Editing Process Begins

Last week, my thesis mentor and I selected a date for the thesis defense. On April 23 I will present my thesis to three professors. Two of these faculty members work in the Baylor English department. One works in the journalism department at Baylor.

With the board meeting in less than a month, I have begun editing the first 50 pages of my thesis. This has brought a wave of nostalgia, as several of the pages were written sophomore year. I've loved seeing how my creative writing has grown in the past two years.

One of the critiques my mentor gave regarded verbs. He told me to avoid weak verbs and to circle any verbs that weakened a sentence. In "Wild Mind," Natalie Goldberg said, "I decided to cut the fat away from verbs as much as possible and let them be immediate and exposed. I tried to stay in present tense as much as possible, even if it was simple past present time. It made the writing alive." 

Goldberg has written several novels on writing and editing including "Wild Mind" and "Writing Down to the Bones." 

I also consulted "The Elements of Style." William Strunk and E.B. White said, “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.”

Stephen King, one of the most prolific modern writers, said, "The road to hell is paved with adverbs" in his book "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft." After editing my verbs and omitting nearly all adverbs, I had significantly improved the flow of the short stories. 

My biggest grammar error is not using the Oxford comma. I have followed AP Style and left the third comma out in all series. Because these are creative stories, I must remember to use the third comma. It's been a challenge. 

I'll always prefer AP Style on this rule. 

The countdown continues to thesis presentation. But with my trusty red pen and helps from the professionals, I feel confident. 

Thesis Crunch Time

Yesterday I met with my thesis advisor and received a dose of reality. I present my honors thesis in one month, which means I will be writing over spring break. 

Soon my honors thesis will be bound in one of these books, seen in the Baylor Honors College. Learn more about formatting an honors thesis here. 

I sat down to write last night and no words came out. As you may have experienced, time pressure caused me writer's block. 

Hemingway always says it best. Read more of his quote. 

Writing had become painful, as the Hemingway quote explains. I needed help. I turned to Natalie Goldberg in "Wild Mind" for advice. She says, "Writing is not an enigma. It is a sport. Apply what you know about tennis, football, or swimming to your writing. I think we Americans are afraid of writing because we are afraid of the loss of control of the mind that writing entails. We are afraid of the unknown, of our own darkness."

Now I recognize that my fear of writing, more than the time pressure, arises from fear of the unknown. I don't know what's going to come out. Writing is the only aspect in my life that is not perfectly measured and defined. This can be terrifying.

So I began to write following Goldberg's Rule #6: You are free to write the worst junk in America.

Once the fear had faded, I took another look at why my stories had become so difficult. I saw that I did not have my characters anchored in a definite setting. I couldn't describe where they were because I couldn't picture it myself.

I turned to Donald Maass in "Writing the Breakout Novel." He says, "The breakout novelist does not merely set a scene; she unveils a unique place, one resonant with a sense of time, woven through with social threads and full of destinies the universe has in store for us all. She does not merely describe a setting, she builds a world."

Next I examined his Breakout Checklist for Time and Place:

Creating breakout time and place involves more than just describing setting.
Use psychology of place means capturing how a place makes a point-of-view character feel.
Conveys a sense of the times.
Portrays historical forces and social trends through characters.
Detail is the secret ingredient of breakout settings.

I had focused too much on a story map and not included enough detail for a setting.

While this story map is crucial, the reader needs to know where this plot is happening. 

So after I let go, I described the setting for myself, and then weaved the setting in my character's point-of-view. Suddenly my writer's block had faded and I could continue with my craft. 

How do you solve writer's block? I'd love to know. 

No Excuse: Write to Write

As a Baylor Honors graduate, I am required to write a thesis. I decided to author a series of short stories, centered around college-aged characters. I've written 45 of the required 80 pages. To finish the collection, I've found inspiration in a few books. 

Natalie Goldberg wrote Wild Mind: Living The Writer's Life. 

Her rules of writing practice are as follows: 

1. Be specific. 

2. Lose control. 

3. Don't think. 

4. Don't worry about punctuation, spelling, grammar. 

6. You are free to wrote the worst junk in America. 

7. Go for the jugular. 

Another inspiration has been Hemingway, who authored four collections of short stories including "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" and "Hills Like White Elephants." I particularly enjoyed the synaptic writing in "Hills Like White Elephants." 

My Creative Writing professor assigned Writing The Breakout Novel by Donald Maas. Some of his best advice discusses character development. His checklist for breakout novels includes the following: 

All stories are character driven. 

Engrossing characters are out of the ordinary. 

Readers' sympathy for characters come from characters' strengths. 

Choose a narrator based on who is changed most by the story's events. 

Now, I'm working on the fifth section of the thesis. Below is an excerpt from the third section, detailing one girl's battle with anorexia. 

Cold, hard cement. That was the last thing Ashley remembered before waking up and seeing the white room. Her roommate must have taken her to the clinic after she fainted and waited for her mom to fly in from Georgia. Ashley knew she was likely to faint eventually, that’s what happens when people starve their bodies, but her roommate’s reaction surprised her. She looked at Rebecca and felt guilty. Ashley took the blame for their unfulfilled friendship. She could have related to Rebecca, encouraged her, grown with her. But she wasn’t Ashley now. This girl, the one obsessed with numbers and exercising, was a ghost of Ashley’s former presence. The obsession stole Ashley’s goodness, ripped her of her identity. A stranger sat in the hospital bed.