Ellen Michelson

At the start of editing, I worked on one piece at a time. No longer. A manuscript section’s been open on the desktop for two hours. I’m happily tunneling around, changing words, tweaking phrases, flipping clauses from one end of their sentences to the other, re-ordering whole sections, when a citation shows up. There aren’t many citations in my memoir draft. Mostly, they’re for texts or films. This one pesters me: is it named properly every time it appears? Does it appear too frequently? The bigger the folder with edited files grows, the more questions about files I’m not editing right now zing through my thoughts. And the more minutes answering them takes. A remark in one piece will remind me of a totally different circumstance in another. Perhaps the topic is the same in both, or students in both hold opposite opinions, or maybe no connection springs out. I envisioned adjusting descriptions to better mask identities, assessing whether situations were presented honestly. Expanding some pieces, eliminating others, doesn’t faze me. I did not anticipate the distractions of lateral thinking. Worse yet: when searching on key words to scrounge up from elsewhere in the manuscript what wasn’t bothersome till a minute before, I find errors I’d feared: not always, not even often, but too much. Working on one piece at a time until it satisfies (for now) is harder and harder.

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Most important are the students. Showing fun, fear, boredom, bliss, the daily ripples and that once-in-a-lifetime massive comber, hosting readers so they can get to know the students, is the goal. The manuscript consists of twenty vignettes, each about one or more students in a high school class, and twenty pieces to fit between the vignettes. The other pieces vary: a little poetry, a couple of rants, some out-of-classroom tales, an open secret or two about grades and exams… Now that the first draft’s done, an editing priority is pushing the person telling the stories into the background as much as possible. It’s a challenge. There isn’t much overlap among the characters from chapter to chapter, with one exception, the narrator. A trick: ask who is this happening to? If the answer can only be the writer, mentioning the writer isn’t necessary.

You’ve figured out the memoir’s about teaching high school. And you’ve noticed this blogpost has no first person pronouns. Somewhat clumsy: practicing, experimenting continue. Hope you’ll keep reading as the editing generates more lessons and they’re shared.

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