How I Survived My Husband's Writing - Ed & Marian Zaruk (rooftoppers txt) 📗

CHAPTER ONE


Throughout our married life, I have, on occasion, set out dinner for two with candles. My husband, during rare impulsive moments, has brought flowers home, but what has kept us close through the years is our love of reading. Then his writing entered our lives, and after watching it grow and mature, I became his first reader. While re-working his novels, we've read his manuscripts out loud to each other over a bottle of wine with flames dancing in the fireplace. Such occasions border on the romantic.

When he picked me up for our first date in his ’33 Ford hot rod, it should have been a clue as to his hobbies, but I married him anyway. We bought a four-door family car, and he took to flying model airplanes. After our daughter was born, he switched to building model trains, his layout eventually taking up space that I thought could be put to better use, so I gave him a son. He smiled, painted the room pink, and our daughter moved into her own bedroom. The remains of his train set moulder away to this day in a couple cardboard boxes under the stairs. I think he had ideas of waiting the kids out but I quashed those with our third child. Running out of spare rooms in our modest house, one evening he came to me and said he was going to take up writing as a hobby.

"Uh huh," I said, hardly giving his words consideration. What he said next, brings a chuckle whenever it’s mentioned.

"Look, honey, how expensive can it be? A few sheets of paper and some pencils."

To me, it was the ideal hobby for a man who'd failed grade 12 English.

I suppose the first occasion I had to take him seriously was a Friday night when I heard my oldest son asking him to write a story for his English class. Now this son was an honour roll student, and fully capable of doing his own writing, but he'd bought his first car and was working hard to keep gas in it. This weekend, not only did he have extra shifts at the local Pizza Hut, but also a late Saturday night party to attend.

"Okay, what's it about?" my husband asked.

"It’s based on Lord of The Flies,” my son replied.

"Never heard of it," he said.

I couldn’t believe it. Here is a man who always has a large non-fiction work on his bedside table, breezes through a novel for weekend recreation, thinks the only real authors are British, and he hasn’t a clue what his kid is reading. Now he was going to rewrite a book, which still appears on bestseller lists, from a brief outline his son had given him while dashing out the door. Well, I thought, he shouldn’t have too much difficulty making it sound like amateur writing.

A week later the paper appeared on the kitchen table with a 94.5% grade. I think it was at that moment I realized this writing thing would get out of hand. Running true to form, and now thinking he was a writer, my husband began work on a novel that winter.

I say ‘began’ because he picked a subject from a television documentary he saw about whaling stations in the South Atlantic. After spending hours researching material at our local library, he sat late into the evenings scribbling in long hand on lined, yellow legal pads. From borrowed books lying on the coffee table and the occasional comment, it came to light he was writing a thriller. No surprise there, his favourite weekend reads at the time were by Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley, and Tom Clancy. Myself, I preferred Ken Follett or Clive Cussler and was reading my way through the Daughters series by Aola Vandergriff.

When spring arrived, he had numerous false starts and a couple of short stories that years later I stumbled across and read, having no idea how he received such good marks from his son's English teacher.


CHAPTER TWO

Deciding his new hobby needed some technical support, he bought a computer, a Texas Instruments 99/4A. This was a great leap forward. The only drawback, that gave no end of aggravation, was the split screen. Really, only half the page vertically showed on the screen and you had to scroll across to see the second half of any given line. After typing two hundred or so lines, the machine said it was full and required the information to be saved to a rather large floppy disk. Add that to the price of a couple pencils and few sheets of paper.

I’d like to mention that, although we always drove older vehicles, we lived as comfortable as anyone can with three kids and a mountain of debt, but in the early ninety’s, I bought him a personal computer with Perfect Office installed. My husband still uses this program, claiming it is simple and more dynamic. From what I know of him, I think he just got used to it and doesn’t want to change. Out of necessity, we have both become familiar with Microsoft Word.

His new ink jet printer spewed out reams of paper which he bought by the box. I have to admit that his writing proliferated in direct proportion to the amount of paper consumed, and finally the first draft of his novel was completed. Proudly displaying the finished product, he said, "I'm going to send this away and see if I can get it published."

Thus started my career as an editor. I didn’t know that much about editing, but I did know how to spell, knew my husband's spelling was atrocious, and I wasn’t about to let him send off a manuscript full of mistakes. Sure enough, as I started reading, up popped the spelling errors and punctuation mistakes. But at the same time, I was engaged by his story and became his first reader. I also found a fulfillment in the printed page that only those who are on the inside world of authors and readers can experience.

Thankful for the assistance, my husband faithfully went through the pages I returned to him with errors circled in red, and corrected them. There are certain marks professional editors make when reviewing material. I'm not that sophisticated. I read with pen or pencil in hand and circle or stroke the things I think he has to address.

Now it is important to mention that computers are not mind readers, so when one types 'bear' instead of 'bare' it just blithely carries on. So does my husband. Therefore, the first rule of thumb for line-editing your partner's work is, don't rely on the spell checker to replace wrong words spelled correctly. I have discovered over the years that the only way to purge an 80,000 word document of these errors is to read and re-read it over many times. There can’t be anything worse for an author than to see his work between covers, then find it has typos. We think they breed. I recently found one that we know was in his novel, Altar and Throne, since the first draft. I'd read over it so often that my eye just became accustomed to it and assumed it was correct. I found it the night before we sent the manuscript to the printer. Such moments strengthen my resolve to ferret out every mistake in my husband’s writing. Editors have passion, too.

That said, I’m impressed with the spell checker feature. My husband’s computer is configured so that any incorrect word will be underscored in red. There are two ways to fix this. The lazy man's way is to click the appropriate symbol on the screen and have the computer make the correction. My husband is not a lazy man, although he does have his moments. Over the years (and I have actually seen him do this,) he looks at the suggestion box and retypes the word correctly. His spelling has improved immensely.

This is all basic stuff, but it's where I started and things went along smoothly until I suggested changes to his composition. In all fairness to my husband, he was working hard to improve his writing. I found this very early draft written fifteen years ago of his first novel, Falklands Deadline, and it clearly shows a weakness of beginning writers. "A new day began in the South Atlantic when, with the sparkle of orange, sunlight broke over a distant horizon." How droll. It tells the reader nothing and can be rendered down to, "It was a dark and stormy night." Absolutely nobody should start a novel with that line, so why re-write it?

Here is the final opening to the Falklands Deadline prologue. "Kapitän zur See Hans Langsdorff glanced at the chronometer: 5:56. Dawn. His steady gloved hands held up a pair of Zeiss binoculars while he studied the masts of two ships appearing over the horizon, 27 kilometres away."

Now it tells us something. Who- Kapitän zur See Hans Langsdorff, obviously German. Where- At sea, as noted by the ship's masts. When- 5:56. Dawn. That word ‘dawn’ is interesting because it subconsciously conjures up the weather in the reader's mind. It had to be a clear morning if the horizon was visible 27 kilometres away. Also the sun would be coming up. We have sense of place being created without a description of the weather. Why, and what was happening, are left out, but would the reader continue to the second paragraph? It is important to ask yourself this because that person may be an agent who has asked for your work. It may be the editor of a large publishing house, but most importantly, it could be someone in a bookstore, or online, reading your opening. You have just seconds to capture their attention. If the reader doesn’t go to the second paragraph, your book will be returned to the shelf and the sale lost. My advice is, don't start your story with the weather. I know many famous authors do it, but they're making money for the publishing houses and I'm sure are cut a lot of slack. First-time authors need to get the introduction right.


CHAPTER THREE

It was a long struggle for my husband to get not only his opening, but the entire document right, which is why I believe first novels belong in a drawer. Many times he would come to me with different lines. Some, I'd screw my nose up at. Others that had merit, we reworked together, and over a period of years, developed a separation of our responsibilities. I can't write, but I know good writing when I see it. I'd offer suggestions, mention words that didn’t work, and encourage him to keep at it. Back to the computer he’d go, type out a few changes, and we'd review it again. I don't always get what I want.