Watch Night 2008

I'm reading Giants, by John Stauffer - subtitled "The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln." It's beautifully researched and written and, you know, right up my alley. With only 6 paragraphs of the 314 page book mentioning Helen, and a kind inscription by Stauffer (thanks to my sister in law) wishing me luck on my book, it's got pride of place in my office.

I'm reading the section now on December 1862...the final days before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was to take effect, freeing slaves throughout the Union and rebel territory. Abolitionists and blacks, including Douglass, feared against hope that Lincoln would lack the courage to see his bold initiative through. So on December 31st they gathered at churches and prayed through the night.

Over three thousand black and white abolitionists met at the Temple [Tremont Temple, a Baptist church in Boston] in the morning...Throughout the day there were numerous short speeches and music but no announcement of the final emancipation decree. Douglass wrapped up the afternoon session by saying that this moment represented a sharp break from the sins of the past. "We have had a period of darkness, but are now having the dawn of light, and are met today to celebrate it."

Suffice it to say, Lincoln was good to his word (though waited past 11 pm to finalize it and nearly gave Douglass a heart attack in the process.)And African Americans still celebrate "Watch Night" as a means of ushering out the old and hoping for the new.

I read Douglass' words with fresh hope last night because in 2008, they sound just as meaningful. Even with Bush gutting the Endangered Species Act on his way out the door, and the black hole of the economy making it hard to see, we sense we're on the brink of something new, a dawn of a new kind of government. I hope that your New Year's Eve celebration gives you a chance to say adieu to the darkness and prepare yourself for the hard work (and promise) that lies ahead.

Happy New Year!

Say it ain't so, Papa

Per my previous post on my efforts to work my way through the reading list in Master Class in Fiction Writing by Adam Sexton, I triumphantly slammed the cover shut on The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway yesterday. It's the first Hemingway I've read since high school when I thought to my young self "Hey! A racist AND a sexist, great stuff."

After doing the post-school runaround I settled in with the Sexton book to see what I had learned about the elusive "voice" as illustrated by Papa Hemingway.

Only to realize that I was supposed to have read A Farewell to Arms.

Noooooooo! So now it's back to the library to pick up ANOTHER Hemingway novel. I am really suffering for my craft.

In the meantime I started to reread Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, one of the writers I admire most because she makes it all seem so easy: the historical accuracy, the compelling characters, the beautiful language.

I was struck by one of Sexton's observations about the relationship between writers and novels: if you figure that an average novel is 300 pages long, and a reader can manage 30 pages at most per sitting, you've got to write a book that will engage the reader ten separate times to drop everything else and pick up your book. In Brooks' case, I couldn't even stop until page 100 - and I've read this before and know what happens. Better, for me anyway, than with Hemingway where I keep flipping to the last page to see how much longer I have to go...

Permission to lie on the couch, but only to read

I find myself in a strange and unaccustomed interval right now: I have free time. I have finished up 95% of my current work projects and am waiting to start on a larger and long-term assignment towards the end of the month. The kids are back in school, the foreign exchange student went home, and the back-to-school paperwork responsibilities of my Room Mom job are dispatched.

For now I'm resisting the impulse to start another novel rewrite, believing that my chance for success is better if I wait until I am simply BURSTING to get back into it. Right now, not bursting.

But it doesn't mean I'm going to lay on the couch and watch Orpah (as my aunt Noonie has always called her.) No, I bought a great book called Master Class in Fiction Writing by Adam Sexton. As the publisher says:

Many writers believe that if they just find the right teacher or workshop, their writing will reach new heights of skill. But why not learn from the best? In his popular workshops in New York City, creative writing instructor Adam Sexton has found that the most effective way for any writer to grasp on the elements of fiction is to study the great masters. Master Class in Fiction Writing is your personal crash course in creative writing, with the world's most accomplished fiction writers as your guides.

You'll learn the art of characterization from Austen, style and voice from Hemingway, and dialogue from Murdoch. You'll discover the timeless techniques of plotting in the work of Conrad and the ingenious structure of Joyce. These are the most important lessons any writer can learn--a truly "novel" approach to writing that will enrich, inform, and inspire.

So it works like this: I read the first few pages of the chapter on, let's say, Characterization. Then Mr. Sexton says, "Go read Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and then read the rest of this chapter." And when I do, all his comments and observations about the craft of good characterization are illustrated by examples like Lucy Steele, Mrs. Underwoood, and Elinor Dashwood who are fresh in my mind.

Being impelled to spend a couple of hours each day with books that I've been meaning to read or
re-read for years, all in the name of bettering my novel and absorbing Sexton's lessons, is a real gift. Even if it means I have to read Hemingway- sorry, but ugh. How many pages of The Sun Also Rises will be spent in describing how the narrator and his comrades travel from bar to bar and then what they drink when they get there? It's like reading a frat boy memoir. Then again Hemingway is an American icon, and I'm unpublished.

So this was, ahem, unexpected

In March I went to DC on a research trip and spent hours at Cedar Hill, the home in Anacostia in which Frederick and Helen Douglass lived. Helen spent the last part of her life fighting to have the home chartered as a national landmark and her efforts paid off. The home underwent a big restoration a few years back and now looks exactly as it did when FD lived there, down to the wallpaper and carpeting.

Since so much of my book takes place within its walls I badgered the poor docent with questions and took a lot of photos, which I'm referring back to every day when I write. One question which the otherwise very knowledgeable docent could not answer: What was up with the hand embroidered pillow shams in Frederick Douglass' bedroom?

As was the style at the time, Frederick and Helen had separate rooms, just across the hall from each other. You can just make out in this photo the pillows on Frederick's bed but I can describe them. Embroidered in red thread were three owls on tree branches, two tucked close together and the third owl on the lower branch. Underneath it says,

"Two's company, three's a crowd." On the bed. In red.

Who made these for him? Helen? What was she telling him? Was it his daughter Rosetta who really couldn't forgive Helen for marrying her widowed father? Was Helen the top owl, or the owl on the bottom? Have I been researching this subject too long? Probably.

Little bit o' pressure

Almost two years ago now, I started working on a novel of historical fiction. I spent the first year caught up in "research rapture" to cop a phrase from writer/editor Janis Cooke Newman...that phase where every time you think you might actually start writing the book, you think "but WAIT! First I should find out the name of the general who oversaw the regiment that defeated the 126th at Harper's Ferry! I can't possibly begin until I know that."

The research rapture went on and on until a seminal evening with cocktails in August 2007, when I told some writer friends with great flourish that I was hoping to finish a first draft by June 2008. One of my friends looked up from her sidecar and said, "June 2008? You could have a crappy first draft in three months, if you tried."

Well Crap By Christmas became my mantra, and I pulled it off, especially the crap part. It took another three months to finish Draft 2, the one I refer to as my "hit by a bus" draft - that is, if I were hit by a bus, I wouldn't feel so bad if Draft 2 was all that was left of me.

And now I'm on the final version, and I have to hand it over to my agent by next Thursday May 15th. That would be do-able, were it not for two things: writer's remorse, and daily life. Writer's remorse kicked in yesterday as I was out walking the Cypriot-German editor and realized: my ending is all wrong. I need a whole new chapter to finish the book. Daily life kicks in every time the phone rings, a school volunteer activity beckons, a paid writing assignment pops up, or someone needs to eat. If I get three solid writing hours in during my 6 hour workday while the kids are at school, I'm pretty happy.

Still I believe my family is as eager for this whole process to be done as I am, so for Mother's Day I'm asking for the ultimate gift: three hours of solitude to get another 30 pages revised. And on May 16th I hope to be writing a post about dropping the completed manuscript off at the agent's!

Rest in Peace, Mildred Loving

Mildred Loving, the surviving half of the interracial couple whose challenge to laws banning interracial marriage led to the Supreme Court to put an end to that nonsense, died on Friday. Loving and her husband Richard took the challenge to the courts in 1967...1967! Thirty-one years ago it was still illegal in Virginia for consenting adults of differing races to marry each other.

Helen Pitts Douglass and Mildred Loving deserve thanks and praise for speaking the simple truth: love is colorblind, and the human race is the only one that matters.

Here's the AP's obituary for Mrs. Loving (talk about a name that works).