Birthing a Book Part II: Gestation, Labor, Delivery

Some of my friends and blog-followers have been asking for more blogs. I admit it has been a while since my last one about the writing of my upcoming book, Susanna and Alice: Quaker Rebels. I haven’t blogged because I have been in the throes of a difficult labor – the editing and proofing process, but I am happy to announce that my labor is now over and the book will soon be released, delivered. At last, I can blog. Let me catch you up on the book and give some tips to first-time writers to help them avoid some of the stressful and time-consuming errors I made.

Gestation

In my last blog, I described how the idea for the book was conceived: from reading the letters of my grandfather’s cousins, Susanna Parry and Alice Paul. I wanted to tell their intertwined stories, but I didn’t know where and how to begin. I spent a long time reading many books about Alice Paul and the Progressive Era, but I couldn’t write anything because the task of writing a book seemed overwhelming. Then a widely published friend gave me simple and seminal advice: Write a page a day, and the book will be done in a year. A page a day: I could do that, so I started with the introduction, telling my story of becoming enthralled by what I found in Susanna’s letters, becoming the book’s narrator who tells the story of her distant relatives as well as her own genealogical adventure. Hence, the Introduction was written.

I studied not only the lives of Susanna, Alice and the Parry family, but also the fascinating, vibrant decades of America’s Progressive Era. All the cultural changes going on at the beginning of the 20th century encouraged the young cousins to dare to be different, to rebel against Quaker norms and become so-called New Women. The young women were surely influenced by the arrival of automobiles, airplanes, electricity, radioactivity, the telephone, the phonograph, motion pictures, ragtime, Cubism, psychology, the reforms of progressive powerhouse Theodore Roosevelt, the settlement houses of Quaker activist Jane Addams, and, of course, the demands of the early suffragists. I had found in the Progressive Era the entry into the world of young Susanna and Alice and the early chapters of the book. I never imagined I would write a history book, but there is indeed a lot of history roped into the pages. We are all, in large part, products of our environments and our times, and Susanna and Alice were no exception. 

What next fascinated me was, given the striking similarities of the young cousins -- both born in 1885 to well-to-do Hicksite Quaker families, both educated at Swarthmore College, what made them so different as adults? The once vivacious Susanna became quiet and somewhat reclusive, whereas the once shy Alice became an outspoken, confrontational icon of suffrage who would not be silenced or deterred in her quest for women’s full equality under the law. Whereas the book begins with describing their childhood similarities, the rest of it explores their differences as adults.

A page a day, sometimes two or three, and the book got written. The same friend gave me good advice about how to get the book published: Send a query a day until you find a publisher. I did just that, finding the most suitable matches in Writer’s Market and sending a query a day to publishing houses. This is not for the faint of heart: there were many rejections and even more non-responses. By the time Laurent and I moved back to France over two years ago, I had given up on getting the book published.

Never think the story is over. Just when I had moved on from the book and out of the country, I found an e-mail in my junk mail from Sunbury Press (coincidentally, the first query I had sent), expressing their interest and asking if the manuscript were still available. I submitted my latest draft and was soon under contract. I thought the hard part was now over: I had found a publisher for the book. I was wrong. The long labor was about to begin: the editing process.

Labor

I don’t take criticism very well. I thought the book was good enough to be ready with just a few tweaks here and there. Silly me. I had to work hard on the book for almost a year until it was ready for publication. It was exhausting and very hard on these old eyes. But I had no choice. The same friend who told me to write a page a day and send a query a day gave me more priceless advice: Whatever you editor asks you to do, do it. I was blessed with two skilled editors. The first was the publisher himself who insisted that I make substantial changes to broaden the book’s appeal. My second editor had a remarkable talent for finding errors I had missed and improving turns of phrase. I am grateful for their invaluable help which made Susanna and Alice a much better book.

The most creative fun I had was working on the front cover with a gifted student at the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design who came up with the idea of using old envelopes and a script font to reflect the epistolary nature of the book. I am delighted with this unique and eye-catching cover.

That was the fun part. The unpleasant part was having to undo mistakes I had made. Let me share two of my costliest mistakes so that you can avoid them and save yourself valuable time, energy, and aggravation as you bring your book into the world.

Mistake #1: Writing in the Historical Present. I struggled with tense in writing the book. In reading the letters in chronological order, I experienced the cousins’ lives as they unfolded. Susanna and Alice came to life for me. I wanted the reader to have the same experience, so I made the decision to write the narrative in the present tense. When events of the past are written in the present tense, it’s called the historical present. This dramatic technique is widely used in fiction but almost never in non-fiction. I had admired Jeremy McCarter’s use of the historical present in his compelling Young Radicals in the War for American Ideals, which tells the stories of Alice Paul and other progressive activists, and thought the technique would also work well for Susanna and Alice. I found one essay on-line, however, which warned against ever using the historical present in writing non-fiction because historians hate it. Alas, I ignored this advice. Turns out my publisher is a historian, and he hated it.

I had no other choice but to change the tense of almost every verb in the narrative, but I left the letters as originally written. All the screen time was very hard on the eyes, but even harder was having to relegate Susanna and Alice to the past. I had so enjoyed being with them in the present for years. I went through separation anxiety, but I got over it and saw that my publisher was right about keeping past events in the past.

Mistake #2: Paginating the Index. Creating an Index was a necessary but horrid task. Time-consuming, boring, hard on the eyes. If I had it to do over again and had the money, I’d pay someone else do it for me. But I did the job. Unfortunately, I assigned page numbers to each entry. How stupid: The original manuscript’s page numbers changed, first in the editing process, then again in the “building” of the book. That’s why the publisher is at first always given an Index with no page numbers; the author adds them once the final edits and proofs are completed. 

I had to go back to the manuscript, number every paragraph of every chapter, then substitute a chapter/paragraph reference for every page number in the Index. For example, “3-8” was the eighth paragraph of Chapter 3. Time-consuming, aggravating, hard on the eyes. But useful, because when the time came to put the page references in the Index, the “Find” function, although very helpful, was imperfect and the chapter/paragraph references helped me locate references “Find” hadn’t found.

Don’t make these mistakes I made. You’ll regret it if you do.

Delivery

All the mistakes and labor are behind me at last, and the book is about to be born. The timing is good: 2022 is the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, and 2023 will be the 100th anniversary of when the Amendment was first written by Alice Paul. It will take several weeks for print and e-books to be available, but if you search Susanna and Alice: Quaker Rebels online, you’ll find the book, me, and Sunbury Press. The book can be ordered from their website. It’s also available on Amazon. I hope readers find it an entertaining, informative, and relative book – a good summer read.