Writing Nemesis

by Elizabeth MacDonald Burrows

When someone asks me what it takes to become a good writer, I usually grumble, “Enough rejects to paper the walls.”

Perhaps that is not a very auspicious point to start defining one’s writing career, but it takes courage to write. It isn’t so much that it takes courage to put the fingers on the computer keyboard, but one has to be able to take publisher rejection. All too often, a potentially good work gets shelved because of a seeming lack of courtesy on the part of publishers. After a few rejects the writer gives up. That is not the time to give up, that is the time to rewrite.

When I first finished writing “Jesus – the True Story”, more years ago than I can almost remember I received the follow rejection from a publisher; “The first of your book is boring, the middle is the most you have to offer and I would prefer that you send me no more of work.”

Naturally I was devastated. I had worked for five years on the book and here was a publisher telling me that it wasn’t any good. By this time I was again on United States lecture tour and headed for West Virginia. While in route, I puzzled over the problem, and ultimately had to agree, if I was honest, that the publisher was right. Therefore, I thought; perhaps I could simply rewrite the first section and try again. That is exactly what I started out to do. Early each morning I would hit the keyboard, and in the afternoon I would head to a small library nearby to do research. I was midway in the third chapter one morning when I looked down and a light went off inside of my head. Finally, I was learning to write. The secret…detail.

For instance; we can write, “Someone left the window up and the cat got out of window.” Or we can write: Paula was so engrossed in her favorite television show that she did not hear her mother call out, “Paula, close the window or Sambo might get out.” Sambo, of course, was the somewhat overweight family cat which had developed a habit of slipping out of the narrow confines of the bottom story apartment every chance he could get. It seems that he had developed an attraction for the Persian cat queen that preened herself in the front window two buildings down the street.”

Ah Ha! I had better stop now, because every writer and would-be writer can see where this is going.

Any description must captivate the reading audience. My solution is to envision myself writing to those who would be most interested in what I write about; for instance children’s stories. The writer should just imagine his, or her, self, setting in the middle of a group of children and telling a story. Or, if one is writing Sci-Fi, the writer needs to be in the middle of the battle. After all, they are the captain of the Starship Hope. Because I write for mass consciousness, and most of my work is non-fiction, I must try to draw the readers into the lives of persons, or events, that I am writing about. I have also had success in fiction, however, both short stories and books. “Htrae–Operation Earth Angel”, and “Maya Sangh” and the valley of the white ones is now handled by bookstores all over the world, such as Germany, France, Africa, Australia, Japan etc. Nevertheless, whether I am involved in fiction, non-fiction or poetry, I am in the middle of those whose life I want to touch. The reader cannot see the topography I am writing about, or the events, unless I describe them in such a manner that they can.

A major problem with first time writers is that they think they have written a great masterpiece, and perhaps they have, but they had better not broadcast it. Between the author’s image of their masterpiece and getting it published, is a sea as wide as the Atlantic Ocean, or the Pacific Ocean, if one is hunkered down in a little cabin located on the beach of the Oregon seacoast. “Don’t change one little hair on my child’s head”, the author cries, as they send off an eight hundred page scenario of their life, which covers his, or her, pain at birth, through almost getting electrocuted on the barn yard fence. Naturally the publishers won’t read it, because they have hundreds of writers sending in their 800 page autobiographies, or a battle over the asteroid belt for faster planetary travel.

Large publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts, so it behooves the author to learn how to write a proposal. First, however, the author needs to shorten that book by at least three hundred manuscript pages. This is real easy; just take out the routine stuff and leave the blood and guts.

Visit The International Foundation of Christian Mysticism.