Novel about Four Ex-Nuns

For the past two days I’ve been stymied about what to write for today’s posting. Then this morning, as I sat at the computer, organizing my array of blogs as bookmarks, an idea came: Why not share something about my manuscript for a novel about four ex-nuns?

         An old adage is to “write what you know.” And I do know something about nuns and ex-nuns. Also, I know something about the thought process that can lead to suicide because in the 1970s I’d struggled with those thoughts.

         The story developed from my wanting to explore what a suicide does to the family and friends left bereft and angered by the self-inflicted death of a loved one. As the main characters, I envisioned four ex-nuns, the mother of one of them, and a priest.

         Why ex-nuns?

          Because most people expect them to be women of deep faith.

         But what if the suicide of a beloved adult child of one of them tests that faith? What will moor them? How will the death affect their relationships? Who else, beyond the four of them, will be affected by death and by the changes within these women and their history with one another?

         I began working on this manuscript in the late 1980s, after I became a freelance line editor, copy editor, and curriculum developer. In 1984, at the age of forty-eight, I’d resigned from a well-paying and demanding position as the manager of the curriculum department at Winston Press. One of the reasons for my resignation was that I wanted time to write my own manuscripts.

         My freelance days were full-time busy with projects and with teaching evening courses on professional editing at several different junior colleges and universities in the metropolitan area of the Twin Cities. Nevertheless, each morning after breakfast, I’d enter my home office and write creatively for an hour. That led to two romances that never saw publication because, after all, what did I know of romance?

         Then the idea for the ex-nun story came to me. I wrote the first draft in a year, but laid it aside because the writing seemed uninspired. However, the manuscript taught me a great deal about writing. Its most important lesson was to let characters take hold of a story and direct it to its end.

         I hadn’t known that could happen until one morning when I came, unwillingly, to my Apple computer to write a new chapter with a new voice. Each chapter of the draft was in the voice of one of the ex-nuns. Three of them had already moved the story forward, but the fourth—Ruth—had been given no chapters of her own. The truth was that I’d developed an antipathy toward her because of what the other characters had said about her.

         Here's what happened that day:

         Reluctantly, I began Ruth’s chapter with her arrival at the protagonist’s home. An awkward conversation ensued between them. Ruth started to say something, and I suddenly realized what she was going to reveal. Her whole background—the story of a childhood tyrannized by abuse—flooded my mind.

         I heard myself say, out loud, “Ruth, you’re not going to tell her that are you? Please, Ruth, you’ll be hurt!”

         I began to cry at the pain and agony Ruth had endured. Tears trickled down my face and fell on my clenched hands.

         I felt the overwhelming disappointment of her life—a life that explained her barbed replies to those who tried to get too close to her.

         Then Ruth’s resolve coursed through me.

         I lifted my hands to the keyboard, and her story unfolded with its own grace and graciousness.

         My tears accompanied it.

         When Ruth ended her story, she, too, cried.

         And I?

         I embraced her. 

        Truly, to understand all is to forgive all. 

        From then on I counted Ruth as an aspect of myself that I now understood and loved.

         Writing, as you can see, is healing.

Two Axioms about Writing Bestsellers

When interviewed, successful novelists often say that the best thing beginning writers can do to enhance their craft is to read the classics, other good literature, and the genre for which the aspiring author wants to write.

         It’s only by doing the latter that a writer knows how that genre is being written today and what appeals to modern-day readers.

         Many nineteenth-century writings are now considered classics. But when contemporary readers try to read the long descriptions and philosophical musings in these novels, they close the books—unread. Today, many busy readers have neither the time nor the patience for that type of writing.

George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), author of Middlemarsh,

which some critics consider the finest novel in the English language.

         So many aspiring writers read more contemporary novels to find out how to be successful today. For example, the prolific James Patterson, a best-selling author of thrillers, writes in short chapters. A number of successful novelists now emulate him in their writing style.

         I’ve read that readers today want shorter books and shorter chapters because they often have time to read only a few pages before having to do some other task. So Patterson and other writers who want to copy his success insist that aspiring mystery authors keep their chapters short, shift from scene to scene, and keep the action moving relentlessly.

James Patterson who’s written innumerable bestselling novels since the 1970s.

 Some readers have the notion that all published novelists become wealthy. These readers peruse articles that mention the advance a novelist got and the number of books a writer sells and believe that they, too, can become a multimillionaire by writing a bestseller. And that’s true. They can.

 But writing that bestseller, finding an agent, and getting a contract isn’t easy. And the truth is that few novels win the interest of enough readers to become bestsellers. Bestselling is always iffy.

Frustrated, these aspiring novelists do more homework and discover what type of fiction is being written today and is most often bought by readers. Their axiom becomes: Write what’s bringing in the big bucks! According to an article in the ProActive Writer Blog,

. . . of the people who buy at least one book at year, 8 out of 10 buy a fiction book . . . [but] out of the same group of people, 8 out of 10 will also buy a non-fiction book . . . Of the people buying at least one fiction book a year, just under half (48%) buy what is classed as Mystery, Thriller and Crime. . . . The second most popular book genre was Science Fiction with 26% of readers buying Sci Fi books, ‘Literature’ was close on its heels with 24% and Romance is worthy of a mention with 21% of the market.

         Now why am I writing about this today? I’d like to share with you my own first attempts at writing and getting published. When I became a freelance editor and curriculum developer in 1984, I spent the first hour of each day writing. At that time, romances were among the biggest sellers.

Nora Roberts' career began with romances.

After becoming a bestselling novelist,

she has gone on to writing women’s fiction and mysteries.

         For ten years, while in a deep depression, I’d read Harlequin romances because they ended happily with no concerns about the social issues that so worried me. These romances put me to sleep at night. In a way they kept me from throwing in the towel on life.

         So when I finally yielded to my lifelong desire to write, I bought into the axiom to write what’s bringing in the money: I picked romances as my genre. I thought I could establish a reputation with romances and then move on to historical fiction.

         I wrote two manuscripts; sent them, one by one, to Harlequin; and received two rejection letters. And why wouldn’t those stories be rejected?  I was forty-eight years old, had seldom dated, had never been in love (although I loved many people), and what I knew about sex could be etched on the edge of the left wingtip of an unemployed bee.  

         I’d read romances, but I knew nothing about the subject matter. In my craving to be published, I’d picked a popular genre to which I could bring no life experience. I finally did get published, but only when Dulcy, the cat with whom I lived for seventeen and a half years gave me our story. The one we had lived together.

         So for me another axiom proved true: Write what you know, not what’s popular. I’ll share more about all this with you in future postings.

Peace.

PS: The article quoted above is quite short and worth reading for all of you who have some interest in writers and what they write.

The three photographs/drawings of novelists are from Wikipedia.

Sentence Structure for Paragraph Writing

At Saint Mary’s Grade School in September 1946, words and I became friends. An earlier posting explained how Sister Mary McCauley invited our fifth-grade class to learn forty-five prepositions. With these prepositions + a noun and a verb we learned to construct and claim sentences. 

            A second posting detailed how she then introduced us to the other parts of speech. Ultimately, she explained their use in sentences, such as subject, predicate, object of a preposition, direct object, indirect object, predicate nominative. With this information, we built more sentences.

            Here’s a sentence describing what I see right now: On her fleece-lined cat bed Maggie snores genteelly. Sister Mary McCauley would explain that this was a simple sentence with one subject—Maggie—and one predicate—snores.

            Today I’ll pick up the thread of those two earlier postings by describing how, in sixth grade, I learned about the three types of sentences and their variations. Once again, Sister Mary McCauley used magazine pictures to encourage us to build sentences that later appeared on bulletin boards.

            For our picture, we built a web of simple sentences of subject + predicate. Next came compound subjects—Maggie and Ellie snored. Next, compound predicates. Maggie snored and stretched. Finally, compound subjects + compound predicates. We then wrote paragraphs that used the four types of simple sentences we’d learned:

A) one subject + one predicate

B) compound subject + predicate

C) subject + compound predicate

D) compound subject + compound predicate.

Using these letters, Sister Mary McCauley gave us a roadmap for a paragraph. For example: A, B, D, B, A, C, A. Each day she presented us with different magazine photos and a different roadmap.

           

            We then explored compound sentences. Maggie snored and Ellie stretched. Now Sister Mary McCauley began to use the word clause to describe any group of words with a subject and a predicate. Then came roadmaps for paragraph building with the four types of simple sentences + compound sentences and their variations.       

    

            In seventh grade, she introduced us to complex sentences and their independent and subordinate clauses: As Maggie snored, her human composed a blog posting. Once again, roadmaps such as S, C, CX, C, S, S, CX. Using that roadmap, let’s write Maggie’s story today.

(S) Maggie sleeps contentedly on my computer desk. (C) Sometimes she snores, but often she settles deeper into the fleece-lined pillow and purrs. (CX) As she snoozes, I soundlessly leave the desk. (C) She’s weary from her dreams and my absence does not disturb her. (S) Then the sound of the can opener reaches Maggie’s finely tuned ears. (S) She leaps from the computer desk and races down the hall. (CX) When she spies the bowl of tangy tuna sitting on the floor, she hunkers down to the business of the day: eating.

Maggie 

By seventh grade, the roadmaps had gotten more complicated and detailed with various kinds of simple, compound, and complex sentences. Thus, did I learn to vary my sentences so as to move a reader quickly or slowly through a story.                  

Just think of all we know and take for granted as we write. Daily, we sit at our computers and type our postings and comments. The nouns and verbs present themselves to us as subjects and predicates, direct objects, objects of prepositions.             

We don’t think about parts of speech or sentence elements; we simply communicate our thoughts in the English syntax. We don’t need to know these names or terms and yet I admit to taking delight in those roadmaps—both in the 1940s and now!

How about you? How did you learn to write so well?

The first three photographs from Wikipedia.

Permutations of a Novel Manuscript

More than two hundred years ago, Robert Burns wrote, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.” That’s happened today. I meant to write about diagramming. But instead, I feel compelled to share the permutations of a manuscript on which I’ve worked thirteen years.

            Back in 1999, while on a walk, I heard myself murmuring these words:

You want to know what? Speak up! My ears refuse the sound. Old age you know. You want to know who Yeshua is? Undoubtedly he is answer to prayer.

I’m old now. Lame. My joints stiff. My eyes rheumy. And memories fade in my setting. But in one memory I am ever young. The remembrance of that day when God’s promise took root in Elizabeth and me. It is not in me to forget. Who can forget benediction? Not I, nor one of mine.

This speaker had to be Zacharias—the father of John the Baptist. The next day, I walked again on the path carpeted by red and yellow autumn leaves and spoke these words:

Trying to trick me are you? You ask a deceptively easy question. Whom do you represent? Antipas? For months, I’ve preached repentance, holding fast to God’s covenant with my people. Question and answer. Yeshua is both. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. Obviously, you do not. And so I speak in words of one syllable: He is the one.

Clearly, someone must have asked Zacharias and John, “Who is Jesus for you?”

I began to write. With the working title Who Is He for You? the manuscript became a series of monologues spoken by those who peopled the Gospel of Luke. Friends described these as “spiritual reflections.” No novel here.

            In 2001-2002, those reflections became “almost a novel,” when I introduced a character named Ephraim. The twenty-seven monologues became the ribs; Ephraim’s crisis of faith, the musculature, held those ribs together. I called this The Jesus Interviews.

            A wondrously kind editor praised the writing, but turned down the manuscript. It was too predictable, she said. Most people know what happened to Jesus and the manuscript closely followed his life as an itinerant preacher.

            In 2003, a friend who’d written two historical novels published by HarperCollins pointed out that the manuscript lacked dramatic tension. It was about a man finding his way—with the focus on the way. To create a novel, I needed to focus on the man.

            That same year, I asked a biblical professor to advise me as to the novel’s authenticity. With his help, I realized how little I knew about the Jewishness of Jesus. The professor provided me with an extensive reading list so that I might steep myself in first-century Judaism. I spent the next two years reading and absorbing the works of a number of biblical scholars—both Christian and Jewish.

            In late 2005, my study impelled me to write a third incarnation of the manuscript: The Yeshua Spy. (I had decided to call Jesus by his Hebrew name: Yeshua.) My new plot put Ephraim into a dramatic situation that would reveal his character. Yeshua, however, tried to usurp the manuscript. I had to wrestle it away from him so as to keep Ephraim and his crisis of faith front and center.

            Fast forward to 2012. I have written and polished nineteen drafts of a manuscript I now call The Reluctant Spy. Throughout this long writing saga, I repeatedly tried to find an agent to represent the work. No luck.

            So today I find myself once again awaiting news from my historical novelist friend who is reading that nineteenth draft. Will she think the plot plausible? Is there enough tension in the story to engage the reader? Is there an audience for this iconoclastic novel? What do I do next?

            Rabbie Burns also penned these words: “Hope springs exulting on triumphant wing.” Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Photographs from Wikipedia.

Intro to the Life of a Wordcrafter

Welcome to my new blog. For the past year, I’ve written an on-line memoir entitled coming home to myself. On it, I post a story from my life each Wednesday and will continue to do so.

            However, in the past twenty-six years, I’ve dreamed often and ever of becoming a published writer. Part of my dream has come true because of a wonderful editor who recognized the sweetness of a cat with whom I lived for seventeen-and-a-half years.

            Yet since the publication by Crown of A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story, I’ve had no luck with finding an agent who’d be interested in representing the stories and novels I’ve written since that cat memoir was published in 1992. Nor have I been able to find another traditional publisher willing to take a risk on my writing. Yet I continue to write . . . and to dream.

            In this blog, I’ll share my dream with you as well as the “blood, sweat, and tears”—to quote Winston Churchill—that are part of the writing life.

            Perhaps you’d enjoy learning more about the ins and outs of getting published. If so, please return to this blog every Sunday for a new posting.            

            Here, I’ll share with you how I learned the craft of writing, how I’ve researched agents and editors, how blogging has enhanced my writing, and how a small press has now published and energetically promoted a second book about Dulcy—the cat who started all this.

            Of course I’ll also discuss the difference social media makes with regard to promotion as well as many other topics, such as self-publishing, that are part of the writing life today. If I receive comments that express writing/publication concerns, I’ll use these as the foundations for future postings.

            I hope you’ll share the crafting of this blog with me. Let me know with your comments what you’d like me to write about. If I have a personal experience that might serve as an example of what you’re interested in, I’ll post about it.

            I hope to see you back here this coming Sunday. My posting then will detail how four friends I’ve met through blogging helped me retitle a book in the hope that it would sell better and find a more fitting cover for it. That’s all happened in the past three whirlwind days, and I’m so pleased with the result. As my friend Elisa says, “I’m living the dream!”

            Peace.

Photo of books from freedigitalphotos.net