How to write about Africa (or how not to write about cultures not your own in general)

Only 5/13ths of the way through of a Bible curriculum assignment due first week of May. So the below post may seem like a blog cop-out. But I also think it reflects my gearing up to re-engage with my Christian Peacemaker Teams work when my sabbatical ends first week of June. I do a lot of writing about people in other cultures, and Wainaina’s essay is a good cautionary note. (One of my colleagues who works on the Colombia team, after she read it on our intra-organizational newslist said how much it annoys her that people always seem to put “poor” before “campesino.”)

This article was originally published in Granta 92.

How to Write About Africa

by by Binyavanga Wainaina

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa’s situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa’s most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or ‘conservation area’, and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa’s rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don’t mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical—Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You’ll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

Twitter timesuck, Agent-cycle, Gilead and Writing that pays

I made a decision today to close my Twitter and HooteSuite tabs (I use both, because I use both 300% magnification for an eye disability so I skim HootSuite to look at writing-related tweets and then read everything else on Twitter.) I have found it basically impossible NOT to check it 10x a day. I haven’t listed anything on Ebay for more than a week, which is my usual downtime activity. But now that I have a May 1 deadline for some Bible curriculum lessons—writing that I actually get paid for, I need to strap in. I’m going to check the feeds just twice a day.

So far, I’ve sent out five agent queries and gotten three rejections. I’ve also just heard from the Dana Awards that my manuscript didn’t make even the honorable mentions. So the honeymoon is over. Not everyone sees how exquisite Shea is. I’m back to “if you’re going to be a writer you have to be able to take rejection and x received 60 thousand rejections before it was finally published blah blah blah” mode. I am being a bit more careful about my querying though. Even though I have a template, I’m not sending out the query e-mails on the same day I write them. I’m let them sit and tweaking at them until I feel good about them.

The first draft of my query today—meaning first draft of my final paragraph, “Why I am sending this query to you, Ms. Agent”—was about our shared enthusiasm for Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 novel Gilead. That novel made me feel really hopeful when I read it (or listened to it, since I can’t read normal size fonts anymore.) It made me realize there is a place, post-Tolstoy, for novels about people of faith. Great novels. It’s sad really, that the term “Christian fiction” immediately brings to mind a genre that is formulaic and trite, when faith should be deep, and awesome and profound. Which, of course, Gilead is.

With this agent, I’ve shared a little more personal information than I usually do—like that I’ve not used the link to the Kirkus Review of Because the Angels with some other agents because it has “an interesting approach to Christianity” in the title. I’ll let the letter sit a couple days and see whether I think it’s still a good idea. Wouldn’t someone who loves Gilead be interested in that? But does she get fifty queries a day from people claiming a Gilead kinship? Aaargh!

The downside of the shared enthusiasm is that you become more emotionally invested. Even though I never met this woman, it means more when someone who loves a book you’ve loved rejects you.

But of course, I have a lot to occupy my time. Six weeks until my sabbatical is over, and I have these thirteen lessons about Jesus’ use of the Hebrew Bible to get done, as well as a bunch of boxes in the hall that I said I was going to go through and get out of the hall before my sabbatical was over.

Passionate Christian Characters, sex, the F-word and Maundy Thursday

I spent this week reading through my novel manuscript carefully, since I had added a big chunk of manuscript—a diary of a teenage character I wrote about in a previous posting— and wanted to make sure that the rest of the novel was in sync with it. Often, when I am at this state this stage of the editing process I enter a state of what I call “Tweaking madness.” I see clunky sentences or awkward paragraphs and I think “How could I have written this? This is so awful! How could I have ever thought this novel was any good?” And usually that’s the time to put it aside until I can look at it with fresh eyes. Because the clunky parts are usually very isolated, and most readers simply breeze past them.

This time, I did catch some awkward phrasing and did some revision, but overall didn’t escalate into “Tweaking Madness.” What I did find as I read through Ralph’s diary, interspersed with the letters and other writings of Shea, my Hosea figure, was a growing sense of unease regarding how Christian the novel was.

I’ve been spending a lot of time learning how to use social media effectively to promote my writing–definitely not there yet–but part of it involves following on Twitter, Facebook, etc. the work of writers and artists whose work you admire. And most of these are secular, for me. Chaim Potok is dead and Marilynne Robinson doesn’t have a Twitter account. I was wondering if Joss Whedon or Margaret Atwood (or more likely fellow Whedon and Atwood enthusiasts) ever stumbled onto Ralph and Shea’s letters, whether they would just zone out immediately, because of their overtly Christian perspective on the world–even if Ralph and Shea were using that perspective to bring down a fascist regime ruling the the United States.

And then there’s the converse problem, Shea is not really “Christian fiction” in the way that the contemporary publishing world defines Christian fiction.It is written from the viewpoint of a philandering husband, and while the sex is not graphically described, it is plentiful and the F-word appears throughout the novel (It’s really odd, my characters can say the F-word, but writing as myself, I say “F-word instead “F—“)

Here is the climactic scene, in which Islam Goldberg-Jones is on trial for providing weapons to the guerrillas trying to bring down the Christian Republic (but the real object of the trial is to defame his wife, Shea.) It’s kind of appropriate actually, for Easter weekend:

“Tell me Mr. Islam Goldberg-Jones. Are you Muslim or Jewish?” the prosecutor began.

“My mother was brought up in a conservative Jewish family, but both of my parents considered themselves atheists. They taught me that God did not exist.”

I heard gasps from the courtroom. They had vetted the audience.

“And did Hoshea Weber know you were an atheist when she married you?”

“Yes.”

“And did she try to convert you?”

I paused and then said, “Not in the way that you mean.”

The military judge said, “Answer his question, Mr. Jones.”

“Goldberg-Jones,” I corrected him.

The bailiff punched the left side of my head, and I heard a consistent high hum in that ear for the rest of the proceedings.

The lawyer rephrased his question. “Did she try to convince you that God exists and that Jesus was the Son of God? Do you believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and buried, rose again and will come to judge the living and the dead?

Shea ascribed what happened next to the Holy Spirit. I will say only this—a quick succession of holos appeared before me, superimposing themselves over the audience in courtroom: Ralph saying—earnest brown eyes wide at having met his first atheist—“But it’s like love, Uncle Iz, you can’t see or hear or touch love, but love still exists”; Ralph clinging to me and sobbing at the border of Akwesasne before he turned back with Hank because Gladys and Edna needed him; Shea smiling at me as we walked and talked in Rock Creek Park and when we lay naked under the ancient Weber family quilt; Leah leaning against the fence at the farm on Thanksgiving day thirteen years ago. Al calling me “son.” My own parents reading Dr. Seuss to me. L’Merci running across the yard at Al and Deborah’s house with Gladys and Edna. All the Webers and I laughing ourselves sick over an only moderately amusing story, because we loved each other. Bernie calling my name, “Ih-ihz.”

“I don’t know whether God is real,” I said. “But I can tell you right now that he’s a hell of a lot more real than you guys and your god are to me. It’s the god you speak of that presides over your tortures and murders and atrocities that doesn’t exist. As for Jesus rising from the dead, today, and today only, I choose to believe in the resurrection because that was Jesus saying ‘Fuck you’ to the Empire who crucified him. And yeah today I believe he will come again to judge us and you all should be really, really afraid.”

I saw the bailiff descending on me with his baton and then everything went black.

So you see my dilemma.

Anyway, I went to the Maundy Thursday service at my church last night and in thinking about Jesus’ sacrifice, it kind of hit me that it’s really not much of a sacrifice for me to be true to who my characters are. They are entitled to be devout Christians, and if a secular public has a problem with that, well, may I not be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. And if a religious public has a problem with Iz, well, he probably agrees with their assessment of his character. And if their problem with him is that he uses the F-word, that really is their problem, not Iz’s.

When I got home, I found a letter from the Posen Foundation saying I was not among the five finalists in their fiction prize, but that they thought my writing sample had been impressive and they encouraged me to submit again next year. Not sure if that was something they said to everyone, but it sounded like more than boilerplate. The timing after the Maundy Thursday service seemed apropos, since the Foundation is designed to promote secular Jewish culture. I actually knew that Shea would be a longshot for the fellowship, but reasoned that since Iz is a very secular Jewish character, and Hosea was a Jewish prophet, and secular Judaism does have some connection to the Jewish prophetic tradition, it was worth the application. But I also knew that since I applied for the Posen Fellowship, the novel had gotten progressively more Christian. I had kind of thought I might be able to up the Jewish content, if I got the Fellowship, but that just wasn’t happening, so there was a small measure of relief, too. Kind of like dating someone you know you’re ill-suited for, and then being glad that s/he later finds a good match.

Diary of Ralph

I’ve finished Ralph’s diary and have interspersed his entries between the heavier prophetic writings of my character Shea, the Hosea figure in my novel.

I think Ralph’s diary entries serve a dual purpose. They’ll help break up those denser sections and they’ll give another view of my narrator, Iz, and possibly make him less “static” as the agent said.

Ralph can ask the questions, how is it that Uncle Iz, a man I like and look up to, whose company I much prefer to that of my father’s, could cheat on my Aunt Shea? How is it that Juanita and Hank, two people who share my faith, can care about my Uncle Iz, knowing what he did to my Aunt Shea? Maybe in the answering of those questions, some readers will have the patience to stick with Iz until his later transformations.

Or not. But I think maybe I can’t just change Iz to to please the ideologies of people I like or want to impress.

Now there’s the question, can I write authentically in the voice of a gay biracial Mennonite teenage boy?

I really want to send this section to my readers, but I know I need to let it sit for a couple days before I do that. I’ll use the time to revise my timeline.

On my way home and a little novel augmentation

I am sitting at JFK airport–Mad Props to Jet Blue for providing free Wi-fi and ample electrical outlets–in a four hour layover. Took the red-eye from Burbank. My body thinks I landed at 2:30 in the morning and my husband really thinks I need to attend this with him after I land in Rochester at 10:30 a.m.:

Meet the Authors:

Sharon Morgan and Thomas DeWolf

(gatheratthetable.net)

GATHER AT THE TABLE: THE HEALING JOURNEY OF A DAUGHTER OF SLAVERY AND A SON OF THE SLAVE TRADE

Thursday, March 14

12:12 to 1:00pm

Central Library at the Rundel Auditorium

115 South Ave. Rochester, NY

Free of Charge

Normally I would say, “You know, that DOES sound interesting,” but I’m going to be in an altered state for the rest of the day.

Even though the memoir writing trip was abortive, writing-wise, the trip wasn’t a complete write off. I did a big promotional giveaway of my novel Because the Angels and it was at the top of the free downloads in the political novel genre and did surprisingly well in the literary novel downloads as well (although I’m not sure other literary novelists would think it belonged there.) I also got to spend an afternoon with my CPT colleague and friend Tim Nafziger, who gave me the idea to incorporate journal entries of one of my characters, Ralph, into Shea, my current novel. As I started spinning this out in my head, I realized Ralph, who is writing during the years he is 14-16, is gay. That’s one of the things that gives me the deepest satisfaction when I write–when characters seem to tell me who they are instead of me telling them who they are. So thanks, Tim. And thank you for being chief among my encouragers over the years, letting me know that my fiction was something more than a promoter of my mental health.

Bad News and Good News in that order.

So day before yesterday I heard back from the agent who had my manuscript and she said that she got about halfway through it and decided the setting wasn’t convincing and that the character of Iz was too static, i.e., he did not transform fast enough. One of the regular readers and cheerers-on of my other novels also gave the same critique. From a previous posting, you know that I was almost anticipating rejection and knowing that a rejection from this particular person would hurt more.

Some of her suggestions I can work with to improve the manuscript. I’m not sure about Iz, though, because I happen to know that there are some men who can be basically kind-hearted and heroic and know that their infidelities cause a lot of pain but still keep cheating on the women who love them. When I was walking yesterday in botanical gardens at UCLA while my friend was at a dental appt. I thought about a way I could bring transformed Iz from the future back into the place in the novel just before he has the affair with Zeinab/Dolores. But then I thought, am I doing that just to make people I like more ideologically comfortable? Does that “cheat” the transformation at the the end?

This is where I could really use a writing mentor. I asked for one on She Writes yesterday, and got some sympathetic responses, but no takers (because there really was no Marilynne Robinson or Chaim Potok among them.) Rebecca Forster, who writes legal thrillers noted that she bases her books on real cases but that sometimes she has step back and make sure she isn’t following them too closely because they become plodding if she does. I actually think my book doesn’t follow Hosea that closely. I’m sure Hebrew Bible scholars won’t think so! There’s as much if not more Amos in her climatic speech at the President Coulter campaign rally as there is Hosea. But anyway, I’m going to try inserting a section from future Iz today and hope for a mentor.

The good news is that I based on reading someone else’s experience on She Writes, I offered Because the Angels as a free download for five days, and the day after the rejection, I found out that it was the #1 top free download in the political fiction genre and #31 in literary fiction–and most of the ones in the literary fiction category were public domain novels like Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights. I spent most of the day sending out tweets and posting on Facebook pages. It slipped down to #3 yesterday, but was back up to # 1 today, and it was featured on the Progressive Christian Kindle. Now, that’s only 259 total downloads, I found out, but it will be interesting to see if something comes of it–reviews, for example.

The Shah, Savak, and the Pasdaran of Iran all suck

So I’m out here in Los Angeles, and I’ve actually been aware that I’ve been pushing my friend to talk to me about her past as we work on this memoir. She didn’t talk about it for many years, because losing the love of her life and so many of her friends after the Iranian revolution was so hard, and in many ways, her whole family has led a diminished life here in Los Angeles; if things had turned out differently, they would have been among the educated elite in Iran and they have all had to to live in enormous losses and start over from scratch here in the U.S.

I am aware of my own inadequacy when she tries to express certain concepts that she would be able to express them brilliantly in Farsi. She comes from a family that recited poetry and her father wrote several volumes of it himself.

Today, my friend told me I should consider the rest of my time here vacation, which is something of a blow. I haven’t said it in so many words; I have tried to gently suggest it, but I didn’t come all this way; I didn’t pay for a plane ticket just to hang out in Los Angeles. Truthfully, I’m not crazy about the sun and palm trees. I don’t mind the slush and snow back home. I’m here to work and there are certain things I can do only when she’s around.

Not sure what to do. Don’t want to be insensitive, but I’m not really here to be on vacation either. I have stuff I could be doing back home. Maybe I’ll give her a couple days to see if she’ll change her mind. I should really be blaming the violent men whose torturing and killing ways led to her being here.

Off to California

I was supposed to fly to Burbank today to spend 2 1/2 weeks with a friend getting a start on her memoir. The Rochester-JFK flight had mechanical problems, so I would have missed my connection, so I’m heading off tomorrow, instead.

My friend was active in the resistance against the regimes of both the Shah and the Islamic Republic, was widowed at 21 when her husband died in the mountains fight for the Kurdish resistance, ended up in an eight year international custody battle with her – for her son that crossed three continents and ended with her basically just stealing him. Since then she has lost a job as a health and safety inspector engineer because she was a whistleblower and has had some other struggles that we won’t go into here. She basically talked to no one about her rather adventurous life for twenty years until my husband Michael, who had known her in Israel (where she had fled to escape questioning by the Shah’s secret police) stopped into visit her because we were attending a convention in San Diego and took the train up to LA.

Maybe it was because she hadn’t seen Michael in 25 years and seeing him again brought her back to that time in her life, when she was preparing to return to Iraq with her fiance and fight for a secular democratic republic to take the place of the Shah’s regime. Or maybe it was because she didn’t know me and I just wanted to hear her about her life, but she spent a couple days just pouring out this really remarkable story. Periodically, she would stop and say, “You know, I haven’t talked about this for twenty years.”

I encouraged her to write it down, and she said she wasn’t ready to. She also had realistic concerns for the security of friends and people in the resistance who still might be in Iran, but a couple years ago, she said she was ready, so I’m going out for a couple weeks to try to get a start on it.

Aside from being a worthwhile project in its own right, the memoir will help keep me from going insane over the fact I have an agent reading my Shea manuscript (the one loosely based on the Hosea-Gomer narrative with the gender roles reversed.) I tweaked a query letter for two weeks to an agency I have wanted to represent me since I knew about it, because of our shared political goals. From what I have learned from googling the agent, I can’t imagine a more sympatico fit. The odd thing is that I’m feeling a little depressed. A couple years ago, I would have spent the next month in delighted anticipation, thinking that this agent was really going to like my book once she read it. And now, there’s part of me that really does think that, because I think it’s a good book, and because with the exception of a couple readers (See my “Feedback” posting) my readers think so too. But then there’s this part of me that thinks, if she doesn’t like it, if the religious bits turn her off in the first couple pages, if [insert reason] what’s the point of going on, because there will never be another agent who will get me as much as this one does. I was mentioning this to a friend at church, and she said that there’s a spiritual term for it called “joyful foreboding.”

Anyway, that’s all by way of saying, the memoir will help keep me from going crazy.

Also found out today, since I had time on my hands because of the flight cancellation, that freeze-drying a human body and then pulverizing it would probably make it better fertilizer than burning it. And since the fascist regime in Shea happened to be doing that to its undesirable population, I was able to change that in the manuscript.

Feedback

I have a circle of readers I send the “first” draft of my manuscripts new, meaning a draft I’m not embarrassed to have other people see. One of the people whose opinion I value most is a fellow writer who has very different tastes in literature. He hates Jane Austen and loves William Faulkner. I am the opposite, and so we write different sorts of fiction and in a way, that makes him a bit more objective, I think. He has been more successful than I in the past. He has an agent, although he’s had a rather long drought in sales, so I definitely value his opinion on what’s “sellable.”

Which is why I came away from our standard, “I’ll feed you lunch and you give me a critique” encounter depressed yesterday. He had liked my first 100 pages, although he said they were hard to read, because of some personal shared life experiences I won’t go into here, and because, like me, it’s not hard for him to imagine the U.S. sliding into religious fascism. Yesterday, he told me he had to really forced himself to read the the rest of the book, for some of the same reasons mentioned above, and thought it had real problems with pacing, that there was too much exposition, that I had too many climatic points, that in general, the novel had problems that would require a pretty big rewrite.

I’ve been edited a lot, so I don’t generally have a knee-jerk negative response to suggestions I rewrite. But others who have read the manuscript said they found it hard to put down. On the other hand, they were fellow members of my organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, who sort of share my worldview, while my friend is a professional writer, who was giving me a professional assessment from the outside. On the other hand, he was picking it up and putting it down over the course of a month and is in general too impatient to read Jane Austen. If a movie doesn’t interest him within the first five minutes, he will walk out. Some of the places he marked as too much exposition were only two paragraphs long and they covered a period of months.

He liked my second novel, and I realized something today: that novel and all of his novels take place in one location, over a period of a few months, with a few characters. Shea, my third novel, takes place over a period of thirty years, moves from the U.S., to Canada, to Chiapas, MX, to Scotland and England, and also ties in how global events are impacting the struggle to bring down the fascist Christian Republic regime in the U.S. Am I being too ambitious? My book is the fictional prison memoir of a political dissident who describes how he, his wife, Shea, and thousands of other ordinary people brought down the fascist regime of the Christian Republic in the United States. All of the great struggles to bring down fascist and oppressive regimes in recent history have had an international component to them, and my work with Christian Peacemaker Teams basically brings that international component to ordinary people who are struggling nonviolently to resist systemic oppression, so my gut says “no.”

This morning, in my e-mail were two critiques from readers outside of Christian Peacemaker Teams who told me that they found the pacing to be brisk. They are not writers, but they are readers. I probably won’t feel completely easy, though, until I have a professional assessment from an editor or agent about how Shea needs to be revised.

To Do list

I’ve been running a low-grade fever the last couple days and have had accompanying canker sores that took over half my mouth and restricted to me to a liquid or very soft food diet. I was kind of stressing out over my To-Do list, but then I thought that my To-Do list, unlike my pre-sabbatical lists, was a real writer’s To-do list:

Sketch out an outline of questions for the friend whose memoir I will be working on with her in Los Angeles from February 25-March 13, to get her thinking
Get my column for Mennonite World Review done before then (Writing on the Idle No More movement currently sweeping across Canada, and implications for White settler Mennonites.)
Get the first 50 pages and an outline of my novel ready for the James Jones novel contest before then
Get the query letter for the agency I really want to represent my third novel polished and ready to go
Get a more generic query letter for agencies ready to go
Check out some Samurai Champloo and Joss Whedon sites for Because the Angels promotion.

When I go back to work for Christian Peacemaker Teams in June, it will be nice to look back on this list, and remember there was a time when I really spent most of my creative energy on writing.

Kathleen Kern Author

How to Write About Africa

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