Cut & Paste

“I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.”   -- Truman Capote

Sometimes I miss my scissors. 

When I first started writing, part of my revision process involved cutting up parts of my manuscript. I'd lay the pieces out on the dining room table and rearrange them.  The scene where the guy is preparing two plants for breeding, for example, has to go after the explanation of why he's doing it, and a little history of plant breeding should go before that. Then I'd clip all the strips of paper together and go back to the keyboard. 

I know there is the cut and past function on the computer, but that isn't as satisfying as physically cutting the paper, seeing all the parts, not just half a page at a time.  And there's always that annoying glitch when the computer cuts more than you want, or pastes it in a weird place (maybe it's just my computer).

But I think Capote is referring to the idea of brevity and clarity -- using just the right word rather than a string of near misses. This is when you have to "kill your darlings," find your focus, and ask yourself, "What am I really trying to say?"  

It's only when you can answer that question that you can put your scissors away. 

Right now, on my current project, I'll keep the scissors handy. 

Nonfiction in Verse: An Interview with Susannah Buhrman-Deever

I'm celebrating Poetry Month with Susannah Buhrman-Deever and her debut book, Predator and Prey, A Conversation in Verse. Beautifully illustrated by Bert Kitchen, this nonfiction picture book captures the dangerous dance of survival, and the way animals communicate in that moment.

Recently, Susannah was gracious enough to answer my many questions. Here's what she had to say about her work and her process:


1. Were you always a poet? What kinds of things did you write as a child?

I don't know that I can call myself a poet, but I do enjoy writing it. I like fiddling around with words, so writing a poem is a very fun (though at times frustrating(!)) challenge. Poetry has always been one of my favorite things to read. Shel Silverstein was an early favorite, and The Ox-Cart Man, which will forever and always be my favorite book, is really a book-length poem. I did write some (terrible) poems growing up, but mostly, I read poems and soaked them in.


2. How did the idea of a “conversation in verse” come about?

The idea of exploring how predators and prey interact had been bubbling around in my head for a while. Specifically, I was thinking about how sometimes prey actually talk to their predators, even though at first glance that might seem to be a strange thing to do. The "conversation in verse" format came to me while on a walk in the woods. A beginning line for a poem in the voice of a chickadee popped in my head, and what a hawk would "say" in reply. I had recently read Paul Fleischman's Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, and the idea of a poetry conversation between two animals seemed like an interesting way to explore predator-prey dynamics.


3. As a trained biologist, how did it feel transforming scientific knowledge into a poetic form? And how important was it to include the prose sidebars?


One of the things I really wanted to be conscious of when writing the poems was to maintain accuracy, even when taking on the "voice" of different animals. It was important that any imagery I used was based in fact. Including both the poems and the prose sidebars was a way for me tell the same story in different ways, hopefully helping my readers better understand what was going on.


4. How did you choose the combatants? And what was it like trying to capture each animal’s “voice.”

Because of my background studying animal behavior, I already knew of a few cases where prey told predators the truth, or predators tricked their prey. Where I could, I wanted to find a examples of predators and prey using the same strategy (for example: a predator "listening in" on its prey to help it hunt, and a prey "listening in" on its predator to avoid being attacked). So I dug into the scientific literature to find more examples I could use.

Capturing each animal's "voice" was the fun part. I played around a lot with using different words and rhythms to get different effects for each "character." It took a lot of exploration and revision before I felt I got a good "voice" for each poem.


5. Did some poems take longer than others, and why?

I worked on the poems on and off for about two years. Some came quickly; others took much longer. Even though it's the shortest poem in the book, it took me over a year to get "PSST-HIDE!" into its final form. Previous versions were way too long, especially because the chickadee call the poem is describing is so short. Sometimes I have to let things sit for a while before the right idea strikes.


6. Which authors did you study while you were working on this project? And what did you learn?

Joyce Sidman's natural history poetry collections (such as Song of the Water Boatman and Winter Bees and Other Poems of the Cold) completely floored me when I first found them. I am in awe of her talent. Seeing her work opened up the possibility to me of using poetry and sidebars to explore nonfiction topics.


7. Is your next project also in verse? And can you tell us what it is?

My next project is a nonfiction picture book (If You Take Away the Otter, illustrated by Matthew Trueman) and is due out next year from Candlewick. That book actually started out as a poem, but eventually became prose. In the meantime, I'm working on researching and drafting some more nature based poetry ideas, because, well, it's something I love to do.


Happy Poetry Month!!

Using Fair Assumptions in Nonfiction

Nonfiction is the truth, facts, and nothing but the facts. Right?  So, is there ever room for conjecture if it is based on those very facts? This question inevitably comes up during a writing workshop, and it is hard to explain, but yes, you can make certain assumptions if the facts support it.

I first heard the term "fair assumptions" during a talk given by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and Elizabeth Partridge.  The example given involved a scene in which a gas lamp hissed. "How do you know the gas lamp hissed?" a student asked. Elizabeth explained that the details of that scene were taken from a photograph that showed a gas lamp hanging in the background. Elizabeth had used that kind of gas lamp and she'd heard it hiss. She made a fair assumption that all gas lamps hiss therefore the lamp in the photo hissed and the people in the photo would have heard it, even though nowhere in any written historic document had anyone mentioned the noise the gas lamp made. 

Last week I mentioned Erik Larson's book Isaac's Storm, and he, too, makes a few fair assumptions which he notes in the back matter. Some are based on photographs. With a magnifying glass Larson picked out specific items like a hat, clothing, etc,strewn in the debris that Isaac would probably have seen although he never wrote about them in any letter or journal.

Another refers to his description of Isaac's family going to either the Murdoch's bath house or  the Pagoda bath house on Sunday.  Larson admits that he found no documentation proving this, but asserts that the close proximity, and the "communal character of the time -- and the absence of television -- it is all but certain that the Clines did so."

Another example is Larson's assumption that venomous snakes competed with people for space in trees to escape the flood and bit people who then may have fallen and drowned. No one knows if this really happened in Galveston, but the phenomenon has been reported elsewhere. Snakes most certainly would have crawled to higher ground, but would they have bitten their competitors? I know I would out of fear and survival instincts. 

The most understandable assumption involves dreams.  As Larson says, "I base this observation on human nature. What survivor of a tragedy has never dreamed that the outcome had been different."

Would you make the same assumptions?  Every writer is different. 

Before you include a fair assumption in your own text ask yourself: Does it change the story? Does it change the reader's perception of the event? If so, don't do it. 

This tool should also be used judiciously.  In Larson's 300 page book, which includes 15 pages of notes, I found only 7 instances where he had to explain his use of fair assumption.  

And like Larson, explain your reasoning in the back matter. Don't let your reader assume you made anything up.