Unpacking

A writer friend I've known for nearly two decades sends sections of her manuscript to me every few weeks, and I send mine to her in Virginia. Every Tuesday evening we talk on the phone. Part of the time we just catch up as friends; part of it we spend giving each other feedback on our work in progress.

Now that I'm into the next phase of revision on Judith I am discovering the value of that exchange, and every other criticism group I've belonged to since I started writing. Just one remark my writing partner made weeks ago, jotted in the margin of Chapter Three, has deepened the tension of the story as a whole.

While on vacation I met an author doing a booksigning. She and I chatted for fifteen or twenty minutes. She very kindly made several suggestions that are changing the way I see writing, revision--and promotion.

Let me just say I am so very grateful for the friendship of other writers.

Feeling the World Come Alive

I've finished the post-research revision on Judith. Though I took the manuscript with me on vacation, I truly took a vacation for the first time in years and did not touch the story (or give it any conscious thought) until the last day, when we had stopped to visit my writing partner in Virginia on the way back to Kentucky. For the first time in several years, Rita and I could savor our mutual feedback face to face instead of over the phone.

Back home in Louisville, I checked in with my characters, especially Judith herself, to feel what she (and her world) need to come fully alive. Over the last ten days I've been revising . . . the first chapter of the novel. One slow pass, page by page, to make sure each new character is visible as a physical being. Another slow pass to insure that each one is located clearly in space. A third--and a fourth--to allow Judith's sense of faith to saturate all she says and does.

On one of the last posts here I wrote about my sudden (only several decades in the making) insight that revision needs no rushing, and in fact requires us to slow down. Now, as I live that, I cannot describe the joy of switching off my internal clock, the sense that I need to hurry in any way. I am a voracious reader, but for the last ten days or so my character's reality leaves me no time and little interest for other writers' stories. (Though I am compiling a list of books to read when I step out of the cave. Whenever that happens to be!)

beachmeansbeach

beachmeansbeach

That was my friend Kristine's special email address for messages and information and organizational data for our annual trips to the beach.  The group of eight or more women who gathered in the canal-side condo nicknamed "The Delaware Consortium" by someone I once knew.  We talked and knitted, cooked and ate and talked, Talked and visited the ocean, which Kristine always called "the big water."

For the first time since soon after Kristine died, I'll be visiting that part of the world again. I could say this upcoming vacation will be bitter sweet, but not only do I want to avoid that cliche, I have no idea how it will feel to see the places where I last saw my friend, or to visit the places that feature in the memoir she inspired me to write.

That will be the topic of my next post a couple of weeks from now.