A Tale of Two Trade Book Copyediting Tests

I recently completed two copyediting tests for traditional publishing houses to earn a spot in their freelance pools: one for a Big Five publisher and one for an independent press. I only “passed” one of them. Here’s what happened.

In January I sent a cold email to an editor at a Big Five imprint, not expecting a response. I introduced myself, mentioned a couple authors I’m a fan of, provided a brief background on my skills, and shared topics of specific manuscripts I’d recently worked on. As I knew there’d be a test before I was approved as a vendor, I mentioned I’d be happy to take it.

Big Five Copyediting Instructions

A different staff member replied and asked if I wanted to take their copyediting test or their proofreading test. I chose the copyediting test. I had five business days to take it once I received this form email:

“Thank you for your interest in freelancing for [BIG FIVE PUB]. Please copyedit the accompanying manuscript in Microsoft Word with Track Changes on and return by [DATE].

Please note the following:

• Review the copyediting instructions before you begin.

• Supply a style sheet when you deliver the manuscript.

• This manuscript includes trailing phrase endnotes (sometimes referred to as blind notes). Please leave the 000 page number markers, but check phrases as necessary.

• Use comment bubbles to flag material such as lyrics and/or poetry that might require permissions.

We follow Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Online Edition; Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Online Edition; and The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition, in matters of spelling and style.”

The attached documents included the first chapter of a historical nonfiction text about the Chinese Communist party, including a title page, a copyright page, an epigraph, footnotes, endnotes, and a bibliography—a total of sixteen pages. It looked intimidating at first glance but doable because it was relatively short, despite being longer than most copyediting tests. My first thought, though, was what the hell are trailing phrase endnotes?

The accompanying document was their standard two-page “Instructions for the Copyeditor,” including the manuscript title, author name, genre, ISBN, and a series of boxes, with the relevant ones marked with an X.

I was to track changes in Word and perform “light” editing: “fix bad grammar, typos, incorrect punctuation, capitalization, spelling repetitions, and ambiguities; do not rewrite, cut, or reparagraph; query inconsistencies.”

That I wasn’t allowed to rewrite or cut at all scared me a little. As a writer and copyeditor, that’s hard not to do.

Under “Fact Checking,” I was instructed to “check names and dates and other factual matter” and “check all foreign language words and phrases.” Not a problem!

Under “Punctuation,” the “yes” box next to “Serial comma?” was checked. Hallelujah. The document also stated the punctuation was already “about right, but correct any errors.” Sweet!

The document stated the language was appropriate for the audience and subject matter. At this point, I thought, How hard can copyediting sixteen pages and throwing together a style sheet be? The answer, I would learn, was “nearly impossible.”

The Big Five Copyediting Test Goes Well—at First

First I Googled “trailing phrase endnotes,” which are notes keyed to words or phrases instead of superscript numbers. In other words, quoted text in the endnotes corresponds to page numbers. My handy Chicago Manual of Style account showed me how to correctly format each one. Simple enough.

Next I started on the title page and praised myself for noticing immediately a very subtle change to the title and a missing apostrophe in the subtitle: “. . . the World’s Largest . . .” Below the publisher’s name was a list of cities from whence they hail: “New Delhi” was missing an “h.” I was on fire, and I hadn’t even started reading chapter one yet!

When I flipped to the copyright page, I reached for a couple nonfiction books on my shelf published by the same house to painstakingly compare them. At this point, I felt confident. I felt even more confident when the next page included song lyrics, and I remembered to leave a note for the author to request permission to print them. The band’s name was misspelled, and the song title needed quotation marks. I’m a rock star copyeditor! Let’s go! I thought as I flipped to the first page of chapter one.

Then shit got real.

The Urge to Revise When Asked to Query

A few changes on the first page were no-brainers: Change “30” to “thirty”; capitalize “mainland” in “Mainland China”; change “Party” to “party” in “member of the party”; fix a typo that made “in” “an” instead; change the “a” to an “e” in “effectiveness”; and remove the apostrophe in “1980’s.” (Major pet peeve!)

Here’s where it got trickier: I’d been instructed not to rewrite, but many sentences were in passive voice, so I called attention to each one in a comment box. “They were soon joined by other groups” sounds better as “Other groups soon joined them,” and “. . . the CCP responded to the protests by publishing . . .” sounds better if written, “The CCP published . . . to respond to the protests.”

Watch for Tone, Go with Your Gut

The textbook-like language was relatively formal. This was not a voice-driven memoir, so sentences like, “Everybody had something to gripe about” stood out—not in a great way. I suggested revising to fit the tone and voice of the rest of the chapter. I also noticed “protests . . . had discontent at their heart” seemed off because “protests” are plural, and “heart” is singular. For the most part, in the beginning, I fought my instincts to rewrite the text, but sometimes it’s easier to do it yourself than write a comment for someone else to do it later. For instance, I changed “. . . there had been very few political reforms to coincide with . . .” to “few political reforms coincided with . . .”

Damn their instructions! Sort of.

Fact-Check Names and Ask Author to Clarify

My eyes crossed as I double-checked each instance of the word “Tiananmen” because it was often spelled incorrectly and not always in the same way. I listed it as one of the names on the style sheet I created. Another name I added was “Deng Xiaoping” and noted the author didn’t explain who Deng was at the beginning of the chapter. There was no context for anyone who didn’t already know China’s history.

I italicized the newspaper People’s Daily, which the author called the “official newspaper.” Of what? Google is a copyeditor’s friend, and this time was no exception. Instead of changing the text to “official newspaper of the Chinese Communist party,” I added it as a suggestion in a comment box because, once again, I had been instructed to do “light editing.” With all the problems I found in the manuscript, I wondered, How is one supposed to lightly edit this?

Did I mention I was still only on page one?

When I reached page two and Googled “Teng Hsiao-p’ing” (and added the apostrophe to his name), I noticed Teng and Deng were the same person, but the author hadn’t clarified this. Which name did the author want to use? Choose one or explain they’re the same man.

It quickly became clear this test was made cumbersome on purpose to weed out prospective copyeditors, but I didn’t want to give up; I wanted to see if I could “pass” it.

Word Choice, Repetition, and the Footnotes That Almost Broke Me

The word “Oriental” appeared on page two to describe “society.” Yikes. I advised the author to use an alternative, less offensive word to refer to people. I made twelve comments total on page two, including one that asked the author to cite a source. I fact-checked an incorrect date. I deleted the useless word “utterly,” and added an “e” to “feared.”

On page three I noted redundant information that already appeared on page two and called out a repetitive phrase that appeared in two consecutive paragraphs. When I reached my first footnote, I almost quit. The author’s name was misspelled, and the referenced page numbers were wrong. This manuscript required tons of fact-checking.

Did I mention copyediting tests are unpaid?

One footnote in chapter two needed to be deleted completely because it referred to something that didn’t exist in the text, which meant renumbering the footnotes, which weren’t numbered at all but were instead denoted by symbols: “* † ‡.” Fun!

Bogged Down in Research

I pointed out a cliché: “stirred the pot.” I fact-checked another incorrect date, and I tried to locate “Ximen River” on a map in Weng’an County and failed to do so, despite it showing up in an article on the internet that this chapter was based on. (Where the hell is Ximen River? I thought, as I spent way too much time scouring Google Maps with no luck.)

Remember the Audience

When the author referred to a young woman who’d been killed as a “corpse” in an “ice coffin” along the river, I urged “revise!” Another offensive “yikes!” moment that I’m sure the test creators added on purpose to see how copyeditors would respond. Remember the audience: This is nonfiction, not sci-fi, and she’s someone’s daughter, her death inciting an important political moment in history.

Then protesters were said to have “legitimate problems,” but what were they? I wondered.

Revising Is Faster than Querying

By the fourth page of chapter two, I gave into my impulse even more to “rewrite” and “cut” when instructed otherwise. I deleted a sentence that appeared word for word twice back-to-back. I revised phrases like “due to the fact that,” an overused phrase that bugs me.

I continued to fix misspelled names, point out incorrect facts, ask the author to clarify confusing statements, and adjust footnotes. Then I proofread the endnotes, checking links, italicizing large works, putting quotation marks around smaller works, and deleting unnecessary information. Finally, I noted why the bibliography was formatted incorrectly and how to change it.

One Last Pass . . . Then Another

Every time I took “one more pass” through these sixteen dense pages, I found something else I’d missed. I was impressed with how thorough the test was at making me question my knowledge, abilities, and mental health. But I’d come too far to quit now.

What’s in a Style Sheet?

In my style sheet, I wrote chapter overviews with the correct timeline of events, dates, names, etc. I added notes about grammar, acronyms, numbers, and punctuation based on perceived author preferences and pertinent Chicago Manual of Style rules. I listed notes about references and permissions, offensive and outdated language, and correct spellings of names of people and locations.

In all, I spent four full business days on this Big Five copyediting test, and when I sent it to the editor, I didn’t care anymore if I’d passed it or not; I was happy to have finished it. Also, I returned the completed test two days early.

The Shorter Independent Press Test

If I could finish this test somewhat successfully, I could finish any copyediting test, so when I saw a dreamy independent press call for freelance copyeditors and proofreaders on LinkedIn, I was excited. I sent an email and awaited the test—this time for both copyediting and proofreading. The copyediting test was two-and-a-half pages, and the proofreading test was one PDF page (two printed book pages side by side). Piece. of. Cake.

The instructions were simple, and I didn’t need to create a style sheet: “Freelancers should have familiarity with Chicago style as it pertains to trade book publishing, an ear for literary voice, and the ability to communicate sensitively.”

Attacking the Work Like It Was My Own

I turned on Track Changes in Word and attacked this copyediting test like I would my own writing—striving to maintain the author’s voice as he explained the origins of how he came to write this book. In the first sentence, I changed “sit around dreaming” to “dream.” In the first paragraph, I capitalized the first word in a question after a colon and deleted an unnecessary comma that divided a complete sentence and an incomplete sentence separated by “and.” I fixed a run-on sentence. I queried if the author meant “eternal” instead of “temporal” to describe “common questions.”

On the first page, I also fixed a misspelled “calendar” and changed “where” to “in which” in “. . . three calendar years where my own responses . . .” I deleted two hyphens to create “twenty-nine years old” and fixed subject/verb agreement in “all utopias has,” which clearly should be “have.”

I noticed the misuse of “sometime” and broke it into two words. I queried “American utopian communities,” asking “Which ones?” Could the author be more specific than “American”? I changed “Youtube” to “YouTube” and three-hundred-twenty-six” to “326.” At one point, the author wrote “etc., etc.” Instead of querying to suggest a change, I crossed it out in favor of “and so on.”

Slash and Burn

On page two, I did quite a bit of revision, not considering that the Big Five instructions from the previous test might apply here as well. “I watched as the files piled up” became “I watched the files pile up.” “I kept thinking that” became “I often thought.” “I kept waiting” became “I waited.” “A co-worker of mine” became “My coworker.” I deleted “just” when it was unnecessary. (You’d be amazed how many writers use the filler word “just” in a manuscript. “Find” that word in yours and see what I mean.)

I slashed and burned this sentence: “All this stuff, all of these little things which I keep thinking were the precursor—or the thing that was eventually going go to make way for the . . .” What a mess. I wrote this instead: “All this stuff I thought was the precursor was what would eventually make way for the . . .” It still wasn’t optimal.

Revise for Clarity

I changed “its” to “the pages’” and “it” to “the files” to clarify what “its” and “it” referred to. I changed “might” to “may” and added “rather” to create this sentence: “I may have known that sooner rather than later.”

On the last half-page, I added “19” to “1990s.” I took out the hyphen in “nonfiction.” I changed “things” to “ideas” and cut excess words, making sentences clearer and more succinct. I queried several more items: When the author wrote, “. . . butt of its own joke,” I asked, “How else might this be rewritten to avoid a commonly used idiom?” I suggested “a lot” was a word choice issue. (One of my teachers once said, “A lot is a piece of land.”) When the author switched from writing in first-person to second person with “. . . if you do it right . . .” I suggested recasting the sentence.

Query Madness

When the tone and content shifted in the last paragraph to include “egomaniacs,” “boy kings,” and “bad theologies,” which didn’t coincide with the rest of the prose, I pointed it out. Which egomaniacs? Which boy kings? Which theologies, and what makes them bad? The conclusion introduced a new topic that was never covered.

I thought I’d nailed this copyediting test after a few passes, spending much less time than I did on the longer test with the prior publisher.

Proofreading: Orphans, Ladders, Meticulous Details, and Offensive Language

The PDF proofread didn't seem too difficult either. Immediately I saw the missing “l” in “enrollment.” “Hoodwinked” is one word, not hyphenated. At the end of the first paragraph, the orphan “him” appeared on a line all by itself—and shouldn’t. In the second paragraph, the past tense verb “listened” didn’t align with the present tense verb “explain” in the same sentence, and I deleted an extra space in a properly hyphenated word.

In that same column, “student Union” didn't need a capital “U,” and “...” didn’t follow the Chicago ellipsis style with spaces: “. . .”

I capitalized “Black” when referring to people, spelled out numbers under 100, and added a hyphen in “sing-alongs.”

In the second column, a ladder needed to be fixed. In typography, a “ladder” describes when a hyphen appears at the end of multiple consecutive lines. A book is more visually appealing and readable without it.

Fact-checking was in order for “Slurpie” and “7/11,” both proper names spelled incorrectly. (The correct words are “Slurpee” and “7-Eleven.”) I added an Oxford comma in “long hair, scraggly facial hair, or sloppy clothes . . .” and queried this line: “. . . to say nothing of Black folks,” which struck me as overly generalizing. I wrote, “Pointing out how Black students stood out and calling them ‘folks’ could be considered offensive.” At the proofreading stage, when text is already formatted, something like this should have been caught sooner.

Many proofreading changes involve whether or not something is a compound word; “back seat” is not one of them if used as a noun. “Saint Louis” is “St. Louis.” A single straight quote (') isn’t the same as an apostrophe, and commas surround names of states when listed with cities, like in “. . . West Memphis, Arkansas, an unmarked sedan . . .”

So Much Quality Competition

I finished the indie press copyediting and proofreading tests feeling positive but knew I had competition because the call on LinkedIn had 728 likes, 140 comments, and 79 reposts last time I checked, and finding work via LinkedIn is like screaming in the middle of an empty forest.

Response Time for Results

The response time between the date I turned in my test to the Big Five publisher and their decision was six weeks and two days. The time to receive a response from the smaller press was five weeks and came in the form of a group email with attached rubrics to show us exactly what the “correct” answers were, which was unexpected and extremely generous.

Which Test Did I Pass?

Believe it or not, I passed the harder test from the Big Five publisher and wasn’t accepted into the freelance pool following the shorter test for the independent press.

Relish and Heed the Rare Feedback

The editor at the Big Five replied, “You’ve been approved! With a caveat.” She said I’d caught “pretty much all of the errors we check and also had useful queries.” The caveat: I was “a little overzealous in rewriting” with regard to removing “unnecessary sentence openers, taking out passive voice,” and deleting “that” to tighten up the work. In this case, I edited too much.

Point taken.

“We often have very voice-y memoirs or fiction where that level of rewriting could get problematic,” she wrote. I fully embraced this wonderful note, but I did ponder the text they’d given me to edit, which wasn’t a “voice-y memoir” nor “fiction.” I assume it’s the standard test for every one of their imprints. She mentioned it was a “fine line to walk.” I agreed.

My favorite note from her email was this: “You’re at an 11, and we want you to dial it back to a 9.” She asked if that made sense. Yes, it does. “Granted, I don’t know how much of this was simply you trying your best on the copyediting test, since, well, it was a test! We don’t want to penalize you for good work.”

First Big Five Projects

I was surprised and pleased with these results, and I have since completed a “low stakes” endnotes and index proofread for the Big Five and am awaiting a full memoir project in August. The August memoir is a “cold read,” which means I’m taking the first pass after the book is formatted to catch the pesky errors that were missed at the manuscript proofreading stage—as far as I understand it.

I didn’t receive the same personal feedback from the independent press, but when I went through the rubric and noticed I’d caught 99 percent of their changes—and then some—I realized they’d probably have the same feedback as the Big Five if asked: I edited too much.

Minor Mistakes Are Inevitable

I missed “loose lines” in the PDF file where alignment needed adjustment, and I didn’t see a dangling modifier. (Gasp!) No one’s perfect, which is why these manuscripts go through several rounds of copyediting and proofreading with different sets of eyes before printing.

The independent press’s parting words were, in part, as follows: “We received hundreds of excellent tests and were able to onboard only a handful of the many talented editors who applied. Of course, no two edits will be exactly alike, and many astute suggestions that were made are not represented [in the rubric].”

Rejection Is Also Inevitable

This is not my first rejection and won’t be my last. Finding freelance work as a traditional publishing copyeditor is not easy, but it can be done.

Say ‘Hey!’

Contact me with any questions, suggestions, or to share your own experiences. I’m always available to quote individual author projects and look forward to hearing from you.

Side note: The 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style is coming this fall! Here are some updates.

A Tribute to Mentors

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part IX

The missing workshop feedback, what I found in my parents’ garage, and my first true writing advisor.

Remember at the beginning of this series when I said I saved everything related to my writing for the last fifteen years? I lied. The only drawback of an in-person workshop is when the feedback is handwritten on hardcopy pages, the stack gets large, and when you move as often as I have, and you eventually publish the essay you revised in that 2013 UCLA Extension personal essay class—the “dead ex-student essay” from blog #8—you feed the pages into the shredder because you don’t think you need them anymore.

My Garage Stash

I hunted for the notes from my UCLA instructor and classmates in that ten-year-old workshop in my parents’ garage in the dusty plastic tubs with my childhood memorabilia, photo albums, and cases of CDs—yes, I saved those. Here’s what I found instead: two sets of small Sculpey clay hands and feet molded onto gnarled wire hangers my grandmother used to build unique, standing sculptures of Santa Claus at Christmastime. My cousin and I retrieved the creepy extremities—the last remnants of Granny’s unfinished art—hanging in “the cold room” in my grandparents’ empty house after the four-day estate sale before the house sold. They were the only items that didn’t sell. It’s no shock why.

Granny’s Unfinished Art

In my parents’ garage, I also found a stack of yellowing papers from the 1990s when I worked on my teaching credential at CSULB, where I wrote bad fiction about the same boyfriends who now appear in my memoir manuscript and one-page, single-spaced essays. The professor who assigned the “one-pagers” was a ruthless grader. Receiving a ten out of ten on one of his papers was next to impossible, and I did it more than once—total bragging rights! (Do you know hard it is to write an entire academic paper on one page? That’s where I learned to edit!) I didn’t think of him as a “mentor” because he was grouchy, arrogant, and uppity about who deserved the title of “professor.” (He did.) Students either loved him or hated him. I loved him, but he didn’t change my life.

An Accepted Essay That Was Never Published

I didn’t find the helpful feedback from my UCLA Extension workshop cohorts in the garage, but I found the essay I wrote about my instructor—and now close friend—on my laptop. It was accepted for publication in 2014 but was never published. (R.I.P. Literary Mothers.) So, with a few minor edits, I am posting that essay here since it never made it to its intended online destination.

The piece is an homage to mentors, the compassionate, miraculous people who lift you up when you don’t believe your writing is up to snuff; whose words encourage you to keep going; who are the reason you decide, “Yes, I can write a book”; who—when you’re nearly forty years old and walk into class with a heavy backpack and a heavy heart—accept your first essay for publication in an anthology; invite you on a California book tour to promote the anthology; summon you to at-home workshops, where you write most of the essays that become the first draft of your manuscript; and tell the backstage bouncer at a punk show you’re an “official photographer” so he’ll let you into the Descendents’ trailer to babysit Milo’s kids while she interviews the band. These are the people who change your life.

It’s been said often before because it’s true: Writers must find their people. I hope you find your version of Shawna Kenney.

Center for Sex and Culture, San Francisco

Before getting to the meat of “how I wrote a memoir” in blog #10—when I actually start writing a book—here’s what I wrote about Shawna nine years ago:

“My Superstar”

March 2014

My 2013 New Year’s resolution was to start writing again. I was almost forty. I’d taken a number of online classes before, but I hadn’t written a word in two years. My latest workshop had deflated me. There I felt judged on my character more than my work. I was labeled based on one essay about one incident. The responses drove me into hiding.

I’m not good enough. This is as far as I’m going to get, I thought.

But when I’m not writing, I suffer.

So, after a two-year ego-healing break, I decided to try again. This time I wouldn’t hide behind the internet. I wanted face-to-face interaction with other writers.

I found Shawna Kenney’s UCLA Extension Writing the Personal Essay course on the university’s website. When I read her bio, I thought, “She’s my people.” It wasn’t the success of her memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix or the “award-winning” accolade in her title; nor was it the numerous literary publishing credits that reeled me in. It was the way she presented her approach to teaching. I knew she would be positive, practical, and nurturing.

I wasn’t wrong. In her ten-week class, I handed out the same essay that incited the negativity that caused me to quit writing in the first place. I wasn’t giving up on it. It’s a story of forbidden sex, desperation, and death. It is not a flattering portrait of me, but it’s true and doesn’t represent all that I am. I knew it was a story I needed to tell.

Dispersing twenty hardcopies, I was terrified. My hands shook. But Shawna had already created a safe space for her students to be themselves and put forth their best work without judgment. I had hope.

At this point, I didn’t call myself a “writer,” only “someone who writes—sometimes.” My first in-person workshop changed that. Shawna and my fellow writing students spent an hour discussing the merits of my work, providing constructive observations that would help me make the piece better. After that, I was eager to submit more material.

I anticipated Shawna’s feedback. She wrote, “You have such a natural writing voice,” and, “You make yourself vulnerable on the page.” She called my first workshop essay “a post-modern romantic tragedy.” Words like “publish this!” and “I could see something like this in The Believer” sustained me.

She asked the right questions: “What does this narrator want more than anything?” and she never questioned my ability to succeed in the future: “I look forward to reading another adventure in dating written in this voice!”

It’s Not Dead Fest 2015, San Bernadino

After previous writing classes, I’d have the best intentions; then I’d stop writing when I wasn’t held accountable because of a debilitating fear of failure. I’m still afraid, but I move through the fear as a result of the bravery I see in Shawna.

In 2013 and beyond, I continued to “ride the Shawna train,” I joked, and took two more of her ten-week workshops, as well as an online writing prompt class. In fall 2013 I submitted an essay to Shawna for a Seal Press anthology she was editing: Book Lovers. She accepted it. I never would have written the essay if she hadn’t asked me, “Are you going to submit something for my book?” It was a particularly difficult essay to write and the first one I published in print.

Because of Shawna’s insight and guidance, I learned to call myself a writer without wincing. I tell strangers I meet, “I’m writing an essay collection,” because I am. It’s an arduous task I always thought unattainable; now I have 105,000 new words because she gave me the freedom to write them.

She also arranged for public readings. I’ve now read in public six times, three times to promote my story in her anthology. I was afraid for people to read my work before I met her. Now I love to hear people’s reactions live when I’m in front of a microphone. I have a newfound confidence I couldn’t have imagined.

As a writer pre-Shawna, I was paralyzed by perfectionism. My editing background made it impossible for me to get words on a page, always worried about the finished product. I now follow her example and know I can fix the words as long as there are words to fix.

I’m “doing the work,” she says. “It’s just a draft,” she tells us.

Her carefree attitude is matched by her intelligence and her own ability to craft. “There’s a reason she’s the teacher,” one of my classmate’s said after reading Shawna’s anthology introduction.

Shawna published a piece in xoJane’s “Unpopular Opinion,” an essay she called very unpopular on Twitter. Of the hundreds of comments posted under the piece, many were downright cruel. Instead of discouraging me from publishing, this only gave me more resolve.

I’ll never please everyone, I thought. If Shawna can have the courage to take this verbal backlash, so can I.

She calls us her “supah stahhhhs” and her “lovelies.” At the end of a long weekend in San Francisco, after two terrific readings and Q&As, we hugged on the street and cried, and she said I was “the female Davy Rothbart.” I’ll take it.

I know now that if I don’t ever publish the book I’ve been writing in my head for forty-one years—the same one that’s now forming on paper—it will be because I choose not to, not because I can’t. Because of Shawna, I’m tackling my passion with “all [my] Chelsey vigor.” She’s my superstar, my editor, and friend. Today I thank her on the page.

Northern California Book Lovers Tour

Feedback as an Act of Compassion

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part VIII

What’s the effect on a writer when an instructor’s critique goes beyond the page?

It’s 2011, and I’ve signed up for another online writing workshop with one of the same instructors I worked with at Gotham Writers Workshop. Only this time the platform is her own setup. For the past three years since I ended my last “real” relationship, I’ve racked up dubious experiences with men who aren’t right for me, and my self-esteem is plummeting, but these romantic blunders make for excellent storytelling—if told properly. As I make poor decision after poor decision in a loop of desperation, I stockpile material for personal essays, my future manuscript, and sessions with a therapist.

One such example is the five-and-a-half-page, single-spaced essay I submit for critique about a year-long off-and-on fling that isn’t quite over yet. I spend four paragraphs setting up the scenario with backstory before I get to how I met this dude who is, in his own words, “in no place to be anyone’s boyfriend right now.” (Pro tip: If someone says that to you, believe him.)

“Shortcut Origin Stories”

In the fifth paragraph, I set the scene for how we meet and describe his appearance, including the hat he’s wearing to cover his premature receding hairline. It’s my ex-boyfriend’s birthday party, and we’re in a sweaty, crowded Irish pub in Newport Beach. (Remember the guy from the Del Taco drive-through? Yeah, that ex-boyfriend.) My ex plays matchmaker and gives his childhood best bud’s little brother my phone number in June. We don’t get coffee until August.

None of this is important. Girl meets boy. They talk in a bar. There’s a spark. Girl’s ex-boyfriend gives boy her phone number. They make plans to get coffee two months later. So what? Many encounters start like this. What makes this one unique? (“Shortcut origin stories,” my 2017 book coach says.)

It gets slightly more interesting in September when the twenty-eight-year-old first kisses me in his mom’s driveway as we look at the stars through the constellation app on his phone, pointed up to the sky, spinning in circles. Cute, right? But again, so what?

Next I spend a few paragraphs recounting an exhausting trip to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios with the bouncy young man and his peppy haunted-house-enthusiast friends, where our age disparity is glaring. (In 2010, I’m thirty-seven.) I write, “The highlight of the night was when we sat on a tram wearing 3-D glasses watching dinosaurs. Resting.” At 2:00 a.m., when we say goodbye in the parking lot, I think this isn’t going to happen. (Second pro tip: If your gut tells you this, listen to it.)

The Beginning Is Not the Beginning

I get why I include the trip to Universal Studios: to show the gap in our energy levels. However, I can venture even further into the timeline of our courtship before I write the first scene. There’s no such thing as “the beginning.” There’s only the point where you decide a piece of writing should start, and I agree with the instructor of this workshop when she says the essay should commence toward the end of the second page: “The first time we had sex was two days after he buried his father. I was an escape.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

The setting of our “love nest” for the next few months is inside a plywood haunted house in his mom’s driveway—a building as temporary as our relationship, which I state explicitly.

The instructor’s feedback is cogent: “Take out any lines in which you explain things. You note the haunted house is a metaphor, and your intimacy is as makeshift as the structure. Trust your readers to understand this. Let the metaphor reveal itself.”

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

In the first and second drafts, I employ the “kitchen sink” method, including every detail I can conjure about what went down with this young man: helping him tear down the haunted house after Halloween; sitting on the couch watching TV with his mom’s dog wedged between us; helping him move to his own apartment; helping him clean his own apartment; attending concerts; visiting his sister’s hoarder house; Taco Tuesdays with his friends, who ask, “Are you guys together?” and not knowing how to respond; discussing the future or lack thereof without actually talking about what we’re doing. I slowly peal back the layers, learning about him piecemeal, sensing he’s hiding something. (Hint: He is.)

But why do I invest so much energy in this dead-end, flimsy partnership? When I write the first draft, I don’t have the answer.

In the nine-and-a-half-page, single-spaced revision, I attempt to address my teacher’s question: “What is this relationship about for you?”

I write, “I was scared of my age, scared of not finding reciprocated love before the ticking clock stopped. I was jealous of all the time he had to figure out his shit. I thought being with someone younger would keep me young for a little while longer.”

It goes deeper, but I’m too close to it to see it—and I don’t know all the facts yet. I don’t recognize his self-absorption; I don’t know he’s also dating men; I don’t realize I, too, am emotionally unavailable. It’s impossible to finish an essay if the events haven’t fully unfolded, and the writer has yet to grasp the import of what she’s trying to convey.

“You remain far too unexamined,” my instructor notes, and she’s not wrong.

I include all the conversations I remember, not only the significant ones—like the time we discuss how many children he wants, and he says four while I look at my watch, and he tells me, “You’re fucked.”

“Use dialogue to reveal character,” my teacher says, and she’s not wrong.

Whittle It Down

After workshopping this piece again a few years later once I have some distance, my fairy godmentor from UCLA Extension—whom you’ll meet in the next entry—says I can put the lengthy essay in the “done pile,” but the version I ultimately publish is fewer than eight-hundred words. I cut most of the scenes, whittling down the meaning of the relationship into its essentials, focusing on the plywood haunted house and an analysis of myself, rather than the minutia of a pseudo-boyfriend whom I eventually cut off abruptly. (Is it still “ghosting” if the person you ghost already dumped you?)

I call myself “the queen of involvement with kings of mixed messages” and write, “Deep down I knew this wasn’t love because love is easier.”

“Mock Intimacy in a Fake House” appears in the original essay collection I eventually compile. As I transform the book into a memoir, however, the superfluous essay falls away. The relevant takeaway is not the casual relationship I have between thirty-seven and thirty-eight but my state of mind when it ends: the realization I am no closer to finding a healthy adult partnership and will never have children if I continue to waste time on trivial matches.

Ninety-Nine Emails Don’t Make an Essay

If you rightfully believe a year-long pursuit of a man with narcissistic tendencies nine years my junior who is ambivalent about all women is an unproductive and demoralizing exercise in seeking intimacy while chipping away at one of the last baby-making years I have left, wait until you get a load of this. The second essay I submit for workshop in 2011 is about an even younger male with whom an unlikely connection leads to pointless pining and an unhealthy obsession. That this twenty-five-year-old, long-haired, larger-than-life bartender/roadie and self-diagnosed “failed musician” happens to be one of my former students is (somewhat) beside the point. The crux is I’m thirty-five in 2008 when I run into him at his restaurant when I am at my peak post-relationship-trauma hotness, having cried myself into a size four. I have not fully processed the years with my recent fiancé and former husband. I am free, emotionally beatdown, and eager for any dalliance without a future. Enter a depressed, vodka-swilling, wily sweetheart who is hellbent on self-destruction: my midthirties kryptonite.

In “It’s Still Me,” I curate an ample chunk of the ninety-nine emails he and I volley back and forth for the next few weeks after reconnecting—a flirty, humorous dance that leads to one memorable in-person get-together. In the original draft, I incorporate too many emails, unable to decide which ones to toss. In later versions, while I cut some, I don’t edit out enough before I get to the face-to-face main event—even in the published essay eventually nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In the original, the emails constitute almost six pages double-spaced. So what if the emails are amusing? What propels the action forward?

What My Instructor Gets Right

“This is probably my favorite of everything I’ve seen from you,” my instructor says, but “the emails are too much,” and she’s not wrong.

Her next comment is one I will hear again and again in future workshops from fellow writers and teachers alike: “I want much more about you.” Sure, I write scenes about our magical night together when he says, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” our subsequent correspondence via Facebook messenger, and the months in which I observe on social media from afar as the young man’s life descends into chaos. But what of it? What does this needless preoccupation say about my mental state, and why, again, do I devote so much emotional energy toward someone who contributes nothing in return?

The 2011 draft is fourteen double-spaced pages, and like “Mock Intimacy in a Fake House,” it encompasses the entirety of our brief liaison, including everything we wrote and said to each other, a tour of his tattoos on his friend’s couch, a trip to the grocery store for condoms, a postcoital conversation in what I later determined wasn’t even his bed, descriptions of the videos he posted to Facebook, and online conversations with his friends after he dies.

Both essays initially have similar problems: I do a decent job of writing scenes, but I don’t make decisions about what scenes are crucial, nor do I scrutinize the reasons for my actions and what my choices mean in the grand scheme.

Nothing takes the place of time to gain insight. An essay often takes years of revision before it achieves its proper weightiness, and in both cases, that’s what happens.

Feedback as a Personal Attack

Up to this point, I agree with the instructor’s comments. I am on board with her prudent advice, but her remarks and tone take an upsetting turn. After suggesting I read “The Fourth State of Matter” by Joanne Beard (cool!), she launches into a critique beyond what’s on the page:

“WHY? Why on earth did you get so hung up on someone ten years younger who went on the road all the time?”

The undeveloped—but true—motive for my behavior stipulated in the essay doesn’t sit well with her: something about people-pleasing and wanting to “fix” unavailable men—you know, garden-variety codependent shit.

“I don’t buy it,” she writes.

Say what?

She says she’s the “queen” of comparable conduct and lumps me into a generic category based on her own childhood experiences. (I read her memoir; our backgrounds are entirely different.) She calls me “honey” in a condescending manner and says I “avoid real intimacy,” which is fair, but then she says, “He didn’t care about you.” Even if that’s accurate, why is it necessary to state it while evaluating a person’s writing? What effect does that have on a vulnerable writer who already feels enough shame and lack of self-confidence as it is?

She scrutinizes my character, rather than my work, ending with this: “I hope you’re not feeling too psychoanalyzed, but this is what happens in memoir writing!”

Is it?

I Quit

My reaction to being the target of a borderline tirade from the person I trust with an extremely personal story is defensiveness, anger, and despair. Not only am I not eager to revise the essay, I quit altogether. I don’t write anything for the next two years.

When I recently located the email with the instructor’s twelve-year-old feedback—after having forgiven her long ago—I wonder if I overreacted. Maybe her comments weren’t as harsh as I remember. Maybe I wasn’t ready for the brutal truth. Maybe I was too sensitive. Then I read them again.

Even today, her email is jarring.

Editing as an Act of Empathy

As a developmental editor of other writers’ memoir manuscripts now, I am cognizant of providing constructive feedback while considering the real, fragile human on the other side of the computer screen. An editor’s job isn’t to analyze a person’s choices outside of the story. It’s a judgment-free zone. Editing is an act of empathy. There are plenty of ways to kindly nudge a writer toward self-discovery. Ask pertinent questions, for instance. Contemptuous condemnations aren’t warranted.

Fortunately, in 2013, when I’m pushing forty, I seek a gentle mentor who nurtures me like a delicate plant in need of watering. In her UCLA Extension personal essay class on campus, I hand out “It’s Still Me” to twenty new strangers, my hands shaking, terrified of judgment, only to be met with support, constructive criticism about my writing, and encouragement to revise, publish, and reimagine the piece for my future memoir. Thankfully, the essay that temporarily ends my writing career is the catalyst for my pursuit to complete an entire book.

Crossroads and Structure: A Dreadful Haircut, a Trip to the Mall, and a Life-Changing Decision

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part VII

Write it now. Organize it later.

Whenever anyone asks me, “When did you start writing your book?” I always cite January 2014. But that’s only when I started writing my manuscript in earnest—an essay collection at the time. If the short pieces I wrote for a Gotham Writers Workshop Memoir II class in late 2008 are any indication, I really started writing my book then; I just didn’t realize I was writing a book. Portions of two assignments in particular provided the basis for one of the chapters that would end up in my memoir manuscript—organized differently, written differently, and in nowhere near their current form. Yet, writing them was an integral precursor to writing a lengthier, better connected, more sophisticated work.

One of the pieces starts with a scene I tried so hard to incorporate beyond what I turned into my workshop instructor. It was a turning point. However, I relegated it to the “reject” file because it functions in exactly the same way as another scene that did end up in the manuscript.

The Haircut from Hell

In spring 2008, while planning my second wedding, I had an appointment with my fifth hairdresser in a year-and-a-half near Atlanta. My longtime stylist was in Orange County, California, and I couldn’t seem to find one in Georgia who didn’t screw up my hair while charging exorbitant rates. Highlights were either nonexistent within a few weeks, or my hair was bleached until it was canary yellow. There was no in-between. The stylist I visited while planning my wedding was my first repeat appointment since I’d moved there. She’d done a passable job on my hair the first time. The second time, however, she was having an off day, and that’s being kind.

“Are you growing your hair out for the wedding?” she asked.

“Yes. I just need a trim,” I said.

She stood between me and the mirror cutting layers, which she later called “blending.” Only, these weren’t “layers,” and I didn’t need them because my hair is extremely thin. When she was finished, and I saw myself in the mirror, I was shocked into silence. She had completely hacked off one side of my hair.

“This debacle cost me my resolve to make Georgia my home.”

I called my fiancé to pick me up and said, “I’m done.” I wasn’t only done with my appointment; I was done in a much more final way. I cried all the way home while he tried to reassure me it wasn’t “that bad.” Only, it was worse than I initially thought.

“When I got home and brushed it out, it was as uneven as if she’d cut it with pruning shears. I wasn’t a shrub in the backyard. I was a person supposed to be married in eight weeks.”

It took a year for my hair to grow out again. While this was a devastating, defining moment, it wasn’t necessary to include it in the book because I wrote about another crucial moment when I was considering whether or not to call off my wedding and move back to California. I didn’t need two. What came next in the disjointed 2008 piece, though, did make it into the book in an adjusted form.

Finding the Structure

One of the main differences between that early essay and what appears in my memoir now is the way in which the Georgia story is organized. In my earlier work, only months after the incident occurred, I was still trying to figure out what the story was. I wrote the salon scene and then a wedding planning scene that occurred before the inept stylist chopped off my hair. The order doesn’t make sense. I wrote them out of chronological order because I didn’t consciously choose what should come first; I wrote what came next in my brain as I was putting words on the page.

Portions of my current manuscript are nonchronological, but I made organizational decisions with forethought and a purpose after multiple drafts—with help from an astute editor who advised, in some cases, figuring out what elements don’t go together and deciding why they do.

In the manuscript, the wedding planning follows the proposal, and the revelatory alternative to the salon catastrophe follows the wedding planning—because that’s the order in which they transpired. There is no need to make it more complicated than it needs to be.

In the fifteen-year-old version, after an argument resulted in my fiancé telling me to “do what you want. It’s your wedding,” I include a paragraph about the first time I visited him “when we were merely clandestine pen pals,” which is a head-scratcher. I don’t incorporate any noticeable transition or reasonable page break between beats that would signify why they appear in that order.

I return to wedding planning after a flashback consisting of a list of cities and romantic encounters we had during our honeymoon phase when we were in a long-distance relationship, both of which make it into the manuscript, but, again, in a more logical sequence and with new surrounding material that delves deeper into what was really going on—the “what does this all mean?” part.

A Trip to the Mall with My Would-Be Stepdaughter

The second, related piece from my Memoir II workshop details a trip to the mall with my fiancé’s seven-year-old daughter, where I bought her hot chocolate, a giant pretzel, and a furry yellow stuffed duck because I felt guilty I was about to leave her, which she didn’t know yet.

I was reminded of how much I was not her mom, however, when she didn’t thank me for the treats, instead asking me to buy her Crocs too. I reminded her, “Your mom buys your shoes, sweetie.” Then she begged while I kept saying no.

After likening myself to a “hip aunt you only see on holidays,” I transition into a description of the moms who perpetually sit in the driveway across the street from my fiancé’s house while their children stumble around in the grass, toys strewn about: “a suburban housewife nightmare.”

I return to the mall scene before we inform the children I’m leaving: another odd organizational tactic. Dropping the news on my fiancé’s ten-year-old son crushes him “like a tin can.” Then we’re back in the mall, where I tell his sister we have to leave so we can make it to his Little League game. The scenes are all over the place.

Facing the Big Questions

Here’s what’s missing from that first attempt at writing the story, aside from a conscientious structure: What do I really want? Approaching thirty-five, is being a stepmom in Georgia enough? Do I want to be part of the “housewife nightmare” across the street (read: Am I jealous?), or is being only a “real” mom not enough either? If I leave this readymade family, is it worth it if I never have another family of my own again?

These are questions I grapple with in the manuscript, in addition to fleshing out and tightening the scenes from 2008—in a much more cogent arrangement. If I hadn’t jotted the details of my experiences as a pseudo-Southern stepmom in the same year in which they occurred, however, I would not have remembered the specifics when, in 2014, I sat down to “write a book.”

Write the material while still emotionally invested, and edit it when there’s temporal and sentimental distance—when the gut-level impact wanes.

One Last Online Writing Workshop Before I Quit

After three creative writing workshops—one through UCI Extension and two through Gotham Writers Workshop—I noodled with a few essays on my own, including one I worked on for seven years that I never quite figured out, nor tried to publish. Not having instructor-imposed deadlines proved to be a detriment to my writing in my late thirties, as I did not accomplish nearly as much as I wanted to when no one was awaiting pages. A stifling fear of failure hindered my progress—hooray, anxiety!—which is why, in spring 2011, I signed up for another online memoir writing workshop, following my previous instructor to her new venture with her then husband. The feedback I received on two long essays I wrote during that class would send me into a tailspin that led to a two-year break from writing anything. That’s next time.

Choosing Chapter One

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part V

What Does a Writer Do When Two Talented Authors Provide Contrasting Feedback?

In spring 2008, I ended an engagement a month before my second wedding and flew home to California from Georgia with the tags still on my bridal dress. I was single, despondent, relieved, and ready to write again. At thirty-five, I was about to make a slew of dubious decisions that would become material for my future memoir manuscript, but I had plenty to write about already when I signed up for a Gotham Writers Workshop Memoir I class.

During the second week of that online workshop, I wrote a one-and-a-half-page single-spaced draft of a somewhat sketchy incident that occurred on New Year’s Eve when I was eleven when three boys talked me into playing what they coined Strip Trivial Pursuit. I would again write this same story as a seven-and-a-half-page double-spaced first chapter for my memoir in 2021. I rewrote it after receiving feedback from an author who is recognized as an expert on traditional publishing. At the beginning of 2021, I quit querying agents after ninety-six of them either passed or didn’t respond. (One said “maybe” until her father died.) I hired the author to read my first chapter and query letter to provide feedback about why I wasn’t gaining traction. The first chapter she read was about a much sketchier night in 2000 when I crashed a wedding and didn’t return home until 11:00 a.m. the next day. In 2017, a different well-respected, oft-published author suggested that chapter should go first.

Author Two’s Reaction

In 2021, I made the wedding crasher story chapter two because Author Two felt “adrift” after reading it.

“As a reader, we feel we are being told a funny but kind of disturbing story, but we don’t understand why,” she wrote. “Your memoir needs to be framed in some way, and in that framing, the reader understands how they are supposed to hear your story.

“If your memoir is framed as a single-girl survival story, then we understand we are witnessing someone who has not yet established boundaries around and for her sexuality. She’s still exploring it, but we know—because the back of the book (or query letter) tells us so—she [will] reach a point where she changes her behavior and starts living her life for herself first.”

I wrote in the margin, “Yes! This!” because that’s what my memoir tries to do.

She felt “uncomfortable while reading the material.” She wondered, “I’m not sure what to do with the information I’m being given—SOS!” She said “gatekeepers (editors and agents)” may have the same reaction.

She provided two examples that worked well, one a memoir and one a novel: “Both of these books introduce us to female narrators who are a hot, hot mess, but we are meeting them on the page because the back of the book has promised they are going to get out of the hot mess by doing X for Y.”

But What If Making the Reader Uncomfortable Is the Point?

In 2017, after reading the essay collection I would soon convert into a memoir under his guidance, Author One said this about the main character from the night I crashed that wedding—who, at the time, appeared on page seventy-six: “All right, Motherfucker. You’re going to start my book.

“Make readers curious about the next chapter. It should be fucking serrated,” he said.

In contrast to what Author Two would later say, Author One advised, “Play up moral ambiguity. Use the reader’s curiosity against her. Don’t offer easy answers. Push up the juicy morsel to the front without context. Why is Chelsey putting herself in this situation?”

The astute reader should trust the author will explain everything in due time.

“At weddings, everyone is happy,” he said. “Yet, I have never been to a wedding where someone doesn’t do something shameful. Make readers curious about chapter two.”

Tearing apart chronological, standalone pieces, reorganizing them, ditching some, cutting others, adding new material, and sewing everything back together in nonchronological order was exhilarating. An avid reader of his books, I trusted his advice and did the best I could to adhere to it. If he thought the night I crashed a wedding should go first, it should go first.

And yet . . .

The Old Version of a New Chapter

In 2008, I got right to the point in the first sentence of the New Year’s Eve story: “My lifelong trouble with boys started when I reluctantly agreed to play Strip Trivial Pursuit with three of them when I was eleven . . .”

On December 31, 1984, our parents left us alone while they went to a party down the street with my infant sister because they trusted us. I knew two of the three boys well—and still do; the older one was thirteen. We had never given them any reason to believe we’d get in trouble while they were gone. The boys were resolved to change that.

In the early version, much like with the drive-through debacle, I provide descriptive details and show what happened, but I do not offer insight about what this all means from the vantage point of a mature adult who feels protective of her younger self. I do, however, notice my voice taking shape, as the embarrassing similes and clunky adjectives of the prior pieces recede—sometimes.

That night, the younger brother—my same age—thought it was a swell plan to unscrew Christmas lights from their neighbors’ homes. In the 2008 version, I participate: “He amassed them, and we slung them into the street, enjoying the crisp popping sound as they hit the pavement. The quiet suburban road was swiftly blanketed in crunchy holiday glass . . .”

In the 2021 version, I am an innocent, dismayed bystander: “I watched from a vigilant distance as he littered red and green glass across the asphalt, gleeful over the satisfying sonic pop when the bulbs hit the ground.”

Did I participate, or did I watch? I no longer remember which version is correct, which makes me wonder how much of my memoir is flawed.

We do the best we can with what our brains tell us is the truth.

Next, the three boys and I traipsed through a rushing creek bed to a different neighborhood with armloads of toilet paper to decorate cars. I briefly mention the new black leather flats I ruined walking through dirty water, exaggerating about my how “my mother would kill me” for wrecking my pristine shoes.

Back at the boys’ house, they busted out the Trivial Pursuit board game and announced each time a player missed a question, an item of clothing would come off. I was a skinny child who hadn’t hit puberty yet, wearing only jeans, underwear, and a flimsy blouse. I remember saying, “I’m eleven! Why would you want to see me naked anyway?” They pressured me into playing because I was the only girl in the room and kindly grabbed one of their parent’s windbreakers from the closet, which I threw on and zipped up. I tried to think of ways to get out of playing because I had zero plans to take off my clothes. When I didn’t know the answer to the first trivia question, I unzipped the jacket, and halfway down it got stuck. I had my out. Once the youngest boy was running around the house in his underwear, the game ended.

That’s when they started drinking. “Wanna do shots?” one of them asked.

I politely declined and “planted myself in the corner of the pillow-top couch and turned on MTV. I stayed put until my parents returned after midnight . . .

“It made me nervous” to watch the boys get intoxicated. “I was homesick and sleepy. When the boys beat pots and pans to ring in 1985, I was silent, a meek child not ready for the mysterious world of grownup parties.”

In the early version, that’s where the story ends.

A Revision Thirteen Years Later

On the advice of Author Two, I wrote two new paragraphs to start my manuscript to provide the framework for how the reader should approach my memoir:

“When I was a child, I not only envisioned being a doting mom and wife in a similar enviable family to the one I grew up in; I expected it to drop out of the clouds and smack me in the face—in the right order, at the right time, in the right place . . .” I describe myself as a “compliant, rule-following child” who “worried [herself] sick over grades . . .” I write, “I never wanted to disappoint anyone then, much like I never wanted to inconvenience men in the future,” and “I was a fierce people pleaser,” but I also had firmer limits as a child than as a young adult, which is why I held my ground when I felt uneasy on New Year’s Eve.

The stakes ratchet up in one paragraph from early in the evening playing Crossbows and Catapults on the tile in the entryway of the house, to stealing Christmas lights, to toilet-papering cars and ruining my shoes in the murky creek bed. I attach significance to the dirty, wet shoes in the next paragraph to provide context:

“I feared my parents’ frustration, despite how few times they’d ever been angry with me . . .” These shoes were one of my first pairs of “adult” shoes. I recall the “fluorescent pink ‘clown shoes’” kids at school made fun of, adding, “My giant feet didn’t match the rest of my stick figure body. . .”

When the boys set up the Trivial Pursuit game on the kitchen table, my writing slows down, and I expand on the original:

“I was more annoyed than angry in a situation that could have been very scary under different circumstances with less cool people.” As the zipper got stuck on the fabric, “. . . I envisioned my parents cutting me out of the jacket when they returned after midnight and taking money out of my allowance to pay for a replacement. I was flooded with relief while trying to extract myself from the garment . . . I would now live in this magical, protective windbreaker safe from the whims of wild boys forever . . .”

When the boys climb the cabinets in the kitchen to pull alcohol out of the cupboards, I retreat to the couch to make “myself so small and quiet as to almost be invisible—something I’d do as a theoretical gesture over and over again in the coming decades, so as not to make waves and take up space with my overwhelming, intense emotions.”

I explain my parents will return to scoop me safely into the car and take me home to our sanctuary, the house “we’d lived in since 1978, the same house I’m sitting in now writing this in 2021.”

I spend more than a page using a repetitive tactic to provide morsels of what’s to come in the rest of the memoir: “Don’t tell that eleven-year-old girl . . .” all the traumatizing experiences she will live through. “Don’t tell her love isn’t always enough. Don’t tell her . . .” this. “Don’t tell her . . .” that. Instead, “Tell her . . .” this. “Tell her . . .” that. I give advice to my younger self I wish I’d known before making so many mistakes. That eleven-year-old girl was in some ways stronger than the thirtysomething woman I would become. I had an easier time saying “no” then than I did between eighteen and forty.

While this section is perceptive, I give too much away too soon—something Author One would have advised against, which jives with the comments of an independent publisher in a September 2022 rejection email.

So, Which Author Was Right?

They both were. Every reader brings unique experiences, tastes, and preferences to a book. That’s why not everyone is a writer’s ideal reader, and once a book is in the world, the reader is as much a part of the meaning of the text as the author.

How did I decide which chapter should go first?

The Tiebreaker

The project director for a coveted independent press recently sent me a personalized rejection when the judge for their nonfiction book contest didn’t choose my manuscript. I was elated. Personalized feedback in a rejection? From the publisher himself? That never happens!

Here’s an excerpt of what he said:

“Your writing is wonderful here. It's fun, shocking, the life is interesting, the development strong. Our concern was the opening, which failed to grab the reader. It was too verbose, and it wasn't a good example of what is, in the rest of the book, swift and clean narration. Bring that same technique that's in the rest of the book up front and strong.”

He liked my manuscript—all except for the New Year’s Eve chapter, written as an afterthought based on Author Two’s fresh take.

So, I cut it. The tale of an eleven-year-old girl who worms her way out of drinking and shedding her clothes landed in the “reject” folder on my hard drive, and the twenty-seven-year-old woman who crashed a wedding and instigated scandalous behavior at an afterparty returned to its rightful place as the first chapter, as Author One suggested.

The reader will receive the answers she craves, but not all at once from the outset.

Drive-Through Debacle with Lucky Thirteen

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part IV

An Anecdote, Not an Essay

Before we say goodbye to my creative writing workshop in 2007, let’s discuss one more piece from the ten I wrote during the quarter. In Part III, we looked at a story involving my relationship with my college boyfriend. For the final lesson, I wrote about the man I would date immediately after him while I was still grieving lost love—a rebound that would last longer than the relationship from which I was rebounding. Lesson 10 is called “Drive-Through Debacle.” With my third boyfriend, I had many debacles from which to choose between 1997 and 1999. This one involves an undignified late-night, post-dance-club Del Taco run.

I begin the short essay with a slew of examples to explain why my third boyfriend’s nickname was Lucky Thirteen before setting the scene outside the fast-food joint: He had broken his nose seven times; he had a titanium cheekbone as a result of a jet ski accident; he once puked across the dashboard of my car when he mixed booze with antibiotics; he skewered both of his truck’s front tires in the desert driving over a pile of firewood full of nails; he totaled that same Ford F-150 driving to Big Bear Mountain on black ice when he failed to put on chains while I was in the passenger seat.

When the Tone Doesn't Match the Content

The tone of this piece is comedic and lighthearted, despite the material suggesting a more troubling set of circumstances. I write:

“Akin to a twisted game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, in my twenties I had the inexplicable habit of walking into a crowded room, spinning in circles blindly with a pointed finger, halting on the most overtly maniacal guy in the room and saying, ‘There’s my next boyfriend!’”

This is an exaggeration, as I could still count on one hand how many boys I’d dated up until then, and my writing is somewhat flippant, but I see certain improvements in this piece compared to the first ones I wrote at the beginning of the quarter. This incident has a beginning, middle, and end, while earlier pieces were less structured and cohesive.

Rookie Writing Mistakes

In the next paragraph, I call myself the “DD,” not the “designated driver” but the “designated dumbass.” During the night in question, twenty-three-year-old Lucky Thirteen had had too much to drink, and the minimal alcohol I had consumed had worn off—a consistent theme in my dating life. All this to say I was driving. Then I make two rookie writing mistakes: I pull the reader out of the story to write a paragraph suggesting cops looking to fill DUI quotas should park at the outlet of the Del Taco drive-through late on Saturday nights because they could hand them out like “Halloween candy.” Funny but unnecessary. Next I give away the ending of the story, thus killing the buildup to the shocking conflict and scant resolution I have yet to get into:

“In this case, however, it wasn’t a DUI they’d be after: It was public nudity and crude acts against impressionable minors.”

The reader’s interest may be piqued, but now she knows exactly where this is headed—and way too soon. Plus, the carefree, funny tone of the essay suddenly seems inappropriate in relation to the content.

Here’s what happened after I ordered our burritos before we made it to the window to pick them up: The car behind us was teeming with teenagers, most of whom were probably too young to drive. One of them ran to the front of my blue Acura Integra, pulled his shorts halfway down his butt, and hopped onto the hood. He smacked his behind three times, then pulled his pants up and ran back to his friend’s car. Their windows were rolled down, so I could hear them screaming and laughing. It reminded me of the innocent nights I had in high school renting VHS tapes from Blockbuster. His antics were harmless. I laughed until my boyfriend said, “Watch this!”

When I illustrate the teenage boy and his prank, I do what I did best at thirty-four: I over-describe and lob contrived similes. The boy “skipped . . . like a spry, devious Robin Goodfellow” and slapped his “Johnson & Johnson, powder-fresh Gerber baby butt.” This is practice. It’s an early draft. I’m new. It’s a long process. I’ll get there. So, I will cut myself a break, even while I wince.

What should have happened next: I grabbed our bag of burritos and drove us back to Lucky Thirteen’s parents’ spacious house, where we had a whole wing of the property to ourselves, if you don’t count his bedridden, silent great aunt with dementia who resided in the bedroom next to his.

What actually happened: Lucky Thirteen jumped out of my car, silencing the children behind us, pulled his pants down in their headlights, and bent over head to knees, yelling, “You like that! You like that! Welcome to The Patch, Motherfucker!”

The Patch was “a tender moniker bestowed upon the forest growing between the two now-spread cheeks [his] saintly mother gave him.” Translation: He exposed the entire hairy crack of his skinny ass to children. My fear had been he would yell at them; this was worse. They screamed, not in the way they’d screamed before, but in horror.

I gripped the steering wheel and hung my head out of sight, “saying the prayer of the mortified agnostic.”

My reaction was both apt and passive. I write, “I was livid,” instead of showing my lividness, but I do add important dialogue I recreated from memory:

“I gave him the ‘you-could-have-gotten-arrested’ lecture.

‘Oh, come on. That was hilarious!’ he said.

‘No, it wasn’t. You totally disturbed those kids!’

‘Whatever. They started it.’

‘They have probably never seen a grown man naked before, especially not one so hairy,’ I said.”

When I reread this piece recently, I wrote in the margin, “This isn’t funny. This is assault.”

I remember not talking much to my boyfriend on the drive home, but I didn’t get out of the car to check on the traumatized kids when I had the chance, and now I wish I had. I was ashamed, but I don’t express so. I had an opportunity in this essay to dig deeper to find the meaning behind this event, rather than relaying a surface-level anecdote as if reenacting it at a party for laughs. The truth was I was in pain because of prior rejection, so I chose a partner for whom I knew I wouldn’t fall in love—someone emotionally “safe” to blunt the agony of true loss, and I put up with his appalling behavior because, when he was sober, he was kind, fun, and generous. But I don’t share that here, and I barely scratch the surface with regard to the effect he had on the poor teenagers in that beat-up car behind us. I write:

“They high-tailed it the long way through the parking lot. . . ,” and I was “left wondering how much harm that misguided episode really caused the modest bunch who were just out for a good time.”

But What Does This Story Mean?

It’s a start, but I want more from this ending. What makes this an essay, rather than a yarn? I might suggest to my younger self tying this incident in with others of a similar ilk to show a pattern both in how I deal with my relationship to Lucky Thirteen and the greater significance of our tentative bond. What separates this piece from a stronger one are its implications. What does this all mean? Can I attach more weight to this scene?

I leave the reader with a “perfect fanny imprint on the hood of my car” the “little boy” left, and then I continue to date the offending man because I’m afraid to be alone with my thoughts and emotions and because he does nice things for me sometimes, like teach me how to snowboard. Ultimately, it wasn’t enough.

What the Teacher Said

My instructor said this about Lesson 10:

“Your writing is so lively and fun, Chelsey.” She is confused about whether this is an essay or a short story. She says, “. . . show how it changed you. . .” if it’s a short story. “In a story, I think it’s best when the narrator has shifted in her understanding so she’s no longer the same person.” I would argue that’s sound advice for an essay as well.

Her last comment is one that stuck with me: “I’m sure if you keep writing, and I can’t see you not writing, I’ll be seeing your name all over the place!”

She saw something in my early work I didn’t see yet. It was one of many boosts to come that kept me going and introduced me to the importance of writing mentors.

Write What You Have to Write

Lucky Thirteen eventually made a noteworthy guest appearance in my memoir manuscript, but the Del Taco incident did not. Reviewing the ten pieces I wrote for this long-ago writing workshop, I notice I was immediately drawn to nonfiction, most specifically stories about my romantic encounters. I knew I had to write about them, even if I didn’t fully understand why yet. It’s true what authors say: Write about the thing you are obsessed with—the thing that tugs at you and won’t stop tugging.

I would follow this preoccupation and see it through, but not yet. When this class ended, I was excited to continue writing on my own without deadlines, but I didn’t. I stopped. I temporarily quit because I had massive imposter syndrome. I didn’t write again until I signed up for Memoir I through Gotham Writers Workshop in 2008, when I was now single, back in California, making more questionable romantic decisions that would appear in my upcoming work.

The Fall

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part II

A Critique of My First Workshop Essay

Welcome to How I Wrote a Memoir. If you haven’t read Part I, it’s here. Here’s Part II:

Imagine a thirty-four-year-old transplant sitting at her soon-to-be fiancé’s oak desk in a suburban home north of Atlanta, Georgia, across the street from the cul-de-sac moms who lounge in lawn chairs in the driveway chatting, while their husbands work and their toddlers tumble in the grass. In 2007, I imagine I was invisible to the neighborhood Southern ladies because I was a childless, unmarried Californian with a job. It didn’t take much to determine we had nothing in common. I waved to them, but I was never invited into their unspoken club. I was starving for authentic companionship, so I signed up for an online creative writing class through UC Irvine Extension, where I had previously spent three glorious years on campus. I needed to find my people again.

A Writer Who Doesn't Write

I didn’t have a plan for my writing. I only knew it was well past time to explore it. When I was twenty-two, I wrote in my journal, “I just want to be a writer.” Twelve years later I still wasn’t writing, a result of an incapacitating fear of failure. My cruel inner voice berated me with no supporting evidence to back up its claims: You will never be good enough. What will people think of you? Why even try?

Name That Pesky Inner Editor

Many years later, during a Hugo House class in Seattle on Mindful Writing, Anna Vodicka asked us to name our negative inner voices and tell them, “I’m not listening to you.” I named mine after my nightmare sixth-grade teacher who launched heavy objects across the room when she was angry and cussed at our parents under her breath loud enough for us to hear. During Anna’s class, I thought, “I’m not listening to you, Miss Salter.”

Back in 2007, I needed an outside party to provide deadlines before I would sit in a chair, stare at the blank page, and type words, and since I’d always been a dutiful student, what better way to write than to have a bona fide writing teacher with a published craft book anticipate reading my work for ten straight weeks?

Poor Choices, Good Material

I gravitated immediately to nonfiction because I’m not creative enough to write fiction, imaginary Miss Salter lied. Plus, before moving to Georgia, I’d ended a six-month marriage to a man I’d lived with for more than three years who struggled with drug addiction—the only person I’d ever cheated on, incidentally with the man whose desk I was currently using. After a stable, somewhat uneventful childhood, I had material because of poor adult relationship choices. Hallelujah!

Skydiving

My first short essay in that creative writing class describes jumping out of an airplane. It was a hot, dry August day near Lake Perris, California, two days after my wedding in 2005. The piece is called “The Fall” because it attempted to work on two levels: taking a literal leap from 13,000 feet and a metaphorical leap into an ill-advised, permanent commitment with someone I was unsure was a match, both of us bluffing the day we said, “I do.” It was a groovy idea but a poorly executed essay—both a missed opportunity and necessary practice.

In the first paragraph, I write skydiving occurred before we had sex on our honeymoon, a clue I’d made a tremendous mistake. Then I describe the plane:

“The small plane that carried us into the air was painted like a gray and blue shark, with jagged teeth marking the nose of the aircraft. The rickety jet looked as if it had been taped together with duct tape—twice. It rattled with the sound of loose bolts crashing against metal, and it flew like a bird with a clipped wing, dipping and swaying toward earth.”

Woefully Wordy

Was it a shark or a bird? Why “twice”? “It rattled” suffices. All planes carry people “into the air.” Someone get this poor girl an editor! Reading this wordy paragraph, I want to shake my younger shoulders and scream, “You’re trying too hard!” As my future book coach later said, “Pick the right image; render it correctly; move on.”

Cut the fluff.

The crux of this essay shouldn’t lie with what the plane looks like anyway. We only need to know it’s well-worn and possibly unsafe, so now I might write, “The small, rickety gray plane, with a nose painted with shark teeth, swayed as we gained elevation.”

I go on to describe the stickers slapped on the inside walls of the plane and call the jump experts taking us on this dangerous adventure “daredevil punks” and “crazy hooligans.” (Pick one and cut “crazy.”) I explain how they teased us, fondling the loose straps carrying our parachute packs. I describe my husband and his tandem companion sliding down the bench toward the door-less opening and the roar of the wind outside. I call the wind “deafening,” which it was, “blowing like an angry hurricane,” which it wasn’t. I write my husband turned into an “instant speck” when he jumped, a phrase I still like, but what I don’t do is describe the turbulence of my relationship. Why did I get married two days ago when I was still having doubts? Why did we not have sex on our wedding night—or the next day? Why is jumping out of a plane less scary than hurdling into this marriage? What is this essay about besides skydiving?

When a Scene Misses the Significance

I write, “I had lost him,” both during his free fall and in our relationship, but I fail to explain why. I talk around it: “Our three-and-a-half-year relationship, complete with a condo, a dog, and a variety of motorized toys in the garage, had led to this moment. Even though it was supposed to be the beginning, it felt like the end.”

Readers don’t read minds; they read the words writers write.

I then describe my tumble from the plane. There’s an “unfettered cry”; “spinning like a rag doll”; and that irksome Miss Salter: What if the chute doesn’t open? What will happen when I hit bottom? Why can’t I breathe? I didn’t actually have time to think anything when I was dropping from the sky at terminal velocity, but I’ll let those questions slide. But then, there’s this: “The screeching pressure pierced my ears like the needling voices that had been guiding my life for so long . . .” So many adjectives, so little explanation. I say something vague about being a people pleaser, but the reader still knows nothing concrete.

After my tandem instructor grabs my hand to pull the chute, we float “like a pendulum,” and I know I will survive, “gliding in for a perfect landing in the soft grass.” I describe this as one of my bravest moments, along with the moment I leave my husband six months later because I finally “listen to my heart,” a vague realization that leaves the reader with more questions than answers.

So Many Questions

I recently wrote in the margin, “How” would I survive the metaphorical fall? “Why” did I stuff my backpack full of clothes and head home to my parents’ house? “What happened?!”

I still like the idea of an essay about skydiving as a metaphor for my marriage. The piece could have worked if I’d been more adept and willing to dig deep into what happened between me and my husband when we wrote the vows we both broke immediately. Part of the problem was I didn’t fully understand our situation yet. I needed more time to work this story out, and my ex-husband didn’t get sober and make amends until 2011. Even then I didn’t accept all that had been hidden from me, nor did I fess up.

Also, when I wrote the piece, I didn’t feel free to write the whole truth. The man I almost married in Georgia once said, “You have storytelling disease.” I laughed, but it wasn’t funny. The desire to make meaning out of one’s personal history is not a disease. I knew if I wrote the real story, my current partner would be upset and wouldn’t understand why I’d felt compelled to do so. This stopped me.

What the Teacher Said

Here's what my UCI Extension instructor said about “The Fall”: “I’d like to know more, have a few more details about what was wrong. Had your husband pushed you into jumping out of the plane, which may have been the last straw?”

The smart reader shouldn’t have to guess what the writer is trying to say. The writer should be forthright, not obscure the facts with excessive, flowery language.

Skydiving was my idea. Getting married wasn’t. It took fourteen more years to write, revise, and publish the genuine story of these two overlapping partnerships, and I didn’t mention skydiving once.

A Sixteen-Year Journey to Complete a Book

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part I

In this blog series, I will explore my writing process from my first workshop to completed manuscript.

In 2007, seven years after completing seven years of college, I decided to take writing seriously. At thirty-four, I was a Southern California woman living in a small Georgia suburb north of Atlanta, in love with a man who’d soon give me a giant ring I would return before my thirty-fifth birthday to move home. When I believed I was in Georgia forever, feeling homesick, not writing, and longing for a creative community, I signed up for an online UCI Extension Creative Writing course. Connecting to my alma mater from afar, I didn’t know what I wanted to write. I only knew I wasn’t nurturing a gaping hole inside that writing fills. At the time, calling myself a “writer” felt like a lie, so I didn’t. I was a writer who didn’t write, and I was about to begin the arduous, wonderful process of finding my voice, determining my trajectory, and completing a memoir manuscript, at least half of which consists of life experience I hadn’t lived yet. Writing a book was a vague, lifelong dream that didn’t seem feasible for an edit-as-you-go perfectionist with no deadlines and a comfortable, unchallenging full-time editing job. It was easy—yet joyless—not to write.

Everything Saved

My first post-university creative writing class was one of many online and in-person workshops, lectures, and mentorships—and I have saved nearly every assignment, note of feedback, related email, discarded essay, published essay, handout, and unusable paragraph I kid myself into thinking I will still use someday. I have one hundred pages of an abandoned novel, several versions of my nonfiction book proposal, and an entire essay collection I scrapped to rewrite the still-living 66,000-word “completed” memoir manuscript I’m now submitting. No writing time has been wasted, nor will it ever be.

Perpetual Persistence

Fast approaching fifty, while I have yet to publish my first manuscript, I will not give up, and with a well-respected publisher recently saying my memoir is “compulsively readable,” I have another nudge to keep going, however long it takes, as frustrating and painful as the interminable wait is. I may have to write another book first. I may have to publish that one essay or op-ed that gets the right attention. I may have to go viral on the now-unraveling Twitter or Gen-Z-inundated-TikTok, a platform to which I fear I am too old and uncool to contribute. I may have to revise my proposal with updated comp titles for the umpteenth time—for the love of fuck—but if that’s what it takes, that’s what I’ll do.

After fifteen years, countless hours, nine workshops, seven lecture-based classes, five conferences, a magical book coach, an insightful “book doula,” a lifelong mentor, two consistent beta readers, thirteen public readings, a defunct seven-year blog, a current blog, more than twenty published essays, ninety-six agent queries, twenty-seven independent press submissions (three pending), monthslong excruciating breaks, and over two hundred literary rejections since I started sending out my work, I have a lot to say about how I wrote and revised a memoir. After watching one too many episodes of The Bachelorette, I hate the word “journey,” but that’s what it’s been, and that’s what I want to share, starting with that ten-week creative writing class in 2007.

Editing Advice for My Younger Self: A Blog Series

When I thought of the idea for this blog series and began locating and reading everything I’ve written since I was thirty-four, jotting notes about what I did right from the outset and where I went terribly wrong—my current self now the developmental and line editor for my younger self—I thought, “Oh crap, this is another book.” I also thought the examples and stories I plan to elucidate may be valuable. Plus, I see firsthand how far I’ve progressed. While I will always compare myself to better writers, of which there are many, I am a much better writer than I was in 2007—when I never met a torturous simile I didn’t find “clever,” hadn’t mastered the art of cutting superfluous words on any level, and had little grasp of the story under the story. (What is this really about?) It’s both cringey and reassuring to read my old work—some of which is downright insensitive, but I’ll get to that later.

Sixteen Years of Writing

I never received an MFA, a possibility I still research online at least every two years until I consider money, but I probably have roughly the equivalent experience. (I was once told in jest I have an “honorary” MFA.) Looking at my notes from that first workshop, I realize, if given the opportunity, I could teach a college-level writing workshop now. So, in this space, I plan to talk my way through the last fifteen (almost sixteen!) years on the page, with no idea how many posts it will turn into or how long it will take. Since I never want to stop learning, and I apparently haven’t fully abandoned the part of me that taught high school English for two years in my twenties, I hope this series turns into something useful—or at least will be somewhat amusing, even if I’m the only one reading it. In any case, next time I will reveal what I learned about writing when I was starving for creative kinship in Georgia when I had much less gray hair; my jeans were five sizes smaller; and I was planning a second wedding that never happened. Part two: coming soon.

A Word Lover’s Origin Story

When I was a child, I read every Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary novel I could get my hands on. I rejoiced on days when the Scholastic Book Fair came to my elementary school. I read at the dinner table. I reorganized my bookshelves often, opting to submerge myself in words while other children played outside and perfected Atari games.

I was that kid in junior high who relished diagramming sentences and didn’t flinch when we were forced to memorize all the prepositions in alphabetical order, as if that would somehow make us better writers. When my eighth grade English teacher introduced the dreaded five-paragraph essay and enforced her predetermined sentence variation requirements, I complied without question, even though she treated essays like a fixed math problem with one “right” answer and forbid the use of “I” in our work; it was taboo to have opinions.

During my first week of high school, my ninth grade English teacher said, “Forget everything you’ve ever learned about writing.” He set us free to make arguments on the page without restrictions on sentence types or a specific number of paragraphs. It was revelatory. Around that time, I connected my love of reading with my love of writing. It took an inordinately long time and an enormous amount of self-imposed work, however, to reach my current trajectory.

I am a lifelong learner, and in midlife I have substantial experience and skills I never imagined possible when my friends and I sat in that windowless freshmen classroom, marking off the days until the Rose Bowl Depeche Mode concert on my teacher’s blackboard. In hindsight, it was inevitable I would become an English major, receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Irvine, but on the last day of my undergraduate career, I had no solid plans, aside from purchasing an alumni sweatshirt. At twenty two, I wrote in my journal, “I just want to be a writer.” Then I didn’t write. I didn’t consider it a viable option.

To remain a student, I attended California State University, Long Beach, where I studied for two years to become a high school English teacher. Between 2000 and 2002, I taught ninth, eleventh, and twelfth grade literature and writing, ensuring I had zero time to read and write for pleasure—or date anyone—and the stress of disciplining teenagers when I still looked like one likely shaved off a couple years of my life.

So I became an editor, the other career option I’d considered in the late nineties. After I quit teaching, I edited law textbooks and interviewed attorneys for a newsletter. Then I managed a data center association magazine. Next, I edited an electronics manufacturing magazine for sixteen years, most recently as the chief content officer.

Simultaneously, beginning in 2007, I mustered the courage to write personal and craft essays, memoir, and, more recently, fiction, while also providing constructive feedback on other writers’ multi-genre work, cultivating a nourishing community. After a handful of writing workshops through UCI Extension and Gotham Writers Workshop, I found a mentor in author Shawna Kenney through UCLA Extension in her personal essay class. After a ten-week class on campus, she invited me to join a critique group. I spent four eight-week sessions in her private workshop, where I compiled essays that would turn into a draft of a collection. I latched onto the workshop environment, listening to constructive criticism, applying it to improve my abilities as both a writer and an editor, offering notes in a safe space of supportive, like-minded, creative people.

As the editor of the anthology BOOK LOVERS, published by Seal Press, Shawna accepted one of my essays for my first official publication. Seeing it in print in a real book and participating in a series of readings in Northern and Southern California was the push I needed to submit my work elsewhere and continue writing outside the workshop environment with no deadlines. I continued to trade pieces with trusted readers as I worked toward completing my manuscript, and for six years, I edited a fellow writer’s television pilots and screenplays, once attending a table read with professional actors, where I gave advice along with seasoned filmmakers.

For seven months in 2014, with concentrated, consistent work, I completed a draft of my essay collection. After a few revisions over the next year and a half, I declared I was finished. It was a feat to be celebrated, but the manuscript was nowhere near ready, and I have since learned it’s only done when it’s published.

I queried agents, with some interest, but on a gut level, I knew the manuscript was missing something—or had too much of something. (Both were true.) So, I sought a second mentor and found him when a friend suggested the online class Write Your Story at CreativeLive, taught by author Joshua Mohr. His lectures were another revelation. During his book tour for his first memoir, SIRENS, I attended his three-hour, in-person master class and knew immediately I wanted to work with him. We spent eight weeks one-on-one in 2017 revising my collection, molding it into an improved, cohesive memoir with fewer pages, more structure, and deeper emotional resonance. His invaluable notes were all delivered via video chats. We moved the middle of the book to the beginning, and everything extraneous began to fall away. A friend who also worked with Josh said, “He has magic glasses,” and I borrowed them to catch a glimpse of a 3-D stereogram of jumbled, colored triangles morphing into a previously hidden, suddenly recognizable, standout image. Once I saw the big picture, I couldn’t unsee it. His approach changed my writing life forever. That summer, I wrote and revised like a woman on fire, thinking, “What would Josh do?” whenever I hit a snag.

Then I thought, again, “I am done with my manuscript!” (I should have known better.) I even posted a photo of a printed copy on social media, while continuing to query agents, rewriting a book proposal and query letter innumerable times to meet disparate requirements.

In the meantime, I published personal and craft essays in multiple journals, and in early 2017, I published an essay in THE WASHINGTON POST that was republished in a number of global outlets, including in a Sunday print edition of THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD. The piece garnered supportive private and public messages and forgettable comments under the original post. I experienced a dopamine surge—and heightened anxiety—waking up every morning to new attention. “This is it! I have arrived,” I thought. But, after only a week, I was once again alone with the blank page. So it goes.

By 2021, my manuscript revision count numbered somewhere in the double-digits. I had overhauled the ending nearly as much as I’d colored my hair. I reached out to a third mentor after reading BEFORE AND AFTER THE BOOK DEAL. Courtney Maum read my first chapter and query letter, sent an extensive assessment, and followed up with an edifying phone call. Fresh eyes served, yet again, as a tremendous boost. I changed the title, made the first chapter the second chapter, wrote a new first chapter, and revised my query letter based on her insight about what agents look for beyond what’s listed on their websites.

After querying oodles of agents, I researched independent presses and am still submitting to them. Two submissions were “in-progress” for over a year! In their recent rejection, one publisher apologized for the lengthy process, stating I’d almost made their long list, encouraging me to “keep going.” The other one said they loved everything but my first chapter, which was the one I’d most recently added. So I cut it. They said my memoir was “compulsively readable.” I’m getting closer.

Now I know my “finished” manuscript isn’t finished; it’s on hiatus. I have fully embraced the process. The trick, another writer friend said, is to work on the next project while waiting. In workshops, I often said, “I could never write fiction,” even though I love reading novels, but once I attended an inspiring and practical Maria Semple lecture series at the Hugo House focused on the imperative elements of narrative, I changed my mind.

In the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote 100,000 words of a novel until I figured out the story I was trying to tell and returned to page one. If someone would have told me in 2007 when I signed up for my first online creative writing class that I would cast aside 100,000 words to start a novel from scratch without second-guessing why that was important, I never would have believed it.

Working with outstanding editors and fellow writers over the years, I have become a better editor and writer myself, and I will never stop refining my craft. I have learned cutting precious but superfluous words is liberating; every adept writer and editor needs other capable readers to guide them; interminable perseverance is a required trait; one can’t control the outcome, only the journey.

I’ve been on a similar journey as you. I understand your triumphs and travails, but every writer’s process and timeline are unique. I will meet you where you are and help you reach the next level. Collaboration is key. Find me at https://www.drysdaleeditorial.com/.

The Essay Submission Process

I like this essay. I should have no trouble publishing it. I’m so proud for taking the editor’s advice the last time we corresponded. It’s timely, the correct length, and she hasn’t published anything else like it. I’m sure she’ll take it.

When she says “yes,” the essay will go viral around the globe, and I’ll finally get an agent.

Let’s see, the other times I’ve submitted to her, I was either accepted the next day, rejected the same day or 10 days later, or she didn’t respond at all. How long should I wait to bug her since I need to publish this by next month?

*Rereads essay. Yep, I still like it. Maybe she’s busy.

*Checks Twitter.

If she has time to tweet, she has time to read my essay.

*Checks Twitter again.

Crap, she’s dealing with a social media shit storm surrounding another essay she just published. I’m screwed.

I bet she’s already read it.

My essay is total nonsense. The other time she published my work was a fluke. I should quit writing forever.

Stop it. You think this every time, and every time it eventually works out. Keep going.

*Refreshes email. *Refreshes email again. *Tries to write something new. *Can’t. Too distracted.

She hasn’t had time to get to it, and she’s not thinking about you at all. Calm down.

*Makes a list of other places to send the essay and tries to decide how long to wait for the editor to respond.

*Waits a week and sends a nice, pressure-less follow-up email and hopes it doesn’t annoy her. Doesn’t hear back.

I only have time to send this to maybe two or three more places before this “timely” piece is obsolete. Shit.

I’m totally going to end up posting this to my blog, and 23 people will read it.

I’m never going to publish my memoir either, but that’s okay because if I did, everyone would hate me.

*Rewrites essay.

*Sends it somewhere else until someone finally says “yes,” even if it takes years.

*Comes up with an idea for a new piece. Gets excited to write it.

*Repeats steps 1-21.