Dear Readers,
Please join me in celebrating the release of Eddie's War with author Carol Saller. This book will be a special treasure for many of you, because it's historical fiction set in the USA Heartland from 1934-1944. I have a copy setting on my desk to giveaway! I LOVE this book!
In this post, Carol shares from the heart about her long journey to publication--I know it will touch your heart the way it did mine! Congratulations, Carol!
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| Carol Saller |
Bio: Carol Fisher Saller copyedits scholarly books at the University of Chicago Press and is the editor of the
Chicago Manual of Style’s online Q&A. In the past she has worked as an editor of children’s books and has published several books for children in addition to a book for adults,
The Subversive Copy Editor . You can read more about Carol and
Eddie's War at
www.carolsaller.com.
Review Clip of Eddie's War
“A poignant look at boyhood before and during the long years of World War II.... Much more an emotionally resonant coming-of-age tale than a war story, this will be an easy sell for those seeking a quick, excellent read.” —
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
The Writing Journey
Clara, thank you—I’m so happy to be here today! It’s the official publication date of Eddie’s War, nearly eight (yep) years after I began writing it.
I know it seems ridiculous that such a slender novel could take so long to write. I once calculated that I averaged eleven and a half words per day (not including the time I took off to write another book). Although I’m happy with the outcome, I wouldn’t recommend my method to anyone else, and I certainly don’t plan to use it again myself! In fact, that’s what I’d like to share here—one way not to write a book.
Let me explain first that the book consists of seventy-six scenes narrated by Eddie from 1934 to 1944, and they’re written in a spare kind of prose, in short lines like this:
Duck Hunting
Hunkered in the duck blind,
watching,
trying to keep still,
broken reeds
poking through my jacket,
I squirmed.
Long fingers
like barn nails
gripped my neck:
Grampa Rob.
That’s the shortest scene, and it leans toward a poetry style. Most of the scenes are quite a bit longer and read more like regular prose. Here’s the beginning of one:
The Gossips
“Edward Carl, don’t dawdle.”
Grama Lucy gripped my elbow
and lifted
till I was on the tips of my toes
as she hustled us down Main Street.
I wasn’t dawdling,
just trying to read the headlines
of Official Detective
in the five-and-dime window.
(It continues for seventy-three more lines.)
So here’s the main way I made trouble for myself: I wrote the scenes in no particular order, as they popped into my head. They weren’t told in the first person, because I had no main character. I also had no plot, and—for the first four years—no real dramatic tension. That is, for four years I just continued to compile my little vignettes about the townspeople of Ellisville without giving any of the characters difficulties. I wanted to get them into trouble. I just wasn’t able to put them there. Maybe because I’m a mother.
In 2009 I came back to the project after putting it down for a couple of years to write another book, and at that point I nearly decided it was hopeless. All I had was a jumbled mess, like a drawer full of quilt squares that didn’t fit together. Because the historical farming facts and the inspiration for a few of the scenes were drawn from family history, the book was very close to my heart. Feeling that it probably wasn’t publishable, I considered just throwing it all together and printing out copies for my family.
But I decided to make one last try and applied for a spot in one of Stephen Roxburgh’s novel-writing workshops at Boyds Mills. And a miracle happened: Stephen read through my mess, and in the first thirty-minute one-on-one session, he completely sorted me out. He gave me two books to read for inspiration (An Na’s A Step from Heaven, which I had read once before, and Steven Herrick’s By the River, which was new to me), and he encouraged me to simply keep doing what I was doing.
“You have a handful of pearls,” he said, “but it’s not anywhere close to being a necklace.” Still, he somehow had confidence that if I just kept adding pearls, things would start to happen. Over the weekend he gave me assignments: “Write a sentence telling something about Eddie we don’t already know.” That helped me identify Eddie as the main character. Or “Introduce a new character in the fewest words possible.” That ended up being the one about duck hunting with Grampa Rob: I wrote it in forty-eight words; Stephen took a pencil and in about twenty seconds reduced it to twenty-eight and moved the words “Grampa Rob” to the end of the piece. The brilliance of that editing just blew me away! And it also clued me in on how to trim and hone the pieces myself.
I went away with instructions to write a scene a day for a month and see what happened. I didn’t manage to work that fast, but I definitely did more than eleven and a half words a day, and Stephen proved to be right: I began to see connections, threads, developments in my vignettes. I was able to arrange them in an order that made sense. I made a flowchart to see where the holes were, and started filling them in. The character of Grampa Rob introduced drama. On my own, I promoted Sarah’s character in importance to add romance and humor.
I’ll stop there, because I really hope people will read the book to see the end result! I think it’s a minor miracle that a coherent book could have come together out of such a tangle. Next time, though, the first thing I’ll do is outline a plot.
This is actually the first time I’ve spoken publicly about my struggle writing
Eddie’s War, so, Clara thanks for the opportunity!
Ah, Carol, thank you for sharing such a personal journey. I know it strikes a chord with a whole bunch of us!
Dear Friends,
Please take a moment to stop by and congratulate Carol on the Book Birthday of
Eddie's War. Don't forget to visit Carol here:
www.carolsaller.com. Thank you so much for joining us!
