By Deborah Mandel
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10 May, 2021
Yesterday evening, I took a three-mile walk around my condo complex with Mary, a member of my writing group. She and I were both original members since its inception in 2015. While we walked and talked books, we collected a bag of trash which included everything from cigarette butts to empty beer cans to a dirty, well-worn gray fleece blanket. Sad to think that some homeless person lost their little bit of warmth, but it had to go in the bag. Mary and I and the other group members had met in a writing course at Wesleyan University. Mary had come to that class with a completed manuscript. She had been ready to go to work getting it out there in the world. But here’s what happened (an excerpt from All Write: How to Start, Structure, and Sustain a Writing Group ): “I’d grown up with the image of a solitary writer sequestered in a room, hunched over a typewriter, pecking away on a masterpiece. So, when I retired and decided to write a memoir, I followed that model. I holed up in my studio over the garage until I’d churned out a true-life novel, loosely based on my mother’s life. Friends and family edited the first and second drafts with tremendous encouragement. I thought I had a winner! My husband, the sensible one, recommended I attend a six-week writing course at a local university prior to pushing the go button and submitting my manuscript to agents. The course . . . was perfect. The feedback sessions opened my eyes. I knew I had a crackerjack story, but by the middle of the course, I was having serious doubts about my manuscript. I’d broken most of Stephen King’s rules for aspiring writers. I had too much tell and not enough show , and I’d paved the way to hell with adverbs. I knew if I was going to succeed as an author, I needed to be surrounded by a community of peers and not work as a solitary writer.” Mary received everything she wanted and more from our writing group. We worked through her manuscript twice over the course of the next few years, helping her perfect what was a “crackerjack" story into a well-crafted, “crackerjack” manuscript, one that any agent would be lucky to pick up. It took a lot of digging deep, but now Mary is ready to send her book and her query off to agents. She’s ready to hit the go button . Editing a book is a little like walking around and picking up litter. The grounds around our condo complex are nice—year-round green grass, palm trees, and a host of flowering trees and shrubs this time of year. But those cigarette butts, discarded candy wrappers, and empty coffee cups distract from the inherent beauty of the setting, much like unwanted adverbs, unnecessary info dumps, and inconsistencies in the story distract from the inherent beauty of the written word. A writing group will help keep you aware of those sometimes small (think cigarette butts) and sometimes large (think filthy blankets) issues and will help you clean the grounds so that you have a perfectly manicured, pristine, and well-designed book ready to market. Photo: D. Mandel