Editing

This is an editing month and it is every bit as engrossing and time-stopping as writing. I find that as it first comes out, I have a dense, rather viscous style. So, the first thing I do to edit each chapter is to search for all the descriptors using “had”, “which he had given her” for instance [thank you, Anna, for this one]. It’s a past perfect tense, but it certainly slows narrative down, and often the phrase isn’t even necessary. I need to be careful of redundancy of any kind, though there is a use for it, like the refrain in a song.

I also am on the lookout for the adverbs “really,” “quite,” “always,” “just” and so on, which qualify statements. It’s “always” hard for me to commit to statements, as I know there are “often” cases in which they are not “quite” true. But in writing fiction, you can afford to be definite.

My sister Naomi’s notes are invaluable in sharpening the memory picture. She is consistently encouraging, but also she sometimes says: “The fishing trip made me uneasy. I kept wanting to know where Dad was in the boat.” We both know that, though she had a slightly different perspective, we experienced the same sensual details. Whether someone outside our family will find the culture described in the book as vivid remains to be seen.

Don’s ideas about writing help me a great deal as I work with my characters. He suggests:

-                     When introducing a character make sure they are indelible, inevitable in the context of the story, and move the story along.

-                     Make sure an action could only have come from that particular character.

-                     Make the character’s feelings clear by gesture. What is the character doing?

-                     What does the character think as they do things?

Don also reminds me of analogies in filmmaking. He likes to the let the actor he is filming wander around in the frame. He feels this gives the character authority to tell his own story. If you follow a character too closely with the camera, it becomes more about the filmmaker using the character to tell the filmmaker’s story. We’ve seen a lot of that lately!

I want to free my characters to tell their own stories, allowing them plenty of context in which to move about, to play. If we are, to some extent, created by the families we live in, by the widening circles of church, school, community, and country, when we look at an individual we are seeing the culture out of which he came. How often, when we learn something about someone’s background do we say, “Oh, of course, now I understand.” Fiction gives me the freedom to build up the thick culture in which my characters live and act. Editing allows you to reframe, heighten contrast and sharpen the picture. Yes, it’s a little like Photoshopping, but with more infinite possibility, since language lets you work with the mind’s eye.

Color Photographs

Color snapshots start appearing in my photograph albums beginning in the early 1960’s. We were still using black and white photos for portraits. Both my high school and college senior pictures are black and white, probably because the annuals they appeared in were in black and white due to cost. But snapshots, taken by small Kodak cameras, begin to show the colors of our dresses, of the decorations at my senior prom, of our lake. (I remember my chagrin when I first saw my husband Don’s toddler photographs. They were in color!)

I’ve been fascinated by the complete reproductions of Life magazine which Google Books has provided us with at http://oldlifemagazines.com/ . You can buy the magazines here, of course, but you can also click on the year your want, and then the particular magazine and, if you scroll down and keep clicking, the entire thing comes up! If you look at Life magazines from the 1950’s you will often find serious coverage of the news by excellent journalists. By 1951 and 1952, the covers of the magazine were beginning to be in color, and the ads (lots of cigarettes and cars!) used color, but the great news photographs and glamour photographs were in black and white.

My early awareness of the larger world is from photographs in National Geographic, which began to use color very early, and the Life magazine, which arrived almost weekly. Dad went to the post office to get the mail in our tiny North Dakota town, but the photographs in these magazines were like ticking time bombs spread out on our coffee tables. No wonder the kids in my story “set the controls for the heart of the sun"! I tried to read the books listed in Life as those kids my age were reading and started a penpal correspondence with someone who had written a letter to the editor at Life.

My earliest television memory is from November, 1956, when Russian tanks rolled into Hungary and we watched Sunday afternoon news programs, mesmerized as winter brought the cold that kept us in. Our parents had rented a television to watch that year’s political conventions, and when they were over, could not give it up!

In the March 30, 1962 Life magazine, a huge spread entitled “Jackie Leaves Her Mark on India and Pakistan” is all in intense color, and the ads are all in color, but the other news articles, and seven poems by Robert Frost, are in black and white. I believe that by this time, Life magazine was beginning to cover more soft news, especially in photographs, as they were unable to compete with television for hard news.

By 1963, I was off to college, which effectively ended my Life magazine and television news watching for quite some time, except around the death of President Kennedy. A television in our dorm lounge provided viewing of the continuous coverage of this world tragedy. By this time, however, my arrow was pointed out at the world, on a trajectory that would carry me further than I expected, though not perhaps so far after all.