Watership Down by Richard Adams

My partner, Mike, has been trying to get me to read this novel for years. He knows my love of animals. I have already written one novel where animals talk. I'm currently working on another. It seemed a natural fit for me to read this highly-praised novel set in the rabbit world.

That all seemed true to me, but I still didn't do it. I was afraid the book would be too dry. Conversely, I was also concerned that there would be too many battle scenes—I had heard that the book was bloody, and I thought I would be put off by that as well. But Mike kept insisting, and I finally checked it out of the library. It was a great tome of a book with beautiful illustrations that looked to be of considerable importance.

I read the foreword and related to Adams immediately. He had started the book as a story he made up in the car on long drives with his children. One evening, he was reading a story to the children and he threw the book across the room because it was so dull. They suggested that he write down the story that he read to them in the car. It was much better than that book, they said.

So Adams did after work. He wrote in the evenings and then he would read what he wrote to his children, and they would give him feedback. Then he submitted it to numerous publishers who all rejected it with the same criticism—it was too sophisticated for children, and adults would not want to read about rabbits. But Adams was not willing to make any changes. He eventually did find a publisher, and the book became a success.

I was never able to read that beautiful book. After I finished the foreword, I found the text daunting. But this is not a new phenomenon. I have a strange wiring in my head regarding reading. I can read light contemporary novels and children's books just fine. But if it is nonfiction or something out of my comfort zone, I need to listen to it in order to enjoy it.

So I bought the Audible unabridged version of Watership Down with Ralph Cosham as the narrator. (I bought it in December, and it currently seems unavailable. I don't know why. But if you also enjoy audio books, and you can get a hold of this version, I thought Cosham did a fine job as the storyteller.) It is a very quirky book. There are epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter that range from Shakespeare to Napoleon. In this book, rabbits love hearing mythological stories of their culture. I think if I was reading it, those would have been a big yawn for me. Truthfully, they were my least favorite part of the story, although I admire Adams for adding them in, as I think they do deepen the world.

If you haven't read Watership Down, I don't want to give anything away. I would tell you that I listened to the story when I drove in my car and when I took walks, and there were times that I would cry or wish that I had time to walk further or do one more errand so I could find what happened next. I think it has one of the most perfect endings in the world. I have told Mike that we will probably have cats named after Watership Down characters in our future. It is one of my favorite books.

Beta Readers

After I've written a first draft and revised and revised and revised until I can't see it any more, then I turn it over to beta readers. This is currently where I am in my process. Here are some tips that I've learned about this stage along the way:

1. Create Deadlines. At first I naively, grandiosely assumed that people would just read my manuscript right away. Well, people have lives. They put off reading. They might not, gasp, like what I wrote. So now if I ask someone to be a reader, I ask if they can finish within a certain amount of time. I usually say a month. That seems reasonable to me.

2. Less Is More. This is all a personal preference, but I generally ask two, maybe three people to read my draft. It makes life less complicated. I know that I still have the editorial process in front of me, where my developmental and copy editor will also be chiming in with their thoughts. So two or three readers works for me.

3. Choose Carefully. Do you need an expert on a subject to chime in? Who do you know? Or who do you know who knows someone who knows? I also think about compatibility here. I want someone with a kind, thoughtful manner who will take this responsibility seriously. My friend and neighbor, Larry Brown, fits this criteria. I always ask him to be a beta reader, and I look forward to our meeting, when we sit at the table, both with drafts in hands, and I take notes while he tells me what he thought. When you're choosing your beta readers, think about what you might need checked and how you like feedback expressed to you.

4. Provide Guidance. Where do you need help? What is nagging at you? Where are you unsure? Tell your beta readers a few things when you give them the draft. Sometimes I'm more cagey about this step. I don't want to unduly influence their reading. But I generally feel that if something has been bothering me and and I can't figure it out, it's better to  just share that with my beta readers rather than having them get to that point and think, "Oh, this is a mess. Poor dear. I'm going to have to tell her." If I tell them about my concerns, it then becomes a moment of "This is what she was talking about. What would be my suggestions?"

5. Reward Them. I give beta readers the book when it is published. I also often will do some sort of swap: editing or reading of their project in the future or some measure of thanks for their assistance to me. I want them to know how much I appreciate their feedback.

6. Remember You Have the Last Word. One of the reasons why I am not in a feedback group is because I have the unfortunate tendency to want to please people. If I was receiving constant opinions, I would be continually changing my story and forgetting why I wanted to write it in the first place. When I receive feedback from my beta readers, I listen and assess. Most of the time, they have a point. But sometimes I keep it the way it was or I shade it or I go in another direction that I think will work instead. In the end, the writer needs to have final say.

On the Workshop Method and Trusting Myself

There is a myth in the writing world that strong writers welcome continual feedback on their work. It's a testament of character, people argue. It's the fastest way to learn. My response? Bah, humbug. All writers are different. I would argue that many writers write as a result of feeling wounded and alienated at an early age, causing them to retreat to their own private worlds. Do you seriously think that this kind of a temperament is amenable to a critique group? Yes, I am intense on this subject. Here's why.

I am the product of a graduate school creative writing program. The first class I signed up for was Novel Writing 1. I had this childhood dream of writing novels. Here was my chance to learn. But early on in that class, I decided it was too overwhelming to do. Why? Because there was no teaching of craft. The entire class was workshop. Students handed in their work, and class time was taken up by student critique with the occasional comment thrown in by the professor.

So I decided to focus on the short story, which involved more classes that had to do with the workshop method and still no formal teaching of craft, but at least short stories were manageable. By the time I finished school, I was so dispirited that I turned to creative nonfiction. It seemed easier to write about my life and make the prose as pretty as I could. When that was not satisfying, I began writing more analytically, creating a blog where I wrote reviews of things that I read and watched, eventually focusing on The Good Wife, until the writers in that show took leave of their senses and treated their characters horribly, and I could no longer in good conscience write about it any more.

I eventually ended up in a guided-prompt writing group, where people wrote about their private lives in a confidential forum, and there was no feedback. It started me back on the road to where I wanted to go. One day in the group, the leader asked us to write about a moment that had truly affected us. After we did that, she asked us to write about again and change it. That's when I remembered that fiction could be really fun.

It was a bumpy road. Writing for fifteen minutes on my own at home felt like forever. I had to rebuild muscle. I had to learn to trust myself. I remember one time talking to another novelist, and she told me that she loved walking outside, looking around, and making up stories. It jogged a memory. I used to love to do that as a child. I had forgotten all about it.

I made mistakes. I went to a fancy writers' retreat and got my sensibilities clobbered. I was treated like I did not know what I was doing. There was a small voice in my head that said, “Maybe you're right. But even though they didn't teach me much craft at all, I am a graduate of a creative writing program, and they thought enough of me to hire me as a lecturer.” I thought, “Why am I getting so upset by this attitude when this person has never written a novel? Why did I spend so much money on someone who hasn't done what I'm trying to do?” I cried more there than I've ever cried anywhere at any time. I was told that I should put aside my book and go into therapy for at least a year. I could feel my book dangling inside me by a very thin thread. I ended up cutting ties with this teacher and set about to write my book.

Luckily, when I got home, I found The Plot Whisperer, and in that book, Martha Alderson said that I didn't have to show anyone my first draft. That made sense to me. I held that idea close to my heart. I did try seeing a therapist, but in mid-session, I knew I would never go back. I had  a history with therapy. I had been with one therapist for many years. I learned my issues. In the end, I had to get out because I was giving too much power to my therapist. This has been an issue for me all my life, thinking more of others than of myself. At that time, I vowed to continue checking inside, to trust my assessments. I wasn't going to go back.

But I did end up going on medication. I was still crying way too much. So I gave it a try, and it has really helped. I had previously thought that using medication was a sign of weakness. I thought it would turn me into a robot. It has helped me function in life, and I wish I had starting using it a long time ago.

I actually intended today to write about beta readers. That's where I am in my process right now with my current project. I didn't think I would write any of the above, but that's what came out today. Next week, I plan to share about that point in my process where I do need to receive feedback, and how that works for me.

Word Lab

For the past year, I have volunteered at the Young Writers Program in Santa Cruz. It is one of the best decision I've ever made. I find it incredibly rewarding to spend time supporting and encouraging young writers in their work.

I volunteer at their after-school program, Word Lab. Students from various schools attend once a week for two hours for a nine-week session. Their goal is to write a 650-word piece that will be included in an anthology published in the summer. Students can write fiction, nonfiction, whatever they want. At each class, they learn about a concept of how to tell a story.

This past week, I was honored to speak to all three classes about being a writer and how to find ideas for fiction. I shared with them my persistent desire to write novels, an urge that began the moment I picked up a book as a child. I told them that, when I was growing up, we didn't have anything like Word Lab. There weren't programs for creative writing through the schools. I shared my experience after college, when the woman who drove me to one of my early jobs emphatically warned me that no one could make any money writing novels, that it was just an impossible thing to do, and I foolishly believed her. I expressed the other myths that I held in my head, the idea that writers suffered, that they were penniless and came down with tuberculosis, and that a novel would take twelve years of blood, sweat, and tears before you could ever finish it. I said that there came a day when I realized that if I ever wanted to make my dream come true, that I had better get started because the novels weren't getting to write themselves. I said I was determined and scared, and I studied and worked and had fun and figured it out.

I told these groups, that when I imagined my first book, I decided to write about music because it was something that I always loved. But what about music? I said that, as a child, I had studied piano, and I remembered sitting at the bench and feeling like I was the captain of a spaceship that I could travel to faraway lands and explore a range of emotions, that I could create true beauty just by placing my hands on the keys. I expressed that when I thought about that time, I remembered that wonder and then I felt sadness because, when my family moved to California, I stopped playing the piano. Then I shared with them that one of the powerful things about writing is that it can change your insides. When I was done writing the book, where the girl, despite everything, continues to play, I no longer felt sad that I didn't. I will always love music, but my real home is as a writer, and I will live in this house and work and play at my craft for the rest of my life, and that is one heck of a happy ending.

Noel Streatfeild and the Shoes Books

When I was growing up, I loved our library. I had a dream of reading every book in "my section," middle grade and Young Adult. (I often read beyond my years.) However, I soon abandoned this goal because there were certain books that I wanted to read again and again. Noel Streatfeild was one of my favorite authors. Recently I decided to revisit these books and see if they still held up.

Before I dived into the books again, I read a little bit about the author. To my surprise, Noel Streatfeild was a woman. I always had imagined her as a kind, yet dashing man. She had worked as an actress for ten years before writing her books. She hated her first book, Ballet Shoes, written in 1936, because she thought it came too easily to her. She imagined that something that effortless could not be valuable. (Ha!) And it wasn't always the Shoes series. When Random House bought some of Streatfeild's books, they renamed her books.

I was able to check out three of Streatfeild's books from my library, Ballet Shoes, Theatre Shoes, and Dancing Shoes. To my wonder and great relief, I still think these books are terrific, although my analytical brain does keep saying to me, “But they're all basically the same story.” Orphans are taken in. They begin attending a school for theatre and dance. In these books, children discover and strengthen their creative gifts. But I ultimately don't care that the books cover similar terrain. If my library had all of her books, I would read every single one of them again. At some point, I will probably have to buy the rest of them.

In these stories, the children encounter obstacles. What if you have to go to this school and it doesn't suit you? Do you have the strength and perseverance to figure out how to make this time enjoyable? What if you're a spoiled child, always told that you deserved everything, and the orphan who lives in your home turns out to be more talented and popular than you? What if you land the dream job, and you almost throw it away by letting success go to your head?

These children grow up quickly. At the age of twelve, they can obtain a license and start working as actors and dancers in the Christmas season and during summer. Oftentimes, in these books, they need to get these jobs, not only to satisfy their creative aspirations, but to help keep the household afloat. At sixteen, the children graduate from school. They can study in another field or devote themselves completely to a profession in the arts. They are self-possessed and caring in a world where the stakes are high. I love these books.