Ruminations On My First Self-Editing Class

 

Ruminations On My First Self-Editing Class

Michael E. Field

August 2022

I am preparing for the first class of what is a new course for me, ‘Self-Edit Like a Pro: Creative Nonfiction’, and I am approaching it with some trepidation. My writings are my babies and nobody gets to call them ugly, least of all me.  At least the instructor, Maia, is a known entity, as well as you can know someone you have only met in online writing classes.  Due to circumstances, I am not in my usual place for writing. Rather than being in front of my computer with my keyboard on my lap, I am Zooming from my iPad in a community room. At the next table, somebody is doing a jigsaw puzzle; and, through the wall, I can hear strains of 1950’s songs from the ‘Down on the Corner’ Doo Wop singers, the rehearsal I skipped out on for this class. Fortunately, I was there long enough to practice the National Anthem as, next Saturday, we will sing it before the first pitch of the Durham Bulls AAA baseball game.

Maia commences by giving us a list of things to avoid in our writing or, in reality, the things to look for when we are self-editing as they are sure to creep in.  She helpfully and hopefully tells us to avoid adverbs, especially those modifying ‘said’ and its synonyms, as they are a telltale sign of lazy writing. I am not a lazy writer. When I overuse adjectives and adverbs, I make sure to use alliteration. I may not be literately and literally laconic, but I liberally use the same first letter whenever the opportunity arises. On Maia’s list of things to avoid, of course, are cliches. Looking at her list, I realize I may have to deliberately include some of these flaws in my next work just so I will have something to edit out! Oh, and Maia said to avoid exclamation points! She probably should have told us to avoid starting sentences with interjections and conjunctions, too; but she told us to avoid being ‘over-ruled’, i.e., not to let the rules of grammar suppress our natural voice. I am fortunate as my naturally deep bass voice is easy to hear, except it does cause nasty looks in libraries and such. But I don’t think she meant that voice.

Maia proceeds to tell us, in an ‘ly’ free way, that we should assemble a personal editing checklist of lapses in good writing technique, ones we know we are prone to. Five things on the list – make five passes through the rough draft document to excise them. Oh, and Maia said to not put a space before and after an ‘em’ dash; but Word just did it for me, so I now have a singular flaw to edit out of this piece.

Maia starts her list by sharing that she overuses the word ‘great’. Great! I have been taking multiple semesters of writing classes from a flawed writer. At least that has given her editing experience which she can impart to us! She asks the class to share their top of mind writing peccadillos. I could have said using 25 cent words when simpler ones would do; but, instead, I volunteered that, in response to a writing prompt, likely from Maia, I had identified ‘but’ as my favorite word in the English language, at least based on the frequency with which it appears in my writings. Only five ‘buts’ so far in these four paragraphs so I am below my average. Oh, and the ‘what to avoid’ list included avoiding repetitive words and phrases, at least that is what I think the slide said.

Next exercise, we begin ‘learning by doing’, which is Maia’s ‘go to’ teaching method, akin to throwing a baby into the deep end of the swimming pool. I have brought a 5000-word, hard copy rough draft of Introduction to Family Secrets and a purple pen, as I was told red ink may trigger some deep-set memories of a vindictive teacher intent on crushing the spirit out of my creative soul. This piece needs to be edited until, unlike my ‘dulled by time’ memories, it glistens as it is the lead-off essay to a collection of memoir vignettes. With a 15-minute time limit set by Maia, I don’t start at the beginning; rather, I go to a section I know is problematic. The unifying theme, and title of the collection, is Secret Keeping. A friend, reading an even rougher draft, has kindly said that I was beating the reader over the head with the theme. Knowing that structural editing is required as well as fixing grammatical errors, I work inside out, tweaking words in the rough part, then going forward and back, looking for lapses in consistency I have created by my edits.

And there it is - a sentence with not just one demon to be exorcised; rather, I have spotted a run-on sentence with the word ‘but’ used twice. By my standards, the sentence is not ridiculously long, a mere 40 words or so. Certainly not an egregious abuse of the reader for which I should be flogged. But, given my propensity for overuse of that word, this is a prime target for skillful self-editing. I split the run-on sentence into two and change the second ‘but’ to ‘save’, indicating that this final fragment is an exception to the first two phrases of the original.

That set me to thinking, and, later, as I walked the dog on a crisp, moon-lit night, I reflected on why I had initially, very intuitively, written that problematic sentence. Oh, and we aren’t supposed to say ‘moon-lit’ as that is a dry, boring fact; we are supposed to report out the sensations that the moon produced in us leaving the reader to grok that the moon is out without being told. Well, I am not a werewolf, so I didn’t feel anything. Further, Clement Moore set a pretty high bar with ”The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow, Gave the lustre of midday to objects below.” so I am going to stick with ‘moon-lit’ unless the moon actually is glinting off crusty snow like a white tapestry embroidered with thousands of sparkling diamonds, which it is not because it’s Spring.

A sentence with the word ‘but’ used twice would seem to indicate that some convoluted thinking process was taking place, but that is not the way it felt as it was happening. Parsing it in my mind as I walked, I realized that the peculiar sentence structure reflected the way I go through life. The sentence is me; writing that way is my natural voice. The first part of the compound sentence lays out the expected for the reader, but my life rarely goes as expected. So, the second part of the sentence exposits the unexpected, unexpected, at least, to the reader – I am kind of used to it by now (and Word did it again so now there are two flaws in this piece to edit out!) Here is where it gets interesting. In my inner world, there is almost always an ironic twist to the unexpected, sort of an inside joke that only I get. As I write my memoir essays, I want the reader to be able to see that inner world, to be in on the joke. I need to include the ironic twist.

Now the question arises, “Why not edit these three things – the expected, the unexpected and the ironic twist – into separate sentences?” The answer is one simple word, “Texture!” My life consists of texture. I hear music as textures, not melodies; I taste food as textures, not flavors. I process emotions as textures, not feelings; I experience life as textures. Texture is no one thing, it is the harmony and dissonance of things taken in combination. Were I to put the expected, the unexpected and the ironic twist into separate sentences, it would be like putting them into separate containers. They would be blocked from creating texture by the artificial barriers of punctuation, or, as the British say, ‘full stop’! It would be like putting rose petals, jasmine, and frankincense into separate jars on a shelf and saying you had created a potpourri. The three have to be in the same container – mingling their aromas and colors, yet each standing out – for there to be texture.

So, I will continue to build potpourris of texture with my words as that is my natural voice, that is my life. Yes, it is convoluted; and, yes, far too often I am the only person who sees the humor in the ironic twist. Not being seen for what I am or, rather, hiding what I am from people’s sight, secret keeping, is the story of my life. That is why now, buffered by age from the judgement of others, I am capturing my inner stories in my memoir vignettes. And that is why those vignettes will always have convoluted sentences made complex by the texture of the meshing and gnashing that occurs when what the world expects and the unexpected that is my life come together. Rather than groan at paragraph-length sentences larded with multiple conjunctions, I want the reader to laugh at the ironic twist bringing up the end, like the curly tail of a pig. One can’t cut the tail off a pig and display it by itself. One needs to see the expected snout, the unexpectedly large body, and the iconic twisted tail as one animal to appreciate the ironic incongruence of that tail.