The Two Most Consequential Helps I Got
I was thinking about roots and how the first five novels I wrote weren’t worth a damn. I remember my uncle Jack reading a part of one, and saying, yeah, um, sure, it’s good. Yeah, I um, yeah. SO. What’s going on with you?
That was in 2005.
In 2007 or 2008 I discovered two people who proved to be the best teachers I’ve ever had, in terms of writing. One is Katherine Howell. She’s an Australian thriller writer. She let me read her 100 page thesis on creating tension, and did me the greatest favor ever… she edited a few pages of a short story of mine called Simple, which just recently was published in Needle.
The edits she suggested showed me something I had never grasped on my own: half of my text had not a single thing to do with the story. After that, there was no looking back. I made a point of cutting at least a third of every manuscript, and in doing so found that VOICE is a product of editing, as much as anything. To Katherine Howell I’ll be eternally grateful and indebted. You should check out her books. She flat out kicks ass.
The next great stroke of luck in my development happened when I came across Ray Rhamey’s website, floggingthequill.com. Ray takes the first sixteen lines of a book–which is all you can be sure a reader will see–and simply asks “would I turn the page?”
I studied Ray’s blog and many of the articles he’d written about creating story questions, and set about writing another novel. You can take a lesson like Ray teaches and apply it to every single page. Let’s face it: no matter what page your reader is on, there’s always something else she could do with her time. If she’s not asking story questions… if your text doesn’t keep her engaged, she’s going to cut bait.
With all I’d learned from Ray and Katherine I set about writing another novel–this is the one after my Uncle Jack did his best to retain his integrity and leave my feelings unhurt. That novel is TREAD. With TREAD I secured enough interest from Cameron McClure at Donald Maass Agency to ask for the full MS, then a rewrite, then a rejection. But that exchange led to her interest in my third novel, which she signed me for, and then sold twice: Cold Quiet Country.
I’m circling back to TREAD now. My plan is to give it another edit and polish, then release it to find its audience. Anyhow, after I wrote TREAD I went back and submitted it to Ray’s site, Flogging the Quill, and here’s what he had to say. Naturally, I was thrilled.
Every author needs people like Ray and Katherine. I’ve offered a few times to help unpublished authors with editing the way that Katherine helped me, but as yet have had no takers.
If you’re an author looking for the next level of insight, check out Floggingthequill.com and read Katherine Howell. Or ask an author you respect to take a quick look at your story. Two pages of edits from a pro might make the light bulb go off, and you never know until you ask.
Here are the first sixteen lines of TREAD, and the cover.
TREAD
Flagstaff nights are cold; I drink a quarter of my flask of Jack in two gulps. There’s a crew of secessionists in the cabin behind me, bitching about the same old. It’s endless, and that’s why it’s got to end.
I’m on the porch wondering when I should tell the boys to get lost. They got guns but won’t use them. They got the same reasons to be pissed as I do. A tax code seventeen thousand pages long, for shit’s sake. But they’d rather suck beer and fart than defend themselves against the almighty Machine. And what am I doing? Sitting here drinking whiskey and thinking about a dead woman’s feet.
One more gulp of Jack and I’m going in. The only one that has any stones is George Murray—the bastard’s lugging around a set of cannonballs. The IRS closed his bait shop and he’s stockpiling black powder. He’s raising a fuss and I want to hear it.
“We ought to firebomb ‘em,” Murray says. “Hit the IRS, courthouses, Fish and Game. Then they’ll know what we’re about.”
I stand at the door beside a floodlight swarming with moths. Murray and Charlie Yellow Horse, a white man with a sixteenth of Apache blood on his mother’s side, are nose to nose.
“Fucking moron,” Yellow Horse says.
“Talk! Talk! Let’s blow some shit up!”
