When I Came West (Part Fourteen)
For three months I worked diligently in my mind on revisions for When I Came West, preparing myself for the inevitable confrontation with my manuscript.
I specifically remember the time and place: a week when my husband-to-be and I were holed up in our fifth wheel trailer on a ranch in Wyoming, he to do a recording project with the ranch owner and me to do nothing but focus on wading through Matt's suggestions for revision.
I had eleven pages of detailed editorial commentary, forty sticky notes, and three-hundred-and-sixty-seven things to correct. How do I know? Because I kept a tally of every change I made. I turned the revisions into a kind of game in order to keep my mind from totally blanking out and dismissing the project.
If I allowed myself to think back on how many times I had revised the manuscript since its inception I would have given up and thrown the whole thing in the trash can. I kept focusing on Matt's encouraging words, that he continued to believe that the story was compelling and therefore the greatest strength of the work. I took every one of Matt's suggestions to heart and in the end I made every correction.
The thing that surprised me the most is that the story did not change one bit, what changed was the manner in which the story was presented and the way in which I had to fill in the blanks and polish off the rough edges. What this meant was telling more about myself before I came West, what my personal take had been on the Vietnam War, and I had to attempt to explain more of the difficulties in my intimate relationship with Bill.
As far as style, I had to lean up the prose, eliminate wordiness and the overuse of prepositional phrases, eliminate as many compound sentences as possible, eliminate the overuse of adjectival phrases, awkward syntax, and overly long sentences. And too, eliminate the clutter of using needless words.
Plus, I had to eliminate the use of passive voice and back away from nouns and verbs conjugated as gerunds ("ing" endings). There is no other way to describe this process except to say it was excruciatingly slow and wearisome.
I was already so bored with my own story that the last thing I wanted to do was read it again, nonetheless fuss over every word choice, phrase, sentence, paragraph and chapter.
Whenever I couldn't bear to be in the same room with my eviscerated book, I tiptoed out the RV door and set out along isolated ranch roads to let the fresh air and far horizons heal my heart and get my head on straight once more.
