Category Archives: On Writing

Remember Forty-Eight

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Shortly after I hit Send on my effervescently happy post last week, like maybe five minutes later, I realized that while, yes, I am an inherently happy person, the reason for my particular buoyancy last week was I’d just hours earlier finished editing (at least for this go-round) a chapter in the book that was in need of extensive surgical repair. That accomplishment made me feel like a doctor coming out of surgery who says, “Good job in there” with a very undoctory happy dance thrown in. I am two chapters further along in this surgical repair business, and I know that when I get this chapter edited, my happy quotient is set to go through the roof.

Before I get us too deep in the weeds on the travails of editing a novel, let me tell you about my novel. First things first, right?

I’ve set the story in 1848 Ireland, the unrelenting year of death, disease and starvation in the midst of the Great Potato Famine. Historians call 1848 the Year of Revolutions in Europe, a general revolt of the lower classes against the aristocracy. Italy had its Young Italy and Garibaldi, and Ireland had its Young Ireland, a group of radical thinkers who fought for Ireland’s freedom and independence from British rule.

Brigit, a servant girl in western Ireland, despairs of the horror that has befallen the people during the famine, and in looking for a way to help them, she discovers Young Ireland and their dream of independence and a way of feeding the population. In the feudalistic system in place at the time, Irish landlords shipped all their crops to England to pay their taxes. Young Ireland proposed self-government and keeping the country’s food at home.

Brigit receives a vision of a young man, lying bloodied in battle, and it comes as no surprise to anyone (except Brigit) that her vision is of Emmet, a newspaperman in Dublin who works for the most radical of Young Ireland’s leaders. She, in the desolate countryside of western Ireland, and he, on the other side of the country in the political hotbed of Dublin, are two sides of the same journey fighting for the freedom of their country, first separately and then together.

It’s not all blood and guts, but there is plenty of subterfuge and adventure, good guys and bad guys, truth and lies. Young Ireland has a story to tell about their country that year, and I’ve snuck in at this late date to do it for them.

You might not have heard this one before, a throwback to the 50s and 60s, Sonny Cleveland …

Well read

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Ask any historical fiction author, and 99.5% will tell you that doing the research is the best part of writing a book. The other point-5 percent? They likely didn’t understand the question.

The vast majority of that research involves reading. I bet if you surveyed all writers, 99.5% of them, when asked to list their favorite hobbies on their resume, would put reading first. And the other point-5? Well, you know.

You can count me in that number. The 99.5 one. Reading is my passion, and I’ve always had it bad. Back in ye olde college days, I was once asked, “If money was no object and you could do anything you wanted as a job, what would you do? Too easy. Without giving it a second thought, I said, “Lying on a beach reading.” Think big, right?

I can see now that I had nothing in there about writing a book, just reading them. And read them I did. I’ve got bookshelves filled with nothing but Irish books, each of them with a piece of notepaper sticking out the top doing double duty as bookmark and cryptic research notes like “p.46 Clarendon institutes curfew; p.122 typhus outbreak; p.87-94 potato rot; p.12 total deaths in 1848.” Cheery stuff, but it’s my own fault for setting my book in Ireland during the Great Famine.

Besides books, there are newspapers. Lucky for me, the subject of my novel, the revolutionary group Young Ireland, published their own weekly national newspapers – 1848’s version of the alternative media – and those papers handed me a treasure trove of goodies. Thank heavens for newspapers. I’m not sure I would have had a book if not for the newspapers.

Nowadays, we peg a newspaper’s editorial stance and journalistic bent as leftwing or rightwing, liberal or conservative. The Young Ireland newspapers were a different beast; they can’t be slotted into left or right. The Young Irelanders were rebels, anti-British rule, pro Ireland’s independence, so if anything, they were libertarians. A breath of fresh air compared with the contemporary establishment papers, those read by the gentry, the Anglos and Anglo Irish Protestants. Those papers skewed heavily conservative; not just the editorials but the articles, the facts manipulated to serve the establishment. We love to complain today about the untrustworthiness of the biased mainstream media. But that’s so old news, a yawn. Biased media has been the norm since 1848 at least, and my guess is it dates to the first newspaper to come off a press.

I just might have to research that one day.

Look what I dug up for today – the Zombies in a video straight out of the 60s …

A bit of the blarney

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Last week, we discovered that what I wanted to do when I grew up was write a novel. The Great American Novel, no less. And by Great, I mean Big. Big like “Atlas Shrugged” or “Gone With the Wind” or “Anna Karenina.” (This bigness, it turns out, was my first big mistake. But we’ll save that for another day.)

So, I now had “Great” and “Novel” covered. All that was left to figure out was “American.”

Seemingly apropos of nothing … The year before my “I’ll write it!” eureka moment occurred (see last week’s post for eureka #1), I visited Ireland for the first time, and, boy, did I ever fall hard for its charms, hook, line and sinker. Ireland made me feel like I had been wandering all my life and had now come home.

Which is very poetic and all, until some years later someone told me that’s what happens to everybody when they visit Ireland. All of a sudden, I felt like tchotchke in a souvenir shop. With the air blown out of it.

Nonetheless, we soldier on.

My love of all things Ireland included their emigres. And there was my answer. I would write about an Irish immigrant who comes to America. The Great American Novel. Perfect. Except, 15 years and two children later, I still hadn’t written word one. Any notion of writing a book had completely disappeared. Children have a way of getting in the way. By then I was living in Massachusetts, and I found time to think about the book again. The Irish were a big part of Massachusetts history — Lowell especially, and of course Boston. The only thing was, everything I read about the Irish in Boston or the Irish in Lowell depressed the heck out of me, the antithesis of freedom and liberty. The politics were the worst. This was not the Irish in America story I wanted to tell. Massachusetts was a dead end, and once again, the book went on hold.

One of the things I loved most in Ireland was traipsing through the ruins of castles and churches and old abbeys, and that led me to start reading up on Irish history. Several books into my new hobby, I came to one in which the author devoted a couple of paragraphs to a rebel group called Young Ireland, who in 1848 led a rebellion hell bent on Ireland ridding itself of and attaining its independence from England.

My first reaction was who were these guys and why had I never heard of them before? And that was my second eureka moment: By golly, if no one else is telling the story of Young Ireland, then I’ll do it. It has all the elements I needed: freedom, liberty, heroes. Perfect.

And that, my friends, is how the journey of the Great Big Good Irish Novel began. It’s been quite the trip so far.

This morning’s sing-a-long comes from John Hiatt with the very talented Ry Cooder on slide guitar …

Delusions of grandeur …

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… or how I came to write my first novel.

The idea to write a novel came to me right out of the blue. This was back in 1986 if you can believe it. Thirty-eight years ago. (I just have to take a minute to get my head around how long ago that was. On the bright side, though, wouldn’t “All good things come to those who wait” apply in this situation? You’re all nodding, right?)

I say 1986 because that’s the year Barbara Brandon’s “The Passion of Ayn Rand” was published, and so it must have been that year she was the keynote speaker at the National Libertarian Party convention and autographing her book.

Late each afternoon of the convention, the speakers that day held salons, and as a convention attendee, I could choose whom I wanted to salon with. I chose Barbara Brandon. Not surprisingly, 38 years later, I don’t remember much of the discussion, except for this one question. Someone in the back asked Ms. Brandon why she thought no one since Ayn Rand had written a novel, like “Atlas Shrugged,” about freedom.

I don’t remember her answer, but to my ears it sounded weak. I shot up my hand.

It’s safe to say the tenor in the room was devotion to Ayn Rand. A lot of libertarians at the time came to that philosophy after reading Rand and had great respect for her writing. As for the person, Rand had a high regard for herself and did not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. She was not to be challenged.

So there went up my hand, certain I had a better answer: that likely everyone (or at least every libertarian) was too afraid to challenge Ayn in her domain.

Ms. Brandon did not agree with me, probably thinking I was a bit cheeky if not sacrilegious, and I sat down. And that’s when it came to me. My eureka moment: “If no one else is going to do it, then I’ll do it,” I said, although not out loud. “I’ll write the Great American Novel about freedom.” Like I was daring myself. I wonder, if I’d known then that it would take me 38 years to get it done, would I have been so eager to take the dare?

Funny. In the intervening 38 years, there hasn’t been a novel written with the major themes of freedom and liberty, so if nothing else, it looks like I have that niche pretty well sewn up.

A Monday morning treat – the angelic voice of Laura Smith …

Let the work begin

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The calendar doesn’t lie, does it? Any way I look at it, my vacation is officially over, and that means it’s high time I got back to work. And by work, I mean working on my book. Editing.

When I finished writing my novel back in November, I followed those who know these things, their suggestion to put it aside for a while, to give me and it a rest. Six months is what “they” typically suggested. Really? What was I supposed to do for six months? Write another book? I settled on six weeks. Another broken rule to add to the pile of rules I’ve broken so far.

More than once it’s occurred to me that if I habitually ignore the rules promulgated in these “how to write a bestseller” books, one of two things is going to happen: Either my book will a) get published (despite breaking all the rules) or b) it won’t (because I broke all the rules). I suppose if it doesn’t get published, I could always write another book and follow all the rules and see if that works. But if it does get published, then it really comes down to what are rules but to be broken?

Rules or no rules, the six weeks were up last night. Today I start editing. Once again, those in the know say this is the stage where the real writing happens. I have to ask, what was it I was doing for the past seven years – fake writing? It seemed like real writing to me.

Time will tell.

Writing is fun. Editing is not. Writing is also hard work, but it’s fun. Editing is hard work and not fun. Although I’m a proofreader by trade, I am not an editor. I can do it, but it takes both sides of my brain in full gear, and that’s work. But regardless of how much I like or don’t like to edit, it’s got to be done. And quickly. I want the editing round done by the end of June, when I will be attending a historical novel conference and get to hob nob with agents and editors and fellow authors. One of the rules, and this one I do intend to follow: Don’t talk to agents unless your book is ready.

That means that while you are out solving the mysteries of the world this week, I will be hunting down all -ing verbs and –ly adverbs and trashing them all. No more “Bella looked longingly into his eyes.” No, now Bella gets to hold his gaze in hers. It’s going to be a tough week.

For your Monday morning listening pleasure, Steely Dan …

You can’t do both

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That chair I mentioned last time – the one where I sit and write – this is it. Pen and notebook at the ready, cup of tea at my side. The chair gives me a view of my roadside garden, and on the other side of the road, the neighbor’s field, where his two cows often come to ruminate and regurgitate. Above their heads, a bald eagle often hovers in the treetops. I easily get lost in the beauty of it all, sometimes for much longer than I should.

The reason I’ve planted my backside in the chair is to write, not stare at cows eating their curds and whey. This reminds me of Edna Ferber’s rule about writing. She was a well-known writer in her day, the author of “Giant” and “Cimarron” among others. She and I lived in the same town in Connecticut, albeit in different eras and, if the town had train tracks (train tracks? we didn’t even have a stop light), her place was above the tracks and mine way on the other side.

So when Edna moved to her new home, she placed her writing desk at an upstairs window overlooking the back gardens that happened to be occupied by several bronzed, bare-chested young men performing their landscaping duties. Undoubtedly, Edna found much pleasure in staring out the window, inevitably not doing a stitch of writing. That’s when she came up with her rule: If you want to be a gardener, desperate to get outside and put your hands in the dirt, go garden. But if you’re going to be a writer, then write. You can’t do both.

I say, why can’t you? It’s all about pacing. Sort of like Hemingway, who didn’t garden but did like to drink. His rule: Write in the morning and drink in the afternoon. I garden in the morning and write in the afternoon. If Hemingway could find room for both his passions, then so can I.

p.s. Be sure to sign up to follow me. You’ll get a post from me every Monday morning with my scribbles and that week’s entry in my all-time Top 100 songs.

This morning, for your listening pleasure, Aaron Neville with a couple of friends …

Breaking all the rules

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For your listening pleasure …

I am in detox. To tell you the truth, it’s not going so well.

The detox is from my book, which is what “they” say to do – they being the ones who write books that tell people like me what I should do when I write my first novel. I’ve read several of these “From Blank Page to NYT Bestseller” books. I am pretty sure they were all bestsellers.

My main takeaway from all my reading is I have been doing it all wrong. First – and this is at the blank page stage – they say, write, keep writing, don’t stop to edit, just write, write, write. Sadly, my brain doesn’t work that way. It’s in my blood to edit. So that was the first wrong thing. Far too much editing far too early in the game. The second thing they say is to keep the book to 100,000 words, definitely no more than 110,000. Mine is 221,000. Houston, we’ve got a problem.

I broke the latest rule yesterday. The pros say that once you’ve finished the first draft, put the book aside for a good chunk of time. Take a break and come back fresh. I settled on a six-week hiatus. I made it to six days. It’s like an addiction.

Or maybe a rut. The day after I finished the first draft (Day One of the six-week hiatus), I came home from my walk and looked at the chair I sit in to write and said, “Now, what do I do?”

It turns out plenty.

Not least of which was listening to more music. Just a little taste …

p.s. Be sure to sign up to follow me in order to get my weekly missives, arriving in your inbox every Monday morning.

Pinch me

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Cue Rocky Balboa at the top of the steps: Look ma, I did it. I really did it. Ma? Ma? You listening?

But I digress.

Call this my pat-on-the-back post. Be-ee-cause … drum roll …

I FINISHED WRITING MY BOOK!

Apologies for yelling, but that’s me up on the rooftop, shouting it to the world.

I began writing the book seven years ago. This is not my “Astral Weeks Live” book over to the right of your screen; I’m talking about my new book that I have been slaving over for seven years. Seven years, nine months and twelve days, to be exact. But who’s counting? Seven years is a long time. When I started writing the book, gas was $1.97 a gallon. Now I’m lucky if I can get it for under $4.

The story I tell is set in 1848 Ireland. That was the year of revolutions in Europe, the peasants versus the aristocracy, the poor versus the rich. Ireland had its own group of revolutionaries, called Young Ireland, who fought for their country’s independence from England. And that is the story I tell, all 221,000 words of it. Not quite “War and Peace” but getting there.

There was a time early on when I wasn’t sure I would finish it.

I had divided the book into four parts, representing the four seasons. Part 1 is spring, and that’s where I started. Four years later, I finally finished part 1. Even I can do the math on that. Four years times four parts equals sixteen years.

Sixteen years to write a book? Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’d be lucky to be alive in 16 years. It became my overarching goal: Finish the book before I die.

Ma, I did it! And it only took me seven years.

p.s. Go ahead and sign up to receive future posts from me. Now that I am back in the land of the living, I am hoping to post at least once a week. It won’t be all book talk, but there will be plenty of that I am sure. Fortunately, I have other interests that I just love to talk about.