Creative Nonfiction Blog by Brenda Gaines Hunter

One More Draft

During my long absence from the blog, many things happened. First, I moved back to my apartment. I had been staying in a temporary apartment while the owners of the apartment building where I live added a rooftop garden. I live on the top floor.

About My Editors: Catharine & Katie

I will never be able to thank Catharine and Katie enough for the attention they've paid my manuscript, "This is How it Ends."

I initially gave them an extremely sloppy manuscript to critique. By the time, I did the initial editing and sent them cleaner copies, they had already gone through the manuscript without complaint. Fortunately, they had planned to go through it a second time, so the cleaner copies did come in handy.

Catharine is Dr. Catharine Lucas, a professor emerita of English, a writer, and a volunteer at a few organizations, at both writing-oriented nonprofits and organizations involved in reducing global warming.

Katie is just dynamic. She is a writer, an artist, and a shop owner now living in Germany. I met her in the graduate writing program I attended, where she earned an MFA. She's the only non-resident of California I've met who got into Berkeley as a freshman. It's an extremely tough thing to do, and I know Katie will be successful in whatever she chooses to do. Visit Katie. She's an excellent writer.

Marching Toward the Second Draft

Well, I did revise the first draft of my memoir this past week. I found the first 70% of it to be in relatively decent shape, but the last 30% was in poor shape. What I did at first was try to write the book perfectly. By that what I mean is I edited every time I wrote five pages at first. That was because I was afraid of what I would have in the end, if I did not do any house cleaning along the way. I do not write relatively clean first drafts. They are always a mess. 200-300 pages of messy writing was terrifying to me. However, about half way through the writing of the draft I abandoned the idea of cleaning as I went along, because I recognized it could also be a way of procrastinating, and I realized I needed to get the story down. So I sped up and ended up with a mess.

First Draft Revision

I can finally say I’m pretty satisfied with my memoir. I haven’t received the comments from Katie and Catharine yet, but I spent twelve hours over the last few days editing, editing, and editing. While I’m sure there are still grammatical and spelling errors in the manuscript, it is very clean, and I’ll continue to clean it. So I think I have a very good revision of the first draft. What I’ll be looking for from Katie and Catharine are suggestions about content and organization. Things which need to be changed that I just can’t see. (Continued, Sunday)

Finally! Getting Somewhere w/the Editing

Finally, have an editing schedule down. So far, so good! The first half of my memoir is not in as bad of shape as I feared. Actually, I’m surprisingly pleased. My only regret it that it’s not a longer book, but I decided to cover only the first thirteen years of my life. After my thirteenth year, my life really changed, including the people in my life. So I realized going past my thirteenth year would be the start of a new book. I think I’ll have my editing done within a week, give or take a day. Then I’ll wait for the comments from Catharine and Katie to start anew.

Style Guides: A Quick Note About Editing

Use a style guide to help you edit your work. As I’ve finally garnered the courage to do some editing, I realize that consistency is a problem. In places, my memoir is highly stylized and so it was easy while writing to lose track of tense and voice. However, I have been worried about how to do the editing, how to integrate the comments that I’ll receive from Katie and Catharine in a few months and how to accomplish the “feel” for the book that I want. So I’ve developed a plan. At the center of the plan is a style guide that sets out when to use which tense, quotations, italics…