you can offer, please do.  Thanks for reading.

Searching For That Need to Attend College

Kelly Writers House, my favorite place to be
on the University of Pennsylvania's campus

Why did I attend college at the time in my memoir life?  A time when my twins, the youngest, started second grade.  A time when my learning disabled, oldest child needed me more than ever at the dawn of her high school years.  A time when all five of my young children needed me to be the calm, supportive mother they had always known.      

            This reason to go to college should be a necessity and not simply a desire one of my writing friends said.  And I believe she’s right.  But what can that necessity be?

            At the time I was considering college in my memoir, I was knee deep in motherhood.  But I also wanted to publish short stories in children’s magazines.  I wanted to establish a writing career. 

            [I know…who didn’t.]

            This was before social media and blogs.  Before the internet craze.  For me, it was before writers’ groups and organized courses outside the home.  My husband was sole provider of seven and travelled occasionally for business. 

I felt as if I were trapped in that home, sometimes, shackled to motherhood and unable to better myself through formal education.  I adored my children.  Still do.  They are, after all, my life.  My happiness.  I wouldn’t change a thing.  Really!

But after redoing the twins’ baby room with rejection notices—the paper kind, remember those?—I decided that education was key to publication.  At least I felt it would equal the playing field between me and published writers, established writers, the writers I was reading who talked of their college experience in articles they wrote in the baby’s and lady’s magazines I read.  I didn’t have this experience.  College was not an option when I graduated from high school in my blue collar neighborhood.  Only a select few went off to college.  I knew nothing about junior college or college loans.    

It took me seven years to get the courage to enroll in a community college, in classes that met regularly—outside of the home.  I had taken correspondence courses, again before the internet craze, in children’s literature.  These only whet my appetite for that renaissance understanding of the world.

            Little did I know how ill-prepared I was for college.  But that’s what the memoir is about.  My quest for knowledge and how I grappled with feelings of insecurity, feelings of selfishness leaving my family behind to become a college student and gain knowledge.  About finally becoming published.  About someone wanting to read my words.  About someone learning from my words.    

            You beautiful readers have been very kind to me, leaving notes on my blog.  Please offer any opinions as to whether you feel this may be that need to attend college I’m looking for or offer your precious guidance, so necessary to my writing life.  Thank you.   

Revision: A Fact of Life—for Writers

Sometimes I feel like I'm always at my computer.

Hook the reader in the beginning of a story or novel.  Yes, even in memoir.  It’s too easy to just close a book and move on if the story’s not interesting.  But to keep the reader hooked throughout the duration of the book, now that’s the difficult part.

            As I pick my way through yet another revision of my manuscript, I’m attempting to see how I can ratchet up the adventure:  the decisions, the obstacles, the fear of attending college as a non-traditional student, a student with five children, a student with a special needs daughter, a student who has a home to maintain and a family to keep in check as her children grow and face their own educational and life obstacles. 

You see, I had completed a revision of the memoir.  And I still laughed in all the same places.  The flow is there; scene into scene, chapter into the next chapter.  There is a timeline showing primarily my maturation as a college student as well as that of my children growing up.   I’m a scene painter, as I’ve said before.  Perhaps I missed my calling and should be a screenwriter or a playwright.     

However, the more I try to consider my college journey, the more my mind is divided with substituting for the media center specialist for the rest of the school year at the high school, the more the family and all their issues cloud my mind.  I think I need to wait for summer vacation and then hide in the library to seriously consider revising the tension in my memoir about attending college with five children in tow.  I think there may be bloodshed among my darlings in this memoir.   

Thanks for any tips you may offer as to how you handle keeping the reader’s interest in your story, be it memoir or fiction. 

A Life in Reflection: Memoir and Revision

            Hello, HarperCollins?  Are you there?  …I guess not. 

Reflection in Memoir is crucial.

            Time to rise from my knees, add reflection to my life, and revise.  It’s so easy to type, isn’t it?  So much harder to do.

            Writing is a career.  I need to remember this.  And like other careers, some tasks can be more difficult.  Revision.  More often than not, I understand narrative arc, characterization, and sense of place.  I know not to bog down my prose with too much detail.  [I try, I really try…]

            I know to hook the reader at the beginning of the story.  In medias res?  At least for my short stories, I do.  Build tension?  Definitely.  A ticking clock—whether age-related, as in my memoir about attending college with five children in tow, or literal—helps.  Each scene counts.  Everything used in story must be integral to the plot.  Always.

            It shouldn’t be “I, I, I”—even in memoir.  But how to break that cycle?  I’m a scene painter, but need to decide if each one is the right color for the memoir. 

I try to create flowing prose with varied sentence structure.  …Sometimes…I think.  Then again, I’m still in the market for a good critique partner.

            Knowing the rules of writing is one thing.  Doing all of them is another.  One at a time, comb the manuscript for potential errors.  Otherwise you’ll remain on your knees and fail to return to the computer.  No one said writing was easy.

            Do you have some revision tips to share?  Please leave a comment.  It is always greatly appreciated.  Happy Spring!  

The Need for a Book Synopsis to Clear the Brain

Journaling about Spring

Did you ever get to the point that you’ve been looking at the same material over and over and perhaps it was time to step back and analyze it?

            I’ve gotten to that point, and I think that a book synopsis is just the thing to clear my brain to see the manuscript as a whole, to see the turning points and character growth.  To see what I have learned attending college for ten of my children’s growing up years. 

            There’s so much information online about synopses.  I started with a post by Laurel Cohn which gave me general guidelines to set up a book synopsis, like keeping the word count under 500.  But what to include…

            I stared at my 14 chapters until my eyeballs fell out.  I knew I still needed to divide some of the latter chapters.  Finally, I decided to describe a few turning points in the synopsis and assure the publishers that I did complete my bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania.  Then I asked my good friend Jennifer M. Eaton to look at it.  As an experienced Y.A. novel writer, she knows about synopses. 

She asked me one important question.  “Where’s the humorous voice?” 

Leave it to the experienced writer to see through my thin veil of knowledge.

Simple solution:  Describe the college journey through my humorous voice in the synopsis.  Sounds easy.  It’s not. 

Luckily I had made topic sheets for each chapter so I knew at a glance where I had covered what in my memoir.  I found the anecdote about driving the children to the dentist for checkups and trying to tell them about the psychology I was learning.  This helped me study.  However, Pavlov’s dogs were easier to train.  The children kept pushing each other in the van and interrupting me.

I made study tapes for courses to listen to at the children’s swim meets, but then my ear jack disengaged and everyone heard about the horror of Holocaust during the dive competition.  My husband told me I wasn’t allowed to bring the study tapes to the kids’ events when he was present.  I combed the topic sheets for other gems to relate what I hoped was my humorous voice in the memoir.  

  

Why all this angst about writing a book synopsis at this time?  HarperCollins is seeking submissions and no agent is required.  They want adult fiction, romance, young adult fiction, memoir, illustrated non-fiction and more.  You can find details here http://www.wednesdaypost.com.au/ 

A bit more tweaking of the memoir and I’ll be searching for some beta readers.  Would anyone like to read a portion of my memoir or the whole thing?  No rush…unless HarperCollins comes to call.