Are you a writer who is wondering how to tackle editing your manuscript? As I edit my memoir, I think about the tips Ann Hood  shared at the Muse and Marketplace last May in her workshop, “How To Be Your Own Best Editor.” I left the workshop with pages of a notebook filled with her savory tidbits, and re-read them again and again when I’m stuck. Here they are:

First, you need to develop writing habits that you can keep. And don’t allow anything to interfere with your writing time. If need be, Ann suggested finding a writer friend who is amendable to signing a contract with you.

Each day, before writing the next pages of her manuscript, Ann reads aloud what she wrote the day before, and edits at she goes along (it’s too easy to skim over awkward sentences and words when reading silently). She could not have emphasized this enough: When writing first chapters, start where something happens rather than with backstory. While working on those first pages, Ann reminded us to avoid starting with clichés like long descriptions of the weather, or a scene where someone is waking up. As she said, we all wake up the same way: we crawl out of bed, and rub the sleep from our eyes as we shuffle to the bathroom, pee, brush our teeth, etc. I believed it when Ann declared that first chapters tend to get revised the most – I’ve lost count as to how many times I’ve deleted the first chapter of my memoir in progress and have had to start all over again. This happens because we usually start the piece in the wrong place, and believe that’s exactly where the book should start.

On a micro editing level, Ann cautioned against overuse of the verb to be, as in, “she was walking.” Instead, write this: “She walked.” Similarly, she advised to watch out for extraneous and vague descriptors like “so,” “awesome,” and “meanwhile.” The same goes for words like “smile,” “look, and” laugh.”  A recent word count of my two-hundred-fifty-page memoir revealed fifty smiles, and at least seventy looks. Ann suggests we strive for something that is uniquely revealing to your character, such as picking at knuckles to show a nervous response. Here’s another micro editing detail worth jotting down on a Post-it and sticking on your desk: make sure the beginnings and ends of scenes and chapters are resonant.

On a more global point, Ann referred to Grace Paley’s assertion that every story is two stories: the one on the surface and the one bubbling beneath. The climax is when they collide. The external conflict is the plot, or the tangible parts of the story, whereas the internal conflict is a need.

Ann also alluded to Flannery O’Conner, who said writing is painting a picture with words. Or, rather than stating emotions, show them. How is your character sad, angry, or lonely? And don’t forget to have the protagonist do three essential things along the way: React, reply, reflect. As for dialogue, it should do more than offer information. It should advance the conflict, develop character, move the story forward. Of course, you can’t forget the setting – every scene should have one. Is it in a hospital, an office, at the beach?

When finished with a complete draft, Ann urged us to put it away for three months before sending it out to agents (at the very least, one month). Why? She summed it up in an Allen Ginsberg quote: “To regain your voice, you need to forget you ever heard it.” Now that’s worth writing down on a Post-it.

Please feel free to share any thoughts, questions, or insights.

When writing about a past event in the present tense, how does the author manage to control the narrative? In other words, how do readers know when the author is speaking from the present of the past versus the present of the now? It is usually much later when we are able to reflect mindfully on a past event, say, pose rhetorical questions and conjure answers about what happened. So how does the author insert reflection, or what Sue William Silverman calls the voice of experience – the metaphors for instance – in to the present tense telling of a past event?

In Jyl Felman’s memoir, Cravings, she predominately writes in the present tense with brief shifts into the past tense. She employs transitional phrases or words to indicate place and time:

“Every February until she’s too sick.”

“When we are growing up.”

“Ten years later.”

“Right before their fortieth wedding anniversary (14, 15, 18, 26).”

This is how Felman controls the overall architecture of the narrative, and the shifts between the actual now, the past, and the future. For the most part, Felman doesn’t fully step out of the present telling of the past and reflect. Rather, the reflective moments are embedded within the scenes of present tense narration. For example, in the chapter, Hyperventilation, she shows us, through scene, how her mother washes her mouth out with soap for swearing, and how she makes herself hyperventilate and needs to go to the hospital. It’s almost like a listing of events – this happened, then this happened. But intertwined is the voice of experience – metaphorical phrases – such as her descriptions of the process of passing out and how she feels like she’s suffocating. In effect, Felman is saying she needs time out from her family. We also hear the reflective voice in her telling of how she realizes the dysfunction in her family, and that she’s unhappy but no one notices (81-90). Foods, her mother’s recipes, and Jewish tradition – threads throughout the narrative – are also metaphors – the voice of experience – in the book. Felman successfully floats these within the present telling of the past.

She does revert to past tense when telling us more about her sister Judy: her anorexia, stealing, etc. It is in these passages where we gain more insight into the family dynamics – there seems to be a greater sense of interiority here. When Felman returns to the present telling of the past, again, it’s a listing of events. There’s a fast paced feeling about it – no lingering. The present tense telling has a way of building tension. There’s almost a rhythmic quality to the way Felman narrates about Judy in those pages: Judy is lost, her father finds her, Judy’s in Seattle, she’s married then divorced, and so on. At the end of the memoir, Felman does reflect from the real present into past moments. But, again, it is the precise phrases that help us know where we are: “It’s two years since she died, only the memories live in my body (187, 188).”

Here is a list of other memoirs written in the present tense: The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, The Accidental Buddhist by Dinty W. Moore. Blackbird by Jennifer Lauck, When Katie Wakes by Connie Mayfowler, Because I Remember Terror Father, I Remember You by Sue William Silverman, Love Sick by Sue William Silverman

Citations: Felman, Jyl Lynn. Cravings: a Sensual Memoir. Boston: Beacon, 1997. Print.

While writing the initial drafts of my memoir I engaged in an exercise: I read the start of a chapter I had written about the earlier days of my recovery from the multiple injuries I had suffered after an elderly driver struck me. I focused on each sentence, each word and visual detail, then created a list of elements –objects, emotions, as well as the atmosphere of the piece – I anticipated would continue in the chapter. I then read the remaining pages, realizing the tone of the entire chapter smacked of self-pity in my telling of how I felt about the many bruises I suffered. I had failed to see beyond my own marred body, or ahead of me – that I would eventually heal (perhaps I needed the element of time to create emotional distance). In other words, the prose I had chosen was drowning in self-absorption.

Particular questions surfaced: would I continue to wallow in the bruises I sustained? Or would I be able to see beyond my eclipsed world shadowed by pain and, instead, recall the children I had cared for as a nurse, with the intention of showing how others suffer too?

Reading the chapter again, through the lens of my list, forced me to examine the self-indulging narrative I had crafted from a more objective stance. Even though my body would never be the same as it was before the accident, it would come to function quite well. On the other hand, a child who I had long ago cared for as a burn nurse, who I initially included in the chapter, did not regain even half the function she once enjoyed. Hopefully, in stepping back from the page, we return to it with 20/20 vision. In doing so, we are primed to craft a story that is unique on its own merit, yet universal, for we all encounter suffering at some point in our lives.

How do writers transition from one layer (in this essay I use thread, strand, or filament) of a narrative, then successfully return to the main, or grounding thread? In Kathryn Harrison’s memoir, The Kiss, an account of her incestuous affair with her father, there are at least four threads woven throughout the book. The main one being her father, followed by secondary threads: Harrison’s mother, her grandparents, and her struggle with Anorexia Nervosa.

Like forming a braid, Harrison first introduces the main strand – her father – by summarizing the interactions between the two of them during their travels together – then deftly weaves in a secondary strand. One way she accomplishes this is by employing reflection. In the last sentence of the first chapter she says, “These nowhere and notimes [sic] are the only home we have.” The operative word “home” introduces Harrison’s grandmother – the next thread – in chapter two. Harrison says, “My mother’s parents raise me. I live in their house until I’m seventeen” (5).

But she does not let the grounding thread – her father – slip. She goes on to explain that he was not welcomed into her grandparents’ home. The thread further remains intact through dialogue – another strategy in which Harrison weaves together the braid of figures and events in the book. ‘“Where is your dad?’ other children ask. ‘I don’t know,’ [Harrison] answer[s]” (5). This dialogue is the diving off point, which allows her to delve deeper into her past: she tells us that her parents divorced when she was an infant and that she and her mother stayed with her grandparents after her dad left.

She also employs scene as a strategy to weave in the mother thread: her grandmother screams at Harrison’s mother when a date picks her up. But her mother saves snapshots of Harrison’s father (5, 6). We now have the mother thread introduced, along with the father and grandmother – a French braid.

Through scene again, we begin to learn more about Harrison’s mother: she sleeps much of the time, and when Harrison makes noise in an attempt to wake her mother, she ignores her daughter. A theme – rejection – is beginning to unfold between the three filaments – Harrison’s father, her grandparents and mother (7, 8). And when Harrison reflects on her mother’s date, her father remains present on the page: “Though she dates other men … my mother remains romantically fixated … on my father” (9). This follows with a tighter connection to the father: he sends letters to Harrison’s mother, and, as she says, “sometimes, folded in with them, are little ones for me (11).”

These letters segue to other objects, which, in addition to dialogue and reflection, keep the father, mother and grandparent strands intact. For instance, we have Harrison’s mother’s yearbook, in which she reflects on photos of her mother: “Do I know my mother any better than the long-ago classmate … who foretold her future? ‘She will study … French (17).’” The encyclopedia set Harrison includes belongs to her grandparents, which were sold to them by her father, who was once an encyclopedia salesman. Harrison’s mother attempts to teach her daughter French by using flashcards (16, 17, 18).

By including the cards, Harrison reveals her mother’s desire for her daughter to be perfect. Harrison says about her mother, “Once she throws the flash cards down and slaps my face. My mother’s love depends on my capitulation” (19, 20). The mother-daughter relationship in this scene provides us with the first hints of Harrison’s struggle with Anorexia Nervosa, yet another thread:

I come down with an illness no one can define or cure … It goes on for weeks until the day I hear the pediatrician tell my grandmother that I’m so dehydrated I’ll have to be hospitalized … I return to school not just thinner but seemingly smaller … Very occasionally, I dream in French, and on those mornings I wake up ill: I vomit (20, 21).

Harrison then loops back to the grounding thread of her father through startling reflection: “Do my father’s accomplishments cost him as dearly as mine do me” (21)?

Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss. New York: Random House, 1997. Print.