About a Woman
I have the first novel in a trilogy getting ready to publish — and the dedication is to a woman I never met in person
Even writers as brilliant as Virginia Woolf can’t always seem to find a place in the world.
We only shared email and text messages. She wrote for a publication website I’d come across shortly after going full time as a writer. I had been booted from the architectural firm I helped found and worked at for 3 decades — and figured I’d finally put serious time into writing before running altogether out of time.
A fellow architect grad had said ‘Marry an heiress’ if I wanted to retire wealthy. I wouldn’t disagree if the goal was to reach for wealth and glory. My mother taught me to seek gold in other ways. Funny how powerful a hold she put on me without my realizing it growing up.
It was a new experience. I’ve been writing since grade school, but this was difference — now I was writing for purpose.
Reading the online articles this editor wrote for the website, her tag line said she was interested in critiquing the work of strangers. Not in those words, but to the same effect. So I sent a first message, and she replied — just like that. Huh.
We live in a world of electrons flying into the universe but still need people to touch — and push us against our precious beliefs to clarify them.
Previously I’d tried reaching editors the old-fashion way — pitch letters and email. Got one response, nicely declining, but at least the editor had manners enough to respond, so I thank her.
That route to publishing can’t be healthy for anyone’s morale. I don’t know what to make of the pre-Internet publishing world. If they could promote and print millions of Danielle Steel novels — not that good bodice rippers don’t sell — but surely some editor somewhere was looking for better, no?
Silly person.
There has been a flurry of angry birds on the Internet chirping about what’s going wrong with it, though they forget how seamlessly we connect with others across the world. Last summer I got a response from a woman in Kyiv from a piece about Reading Lolita in Tehran. I will frame her message as proof if nothing else.
So back when I started this full time writing craziness, I asked my newfound Internet editor person, did she think it made sense to rewrite a 600 + page novel I’d never tried to publish, and carve it into two? That was my pitch. What I received in return was a gift of such generosity, I keep thinking about it years later.
What this woman led me toward, point after point of ‘red pen praising’ as she called it, was a superior way to think about the craft. Though there was very little praising in what she wrote back. But now I have the first book ready and the second one on its way. I can finish the third once I decide on an ending.
I can say that now.
Looking back, it was an amazing time, even if it didn’t register while it was happening. Email after the next, for several years we went far afield from that first question, often because she’d start another topic —for the most part about writing. I’d get her email at midnight often beginning with a question. She must be West Coast.
She was certain I was a typical male, i.e. not to be trusted. Couldn’t be budged, so I stopped trying. Yet she kept asking me ‘what did I think’ questions about writing — mostly. She flirted but never admitted it. I recall there was a boyfriend. We exchanged no photos and no phone calls — only words blowing out into the ethers.
There was a presence to the lady, bursting as she was with a passion for writing — and equally for life. She was a scientist with a doctorate and a fellowship in Scandinavia who had turned to studying writing. We had that much in common — changing careers in midlife. It’s a compulsion — the need — to write.
When I name-dropped Gormenghast she didn’t blink. Parenthetically, I would not put Gormenghast on a reading list. One shouldn’t be reading Gothic tomes past college. Oh, I kid the Mervyn Peake fans out there, all three of them.
My Internet editor woman person approached writing with a sharp eye, ordering writing theories like biologists order their phyla. My impression: if she could prove the rules, she could grasp what a great work was composed of. The methodical way she was going about it, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had found the formula. She was that intense.
Back then, I was also reading Steven King’s On Writing and Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style, The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne. I actually did a Story Grid analysis of the said novel. I don’t do Story Grid any more, though I learned stuff.
I like Steven Pinker’s attitude about old writing conventions — they’re not all of them useful — and he thinks it’s time we retire Shrunk and White.
“Do you know POV?”
“What?” It was too late after a long day to come back with a chipper response. Oh, I forgot to mention — I was still working my day job when we started our exchange. The memory is slip-sliding away — see it sail like a ship over troubled waters. Sail on silver bird…
Thinking, yeah, I understood ‘point of view,’ but not the writing slang. I never knew it was a subject of discussion all its own. She wagged a finger saying ‘of course it is.’
There are rules about POV; some I take issue with. I do not know how you would ever want to write a love scene of any depth without being in both their heads. Otherwise, it’s missing half the story. That’s my rule.
I suppose you can do it one head at a time, but that takes long as hell, and I was working to reduce the word count. Besides, if he/she does this thing to her/him will she/he experience the same? Discuss among the class, and be sure to get all the pronouns right.
But what my editor woman person said about POV stuck; and it became a thing — figuring how to write repartee from separate points in the same scene without making readers think tennis match instead of story. Another editor, Anne Hawley, called it ‘bobbing heads,’ which is pretty close to the problem. If you’ve never tried fiction, you’d be surprised how easy it is to mess up — and how hard it is to break old habits.
“And do you know character development?”
“Yes, ma’am. Since I was a baby.”
Setting out to write a new character, mostly what you know of them at the start is maybe an image, a situation — and a one liner if you’re lucky. And the point of view is how you introduce this character, and how reliable is the narrator? Point of view is a writer’s best weapon. Even detective writers like Ross Macdonald knew about characters development.
“What do you know about a ‘story arc?’ Again, not a subject of study back when I was learning the trade. But from reading, recognizing a story’s arc is intuitive. Some writers do this better than others. Some can’t find it — I’m thinking Sally Rooney’s Ordinary People —polished writing but no arc, just little wavelets flat-lining to the finish. If I were one of her characters, I’d rather do beer bongs in a Sligo pub.
They say dark winter is emotionally hard to cope with. I don’t know for certain; she never said. But maybe it was the weather my online editor couldn’t take. Abruptly during one long, sunless spell, her mood turned troubling. More than once she said she thought suicide was the better alternative — might even help the living after she’d gone.
When I read those emails, all I could do was babble about the misery she’d leave behind — she had a teenage son, for god’s sake! We both knew I was no therapist, much as I tried. Though I can speak to grief.
I’d been too close to that kind of misery not to believe her. She demanded I knew nothing. One Sunday morning I sat to write a long, rambling email. I told her about Ryan, my own teenage boy. Hearing her response, she was on a far side — she was on Ryan’s side, with no way to reach her. Depression killed my boy his brother thought would take us all to a happier place. Suicide leaves a black hole that can’t be filled.
From then on, I stayed on edge, afraid to say anything she’d mistake. I was never sure how she resolved things, but we continued an intermittent correspondence. She helped me title the third book of poems about Ryan. She declared books need subtitles, thus Love in Winter — Missing Ryan. She endorsed the love and loss twined together. She had that gift.
Times when she was happy were a surprise and a challenge. She glowed with her personality. She knew things about writing, viewed it so differently that I needed to straighten up and pay attention — get smart about it —reminded of those very few gifted teachers who made me reach. Like that.
Then in a burst, she offered her young adult fantasy for comment. She had infrequently asked me to comment on other writers she was working with, but nothing of her own. No explanation other than what do you think? She sent me early drafts by text messages, no preamble, no explanation. If I didn’t get it, my slow imagination was not keeping up.
She must have known by then, I loved challenges. That was such a compliment.
She sent single scenes and longer passages by phone texts, night after night. Her second major scene described the protagonist: the 13-year old daughter and parents waiting dockside to flee London by steamship when these other-worldly dark creatures come at them — and the girl’s powers are first displayed.
The only clues as to time period were the crystal clear physical descriptions — nothing so obvious as ‘in the days of Queen Victoria’. Vivid. And she could jump scenes so fast, I needed to read them a second and third time. She didn’t condescend to write easy fiction — for young adults — or for anyone.
She composed these scenes by cell phone. Did I mention? When I asked, she said she found it the easiest way to write, like pen and paper would burn her to the touch. My sense was she was a writer who wrote faster than she could finish the thought. Something about texting helped slow her down. Reading her work, it was easy to see she was a natural.
I hate writing grocery lists on my phone.
When I ‘changed jobs’, I lost most of those texts with a change of phones, and I didn’t figure it out until it was too late to recover them. I had read enough of her world, beginning in London, plunging deep into a fantastic mythology, then returning to fly like a bird to the Italian Lake Country, I could have easily finished that story if I’d kept those texts. I nearly asked her permission, but I felt sure she’d be gone.
The website she wrote for announced her sudden death of an unknown cause. Otherwise I would have never heard. They reprised some of her best writing articles. And moved on — what else could they do? I sent in requests to talk but heard nothing back.
At one point when we were exchanging messages, I needed her mailing address to send her the check for what I owed. She came back with an address in a Virginia country crossroads village not far from where I live— been there, driven through it many times, We’d bought furniture from a woodworking company right outside her town.
I had assumed she was a west coast lady for sure when she wasn’t traveling to Stockholm for her research project.
She knew all along how close we lived— and never said. Other side of the world was not where she was. And like Virginia Woolf, her brilliance didn’t save her. Maybe it saves none of us, and I’m too stubborn to accept that.
So my book, Kill Devil — Come the Storm, is dedicated to her. Notice the subtitle. It’s such a small thing, except I miss her aggravating, demanding, searching emails at midnight when I need to go to bed. I miss her exactly like I knew I would. God, it hurts.
