Writing Is Re-Writing, It Takes A Village

I’ve rewritten most parts of my book at least 100 times. From the moment I first tried to express myself in 2002, I’ve changed the scope and details of my memoir over and over. I’ve learned that it takes a village, not only to raise a child, but to birth a book. The help of other writers was essential in rewriting my work until it rang clear and true.

After my mother died in 1994, my brothers and I scoured our parents’ former home, separating trash from treasure. In the attic, we discovered gold: thousands of pages of letters, hundreds of pages of diaries and documents, hordes of photos and slides, films, audio tape, and so much more, dating from 1910, through World War II and into the 1990s.

We organized our finds into twenty-five bankers’ boxes and stored them in my garage where they sat for eight years until I gave in to a nagging inner voice and dragged box after box into the house and began reading. I was breathless with the thousands of possible stories I could tell.

I read books on writing family stories (Roorbach, Polking Ulrich, Rainer, etc.) and devoured memoirs. But reading about writing was no substitute for putting words on paper. I thought that my TV background–writing and producing documentaries–meant I knew how to write. I couldn’t have been more wrong! I started writing about our racially changing West Side neighborhood in 1960s Chicago, but each draft seemed as bad as (or worse than) the previous.

At a local university, I signed up for a nonfiction writing class, but struggled to get out a meaningful story. The writing instructor encouraged us to submit pieces to local papers, so I wrote an essay in 2003 based on a letter from my grandmother to her son, my uncle, during World War II. The hook was the Iraq War–and every mother’s worry for her warrior child. I re-wrote it over and over, trying to coax my thoughts into meaningful words. When the essay expressed exactly how I felt, I submitted it to the Chicago Tribune Perspective section, where it was published on the front page! My writing “village elder,” the instructor, had kept me going.

But I still didn’t have a way in to my family story. I asked a local author and neighbor to read a section of the book. She pointed out where the writing went off the rails, but most importantly, recommended a writers’ critique group. I followed this “elder’s” advice and was soon part of a “writing village” of talented, smart writers. At weekly meetings, submissions from two people were read aloud, and members first praised what worked in each, then offered constructive criticism. For ten years, I submitted chapter after chapter of my memoir, received critical feedback, and then rewrote.

But I still wasn’t sure exactly what the theme of my book should be. I had written it start to finish, a sprawling family story of about 135,000 words, but it had no cohesive theme or “take-away” and was about 45,000 words too long! I turned again to the village and signed up for a writing “mentor” through the instruction arm of the magazine, Creative Nonfiction. “Just read this,” I said to my mentor via email, “and tell me what doesn’t add to the story.”

After the mentor’s initial cuts, she and I went on to two more rounds of line-edits – through 2014. I reduced the manuscript to about 95,000 words, still too long, but focused enough to start pitching to agents at the University of Wisconsin’s Writers’ Institute. Most liked the concept, but before they’d consider taking on my book, I needed many thousands of Twitter followers!

By this point, I’d pared the story down to two main themes; the fracturing of my parents’ relationship, and the fracturing of our neighborhood during the racial upheavals of the 1960s, all as experienced either by me directly or by my parents, as recorded in their letters and diaries.

I decided to pitch it to She Writes Press, a hybrid press that focuses on authors’ writing quality above their number of twitter followers. My manuscript was accepted as “ready for publication,” but I felt it needed one more re-write. SWP assigned me a savvy developmental editor who found passages that didn’t fit and pushed me to think about reader “take-away.”

After hundreds of rewrites, and reading scores of how-to-memoir books, essays, and online-advice from the village of writers; after participating for ten years in two superbly helpful writing groups, I had learned to find the right word, to rid my prose of excess verbiage, to reflect on and share my experiences in a way that I hope finds resonance with others.

Writing is re-writing. You may not have to go through as many iterations as I did, trying to find the focus in thousands of family documents, but tap into the writing village for help–and commit yourself to rewriting many, many times before you have a publishable work, and especially, one of which you’re proud.

—
Six-time Emmy-honored Linda Gartz is a documentary producer, author, blogger, educator, and archivist. Her documentaries and TV productions have been featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and Investigation Discovery, syndicated nation-wide. Her educational videos include Begin with Love, hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Grandparenting, hosted by Maya Angelou. Gartz’s articles and essays have been published in literary journals, online, and in local and national magazines and newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune. Born in Chicago, she studied at both Northwestern and the University of Munich, and has lived most of her adult life in Evanston, IL. She earned her B.A. and M.A.T. degrees from Northwestern. To learn more, go to www.LindaGartz.com.

 

About REDLINED

A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago

Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago’s West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands.

But Linda Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lil, choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors.

The community sinks into increasing poverty and crime after two race riots destroy its once vibrant business district, but Fred and Lil continue to nurture their three apartment buildings and tenants for the next twenty years in a devastated landscape—even as their own relationship cracks and withers.

After her parents’ deaths, Linda discovers long-hidden letters, diaries, documents, and photos stashed in the attic of her former home. Determined to learn what forces shattered her parents’ marriage and undermined her community, she searches through the family archives and immerses herself in books on racial change in American neighborhoods.

Told through the lens of Linda’s discoveries of the personal and political, Redlined delivers a riveting story of a community fractured by racial turmoil, an unraveling and conflicted marriage, a daughter’s fight for sexual independence, and an up-close, intimate view of the racial and social upheavals of the 1960s.

 

 

Tags: featured

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing