Treasured Teammates
44 Weeks to Publication
Hello friends!
The manuscript is turned in!!! Let me just take a moment and revel in that. My husband was away for a long weekend with some of the guys, and I had a quiet home to polish up every last detail on my list.
It was a luxury, really, to have that kind of time in the end. So much of the last few months has been churning for hours at a time, so having a few days with only a handful of changes to make gave the last moments a calm and clarity that I rarely had for the rest of the process.
When I think back to the moment I signed the contract, the date that had been agreed upon between my agent, the editor, and myself was less than six months away. It was more like five months and change. I believed I could do it, but it was going to be tight. I had most of the research done, and a fully flushed outline, with a couple of sample chapters, but I was waiting for notes from the editor to determine the final direction that I would take in the narrative.
I had heard from other nonfiction writers that editors typically want to have more input with nonfiction titles, so I didn’t want to start in a direction that an editor would want to change. My editor, however, gave me a few notes, the main one being to err on the side of right versus creative. And I was off and running, on my own.
This is when I found that writing on my own isn’t really by myself. I am tired of my silo. I relied heavily on a writing partner and colleague at the literary magazine. We talked several times a week about each of our projects. I worried out loud to her about this or that, and she would say, “Aime, stop. You’re spinning.” She admitted to me that in the early days she thought that my concept was amazing, and the only thing that would get in the way of finishing it was myself.
I was completely overwhelmed with the amount of research I had gathered, and how I was going to synthesize it into a narrative that would actually be fun to read. My friend saved me with one of her favorite editing techniques. She printed out her entire manuscript, and as she read through it, she drew a line after the end of each cohesive collection of thoughts. She then cut up the sections, spread them out on a large table, and organized them by theme. In this way it was like putting a puzzle together. You spread all of the pieces out on the table, and slowly you organize the different sections by color, by end pieces, you nail down the corners and then it gets easier and easier to fill in the middle.
For me, this worked like a charm. I printed out information from all of the various sources, cut them into sections, sorted them into the place where they fit into the narrative arc and then started piecing it together again within a new manuscript. When I had a new batch laid out on the table, I’d put the pieces away as I found the right spot for them, so the table would get more and more clear as the days went by. It was a great motivator, to clean that table. Everyone in the house could see my progress as well, and they knew that they’d better not touch anything!
It's just one thing, and one way, that one person was able to help another. Think of how many little tips and tricks that we use to function in our work and in our lives. The thing that seems the most obvious to us might just be the thing that someone else needs to solve a major problem in their lives.
This is the benefit of teamwork. This is the benefit of learning from others. This is the benefit of a coach, of a teammate, and a friend. We don’t all have to invent the wheel. But what we do is to show others how to use it.
The Tigerbelle image for this week is from practice. The photos at practice were rarely of individuals running on their own. More often they were of teammates watching each other, helping each other adjust this or that, fine tuning technical skills, suggesting solutions, and most of all giving each other the encouragement and motivation to dig deep and to do the best that they possibly could.
This is Wilma Rudolph and Ralph Boston. Wilma always worried about her starts. She thought that it was a lot easier for the smaller runners to get out of the starting blocks more quickly, and she was right, to a degree. At nearly six feet tall, her limbs were longer to fold up into the starting crouch. But the work, the time she took to focus on this aspect of the race that she considered a weak point, helped her to put all of her other strengths out ahead. She enlisted the help of all of her teammates when she worked on a detail like this, and each of them had something to tell her, even if it was just “you’ve got this, girl.”
I relied heavily on a team to help me too. And to each of them, I’m more grateful than you know. I hope I’ve told you enough. I’ll reach out to help others too, because you never know when that one little off-handed comment is going to change someone’s game.
Until next week!