At some point, one must say, “It’s finished.” I have punched
the Publish button at Amazon. Edith
going to have to go it on her own from now on.
I’ve edited, re-read line-for-line and had friends point out
typos. I’ve done some new formatting, centered the little trees at the
beginning of chapters, and consistently double-spaced when the scenes change.
I’ve researched the
large number of anachronisms that snuck into the first drafts. AIDs in 1974? Bubble tea in the early 90’s?
All gone. Jake’s Crawfish is still in
the book. Actually, so is bubble tea, inaccurate but fun to read about. Tarantino
has replaced HBO as an incentive for Edith to say a certain uncouth word a few
times, after research indicated he didn’t shrink at using the word over one
hundred times in an early 1990’s film.
I reviewed the timeline of my story and changed my
characters’ ages by two years so that Edith could get through high school
before she had to get married, which made her son as little younger than I
wanted, but I changed that, too.
The most shocking changes I had to make were to words that
over the almost- three hundred pages of the book I had repeated so often I
wondered if a cog were loose somewhere
in my brain. When I noticed a repetition of the word “swallow,” (several of my
characters like their wine), I typed it into the “Search in Document” space on
the Word page. A side column appeared
and told me that I had used the word thirty-some times, once or twice a chapter. Not always drinking. Edith swallowed her words; the noise in the
room swallowed her; she couldn’t swallow a story being told her, a fog
swallowed the neighborhood. Of course, a
certain amount of wine and alcohol also got swallowed. I asked for synonyms from my wordy
husband: “gulped, sipped, filled his
mouth, drained,” he advised. “And maybe
you should change the whole sentence to some other action, ‘like closed his
eyes.’” I knew I had used that phrase pretty often too. It took me a day to get down to about ten
irreplaceable swallows.
Several other verbs made themselves known for the same
reason. “Touch,” for one; “turned,” for another. Then I was relieved to realize this writing flaw was
not senility–related. I recalled that in my first unpublished novel, a teenager
shrugged at least twice in each chapter and I could come up with no other
description of that action. And the little grade school kids in the same book
smiled so often their cheeks quivered all day. Same kind of problem in the next two novels.
I apparently have some sort of repetition tic that emerges
when I’m at my computer trying to make a story go into words.
I wonder if Annie Dillard or Alice Munro or Cheryl Strayed spend
much time with the “Search in Document” space.
Or, perhaps they hire a good editor, like all of the books on writing
advise us would-be authors. I will too,
maybe, on the next story, now that I’m finished with Edith.