First-book woes: Almost losing the thread

(but not quite)

After receiving feedback from six readers on a full draft of my memoir, in May, I've been revising it. Even in the best weather of summer, I've worked on it about five days a week. I was feeling pretty good about that, even though progress was slow.

Last week I finished a round of revisions on the first of three parts of the book¹. 

As I came to the end of that 68-page section, printed it and read it, I finally started seeing the book as if from the outside. To my dismay I saw many paragraphs (maybe ten percent of them) that didn't move the plot along. They were not "bad," at this point in the draft process—usually interesting or vivid images, character establishment, or background. But too often, I stopped and said, "Why is this here?" These paragraphs need to be chopped up. Their contents need to be injected where needed in plot-moving scenes. 

That's when my belief in my book project wavered. I felt afraid to take the thing apart and try to put it back together, especially since I thought it was pretty good already. It might escape and fly away, irretrievable, if I break it up in small pieces now. I might introduce new problems and make it worse, instead of better. Maybe, I thought, I'm not capable of turning this book into a beautiful and artful memoir, after years of working on it. 

Still, I'm not letting it go. 

After marking up my first 68 pages extensively, with "move this here" arrows and questions to myself, I decided to re-outline the whole section in the new sequence. It was slow going, paying attention to all the move-arrows. In the outline I also noted, without yet omitting, the paragraphs whose exposition needs to be puréed into the larger pot of soup.

It was good to see scenes (plus those problem areas) all laid out in a list. Then I thought, why not write ONE loose, summary paragraph, in a separate doc, for each item in the outline. I can make sure each one funnels directly into the next one. Then, when I start entering my new revisions and re-orgs into Scrivener, I will have a trail map, like on a hike in the mountains. "Go around this specific bend, not this other way, in order to get to the next view."

I had hoped to work a lot faster at this stage. Instead I'm working as slowly as I was last year before finishing the draft for the beta readers. But I'm sure the story will be more tightly knitted than it was.

1. The book is about what it was like, as an only child, to lose my mother to cancer at age eleven, when I still felt like I was almost physically part of her. Without my mother, I had no guide and no road signs except those my peers showed me. I had to grow into a new life and into adolescence at the same time, and I felt incompetent in almost everything a girl needed to know. On top of all that, I believed I had not mourned or experienced grief over losing my mom. But I still wanted a good life.

So those were the problems I faced. The story the book tells is how I found a good life in my teens despite all that, even though it wasn't the life I had thought I was supposed to have. It’s a story of resourcefulness through a hard time—not a trauma narrative.

Part 1 of the book takes the reader from the protagonist’s childhood in 1970s Chicago with loving parents, through the mom's protracted illness, to her death and burial in her hometown in Arkansas.