Tabula Rasa: An Editing Experiment

I'm going to try something new.

For the last few months, I've been rewriting the second novel in my series (set in 1855), which is the very first novel I ever wrote.

I found my voice halfway through this novel, so editing the first half has been a very odd experience.

I'm sure most writers know the process I'm about to describe, but I'll describe it anyway.

When I write first drafts, I do it from a dreamlike state much like a self-induced hallucination. Almost all writers do it. It's how we make our scenes real and sensory for our readers. If we're living out the scenes in our imaginations, it's easier to get the details right.

When I edit, I am much more rational. I'm looking at sentence construction and characterization to make sure it rings true.

This works just fine when my first draft is in my own "voice," as was the case in the second novel I wrote (set 1825).

But given that I had not hit my stride when I initially drafted the first half of this 1855 novel, I've had some difficulty claiming that earlier prose and bringing it to the standard I would like. Because it's not just a matter of editing. It involves revisualizing and rewording. Sometimes I feel as if the words I put on the page two years ago are restrictive...they cramp my ability to form new sentences and imagery.

So here's my tentative solution. When I feel the time is right, which is not just yet, I'm going to go back to those first scenes and rewrite them tabula rasa, from a blank page.

I already know what happens in these scenes, especially now that I have made the necessary changes to plot and point-of-view. All I need to do now is get away from the pressure of the existing text and reconstruct the events in my new words, in my natural voice that flows so much better than that early work.

Have you ever done this? Have you kept the events and characters of a chapter, but rewritten it from scratch to change the style of the writing? I would love to know how it worked!

And if you have other editing wisdom you've gained while editing old work, please pass it along.

Roadblocks

I'm driving along towards my daughter's summer camp, minding my own business, not hurting a fly. I have allowed exactly enough time to get there, plus an extra five minutes. I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.

As I zoom down the hill into the valley, I see something up ahead. Oh no. It can't be. An ugly orange-and-white sawhorse informs me that the road ahead is closed. Cops gesture smoothly to the right. They don't seem to care that this is the only way to the bridge across the river.

Don't they get it? MY ONLY ROAD IS BLOCKED. If I wish to get to my destination, I'm going to have to drive fifteen minutes down the road and fifteen minutes back. My daughter will miss half of her first class. I will be embarrassed, and mostly, I'm just sick of driving. Haven't I driven enough? Is the world conspiring against me despite my best efforts to do everything right?

I've been roadblocked twice in the past two months.

The first time, I rolled down my window as I passed the friendly traffic policeman manning the barrier. "Hey, is the bridge closed...?"
"You can still get there by the access road!" he called as I whizzed by.
Whew. What a relief! Only a two-minute detour.

The second time I encountered the roadblock, the bridge was completely closed. The detour was so packed and the trip so brutally long that I completely missed my doctor's appointment on the other side of town. I spent an hour-and-a-half driving a route that should have taken thirty minutes. My frustration during the first part of the drive was intense. But once I realized that I had missed my appointment, I became more philosophical. That was the route I had chosen on that morning. I wasn't able to get on or off, at least not at that moment. I had to take a deep breath and settle in for the ride, whether that portion of it was pleasant or not.

Roadblocks happen to writers. They just do. One minute, we're cruising along at 60 mph, happy as beach bums on the Pacific Coast Highway. Then blam! Someone pops up that orange barrier. Just to make it all the better, the clouds open while we're stuck in traffic, and torrential rain pours into our open topped convertible.

"Hey, I finished my book!"
"Sorry, we have too many other queries like yours."
"Hey, I got an agent!"
"Sorry, your first book didn't land a contract."
"Hey, I got a book deal!"
"Sorry, we like this novel we contracted but we need you to rewrite 50% of your story in the next 60 days."
"Hey, my book came out!"
"Sorry, it didn't sell enough to justify another contract for you."

I've seen many of my writer friends run into roadblocks over the course of the past three years.

Some get frustrated.
Some give up, turn around, and go home.
Some persevere and discover it wasn't as bad as they thought.
Some persevere and discover it WAS as bad as they thought, but they still don't give up.

Roads are blocked for a reason. We may not always know why, even much later.

We may end up on roads we don't like. They may not be as scenic as the routes we had planned. We may rail against the disappointment of this road. We may pull over, abandon our cars, and walk away.

Or we can keep going and trust that we're always going somewhere that we need to be. Even if that's through a dark valley. Even if we feel like we're driving over the broken pieces of our fondest hopes.

We all hit the roadblocks. They don't stop completely because we reach one milestone or the other.

Eventually, I always discover that the detour is more valuable than the road I had planned for myself. It just takes me a while to accept it.

Until then, I have to rely on faith.

Have you hit any roadblocks, in writing or otherwise? How do you feel about that detour?

That Dread Word 'Romance'

OK. I admit it. I have a hangup about my genre.

I don't like to call my work "historical romance," even though that's its official label.

Technically, it's "inspirational historical romance." In fact, I might even go farther and say it's "inspirational historical romantic drama." But that's getting slightly ridiculous. When people ask me what I write, I usually say "historical fiction" and leave it at that.

So why don't I like to call it romance?

What's wrong with a good love story?

Nothing. Nothing at all. I couldn't have written my novels if I didn't believe in the value of love stories. I do write lots of other elements into the novels as well, but the love stories are central and bind the other elements together.

But I don't like to call them romances, because the average person on the street usually has a mental image of "romance" that is not at all like the stories I write.

Romances are stereotyped as consumable, poorly-written formula fiction. This is hardly fair. Every genre always contains some poorly-written formula novels, as well as some excellent, original ones. Fantasy illustrates this point very well. I like good fantasy novels, but I do not like many fantasy novels on the bookstore shelves. There's a lot of formula fantasy fiction that imitates Lord of the Rings, featuring elves, magic, and a threatening evil overlord. I love Tolkien like crazy. I do not love the ripoffs.

Yet, if an author tells a stranger that he writes fantasy, he won't earn the scorn that we earn when we use the word "romance" to describe our work.

Why is that?

I think it's because the pornographic nature of many "romances" has ruined the reputation of the genre. Strangers do not assume that the statement "I write fantasy novels" equals "I write pornography." But they frequently assume that any romance must be at least partly pornographic. Many are not aware of the meaning of "inspirational romance," and they do not realize that "inspirational" is by definition "non-pornographic."

I've been hanging out in Borders recently. This past Thursday, I took a stroll through the romance section and picked up books at random.

I don't think I've ever done this before. I'm not a mainstream romance reader, so I just don't look at them much.

Every single novel I picked up in the romance section had pornographic chapters. Some were more extreme than others, but all featured explicit descriptions of anatomy and sexual acts designed to stimulate the imagination and produce a certain physical response in the reader. (Note: I'm not trying to say that all mainstream romance is pornographic. Novels labeled "sweet" by the publishing industry do not contain explicit sex scenes.)

Some people think pornography is OK. I don't. I think it dehumanizes and debases everyone involved, including authors and readers. The fact that a scene takes place in one's imagination instead of on a movie screen doesn't change the essential nature of that scene.

The goal of my work is the polar opposite of that dehumanizing fiction. I aspire for my characters to bring dignity, respect, and hope to readers. I want to show what happens when we demean and oppress others, but then show how a person recovers his humanity even in the bleakest circumstances.

I hope that I can depict love at its best, which is divine love. That kind of love calls us to be stronger, more courageous, more generous, and more forgiving. I believe that divine love lies at the heart of all true love between humans, and the best marriages are built on that kind of love.

That's why I don't like to use the word "romance," with all the baggage it brings with it.

How about you? If you write stories defined as romances, how do you feel about telling strangers that dread word?

If you don't write them, what comes to mind when you hear the phrase "romance novel?" Be honest now! :-)

A Writer's Small Miracle

I want to tell you about something amazing that happened to me last week.

But in order to convey the strange wonder of it, I need to tell you a few things about this first trilogy of mine.

My novels take place in Ohio and Pennsylvania before the Civil War. At that time, some Northerners defied the Fugitive Slave Law to help fleeing slaves escape to Canada.

In the novels, I tell the story of the Hanby family: real historical persons who worked on the Underground Railroad. The Hanbys left a mark on history for one reason. One member of that family wrote a song called "Darling Nelly Gray," which laments an enslaved woman lost forever to her true love. This song influenced people across the Northern United States to oppose slavery.

Most of you probably already know about the novel that did the same thing: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe depicted the humanity and suffering of slaves with such power that she converted many people to the abolitionist cause.

Because of the similar moral effects of the novel and the song, Americans who lived during the Civil War often called "Darling Nelly Gray" "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of song."

So here's the amazing part of the story.

All three titles of the novels in my trilogy come from a hymn.

My editor had asked me to find titles that sounded like scriptural poetry, and so I figured the best place to look for that kind of thing was in an old hymnbook.

I paged through this old songbook jotting down phrases, not bothering to record which phrase came from which hymn.

In the end, both my agent and my editor independently chose the same set of titles. Those titles had all come from the same hymn, but I hadn't recorded the name of that hymn.

So, late last week, after I had a few days to absorb my new titles, I became curious. What was that hymn that had provided such lovely titles for us?

I typed a few key words into Google and watched the search results scroll up. No, that first hymn wasn't right. It had one of the phrases, but not all of them.

Aha! There it was. The hymn that contained my titles revealed itself in the list of search results. My mysterious hymn was called "Still, Still With Thee."

I wanted to read the rest of the lyrics, so I clicked on the highlighted link.

And the first thing that came up, taking up half my screen, was a portrait of the author of this hymn.

The author of the hymn was Harriet Beecher Stowe.

I can't lie. It brought me to tears then, and every time I thought about it for the rest of the night.

I have spent four years of my life with this family and these novels. More than anything, I wanted to do their story justice.

The last couple of weeks have been rough in my personal life. I've questioned myself a lot.

But there's a touch of grace from above in the "accidental" gift of titles from Harriet Beecher Stowe across the gulf of time. I can't help but feel that in this thing, at least, Someone laid a hand on my shoulder to tell me that I got it right.