June 2, 2014

Nancy’s blog is on hiatus for the summer.

May 26, 2014

Nancy’s blog is on break for Memorial Day.

May 19, 2014

In a New York Times piece published last week, writer Pamela Erens gleefully recounted cutting stray words, sentences and even bigger chunks out of her novels. In a column entitled The Joys of Trimming, the writer boasted of her crowning achievement: slashing the second half of a book. Her novel went from a fat 105,000 words to a streamlined 60,000 words, more a novella than a novel. She said she barely missed the material she’d cut, though she worked on the book for years.

Her funny but wise column made me reflect on my own writing issues, which usually are just the opposite. As a journalist for thirty-plus years, I had honed my writing to austere sentences, unadorned paragraphs and stories that steadily shrank as papers became smaller and tighter. When I started writing my novel, Saving Texas, in 2010, I had to learn to write a whole new way. Instead of cutting out description and going light on scene setting, as journalists are admonished to do these days, I worked hard to put more color and detail in.

I’m still not good at this, perhaps because I fear that adding detail and length will lose readers. But I understand what my mentors mean when they say my first drafts are thin. It’s as though I’m writing an outline and I always need to go back and fill it in.

Most of the advice you read about revising your work focuses on cutting, not adding. Erens concludes that judicious cutting increases the vitality, precision and the emotional heart of most writing. She’s right. But I need to keep adding the seasoning and spice until I get just the right mix of ingredients for a tasty dish.

May 12, 2014

I woke up today with a familiar feeling of dread. My last and most difficult deadline of the spring looms in three days. I’ll have to hand over a significant chunk of work on my new novel to my mentor at a master’s program in creative writing. I’ll be writing, fretting, revising, worrying, staring into space and writing some more.

It’s not that the monthly deadlines in my program at the University of Tampa are impossibly onerous or that my wonderful mentor is a strict taskmaster. Writing is hard and lonely, and deadlines never wait for inspiration. Sometimes you just have to inch forward with clunky sentences, bad paragraphs and indigestible pages. Then you can make them better.

Deadlines shouldn’t be a problem for me after thirty-plus years in the newspaper business. Daily deadlines and weekly deadlines were a way of life and I can’t remember missing one, or at least an important one. But in my stress-filled dreams, I’m always busting deadlines and one of my toughest editors is shaking a finger and publicly shaming me.

This deadline is probably harder because it’s the last of the semester. I’ll get a short break afterwards and treat myself to a movie, or a book that’s not required reading. I’ll meet the deadline somehow and when it’s over, I’ll feel strung out and breathless, like I’ve run a long, hard race.

May 5, 2015

I got up Sunday thinking that I’d work on my novel before our niece’s late afternoon wedding. But we were in a nice hotel in downtown Orlando and the day seemed ripe for exploring.

We walked a few blocks to Lake Eola on a glorious sunny day, the kind you treasure before the heat descends. A soft breeze blew over the column of young men walking in step for charity. My sister-in-law’s jeweled sandals clack-clacked over the path as we circled the lake.

Dogs and their humans massed in one patch of grass, enjoying a tail-wagging gabfest. A white swan guarded her nest of five large eggs, her sharp eyes daring anyone to step closer. A black cormorant flapped its wings, drying and posing ironically on a silver sculpture of birds. A claque of turtles gathered on a rock at water’s edge, piling on top of each other in a reptilian conclave. Humans, all sizes, shapes and ages, lingered in a Sunday kind of slowness, seeming as happy as we were.

Bliss. After a long, cold winter, the symphony of nature was tuning up for its best performance of the season – the critically acclaimed month of May. To waste a day like Sunday inside, hunched over a computer, would be wasting life itself. For what is life without taking time to savor its beautiful moments?