I’ve enthused before about Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know. Once I’d read the book a few times, in addition to bingeing my way through every single episode of The Story Grid and The Story Grid Editor Roundtable podcasts, I was emboldened to take the tools and apply them to my memoir. I knew I more or less had the story arc in place, but I also knew from reader comments that there were some gaps that fuddled or distracted. It’s always amazing what you don’t realize has to be said because it’s so obvious to yourself!
Armed with Story Grid tools and reader comments, I did a close analysis of the entire book—and saw what was missing.
In short, while all the pieces of the external genre were in place (in Story Grid lingo, Love/courtship), a few key scenes were missing from the internal genre (Worldview/maturation). And this was a serious problem, because while the love story is the hilarious-and-heartbreaking narrative that should drive readers on chapter by chapter, the real meat of the story, and its final payoff, is in the maturation of worldview. Less obviously dramatic, but ultimately more meaningful.
Once I saw that, I also saw exactly what to do—where I’d missed an opportunity or failed to realize the stakes of an event. Corrected and embellished, I now had a plot with two strong and interrelated plot tracks to take the reader all the way to the end. I even charted the revised version one more time to make sure every last scene was carrying its weight.
And then I was done, right?
Not quite.
Having worked as an editor for a dozen years, I know that sometimes an editor can see what a writer just can’t, however attentive she may be. One of the nicest compliments I ever got was that as an editor I performed a John-the-Baptist ministry: decreasing that the writer might increase. A bad editor rewrites and reconceives; a good editor sees what the writer was going for and helps the writer actually get there. So even though I felt pretty confident that I’d solved my story problems, I wanted an expert outsider to verify my hunch.
Kim Kessler, editor extraordinaire!
The woman for the job was Kim Kessler, one of the five certified Story Grid editors on The Story Grid Editor Roundtable podcast. Since I’d listened to dozens and dozens of episodes, I knew that she liked the kind of story I was writing, shared the kind of values I wanted to communicate, and most importantly would work in the concepts and vocabulary I used to analyze my own work. I hired her for the Editor Beta Read, sent off my manuscript, and sat back, prepared to be praised.
I know, you see the irony coming already, don’t you?
Well, as it turns out, I was right, so far as it goes. The story arc did work really well, Love/courtship on the outside, Worldview/maturation on the inside, rich details, beautiful prose, blah blah blah. The only problem was that I’d written an opening that would hook nobody and a closing that would leave everyone feeling cheated.
Whoops!
That the Prologue was still not right didn’t come as much of a surprise. I realized I’d been thinking that I’d grab an agent with Chapter 1 but not with the actual beginning of the story, and I was just secretly hoping the average New York agent would have so much extra time on her hands that she’d been willing to keep plowing on regardless. Ha. Ha. All writers are painfully familiar with the exposition problem: how to cram in enough information to orient readers without doing so hamhandedly or overwhelmingly.
The Prologue was, moreover, the portion of the book I’d rewritten the most times, and in my particular case suffered a unique disadvantage compared to the other chapters: it’s the only part for which I had no firsthand account to draw on. My personal and family records only pick up with the actual move to Slovakia in August 1993. I had to reconstruct the first visit in January 1993 from memory. In the process, I’d forgotten to give any attention to my emotions or hopes or dreams or dreads regarding the move, or how I fit the prospect into the story of my own life.
But the problem with the Epilogue surprised me quite a bit more. It was so skint that, in fact, Kim was forced to ask why exactly I had decided to write a memoir at all! On reflection, I realized that I thought I’d preyed upon the reader’s consciousness long enough and interest would flag once the main action concluded. But she assured me it was quite the opposite. If readers made it that far, they were ready to have the lessons spelled out for them—the wisdom, the meaning, the takeaway.
“You might hold back, thinking it’s self-centered to keep on talking about yourself,” she commented, “but it’s actually more selfish to do that. You’re not forcing your story on the readers: you’re giving them the tools to interpret their own lives. Don’t disappoint them now.”
That fantastic insight turned my brain upside down and inside out, but I knew immediately she was right. I sat with the notion for a few weeks, letting it ferment, and when at last I had a good chunk of uninterrupted time, I planted myself in front of my computer and tried to fix the Epilogue.
I failed.
“This doesn’t sound like my book at all anymore!” I whined in dismay to the screen. What came out felt fake and inflated. Before long I gave up and stewed in a snit for the rest of the day, hating the whole world for refusing to accept my genius as it emerged rough-hewn from my sparkling mind. I would have cursed Kim, too, but she was so nice and so wise I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Then I woke up the next morning and knew exactly what I needed to do. It’s unlike the Muse to reward a snit, but I think I’d put in enough sweat equity by then to earn her mercies. (The Muse is not a Lutheran.)
And once I knew what to do, I also knew why I hadn’t been able to do it before. The conclusion of the story had to include the adventures entailed in actually writing the story. And that required reaching into a painful spot of my heart that I was OK exposing from my adolescence but less so from my very recent adulthood.
But when I finally did it, the Epilogue sang. And as a result, so did the whole book.
So praises and blessings upon Kim! And I am now officially shifting from editing to seeking an agent toward publication. More news as events warrant!