Talking Books

• If you’ll take a look at the PDF packet now, we’ll look quickly at some edits to the first scene of SO TOTALLY EMILY EBERS.
• First draft (labeled #8):  There aren’t a lot of notes here because we don’t do a lot of line-edits on first draft—too much can still change storywise, so it’s not worth putting in the time just yet.
  • Arthur commented on the “pee your pants” paragraph
    • Peeing your pants is intrinsically a little gross, right? And on the very first page of the book, we readers don’t know Emily well enough to go there with her, so it put Arthur off (me too, I admit).
  • I commented on the fact that Dad ought to know who Emily’s best friends are, so if Emily has to tell Dad her best friends’ names, that makes me not believe in Emily’s closeness to her dad.
    • But the point of this book, as we said earlier, is Emily recognizing that her closeness with her dad wasn’t all that real. Thus the reader needs to believe it at the beginning, and I asked Lisa to change this.
    • On the other hand, we needed to establish the girls’ friendship upfront for the reader, since friendship is also an important theme of the book, and so . . . Watch for this sentence in future drafts.
• Second draft (#9):  First, note the changes Lisa made here. She cut the pee your pants paragraph; added the line “I know you can never remember my friends,” then described them; and added the paragraph about the Elmo tape recorder on p. 2.
  • That was a direct result of our discussion about Emily’s relationship with her dad—the Elmo recorder establishes their closeness.
  • On the other hand, the “never remember my friends” line undercuts that closeness, so I asked Lisa to consider dropping it.
• Running down through the other edits on that page:
  • “The only other time a teacher . . .”: Remember what I was saying about topic sentences above? The first scene in a book serves as sort of the topic sentence of that book, as it establishes the narrator, the setting, and the main idea quickly for the reader.
    • Therefore you really want to stay focused in that first scene, especially early on. Here the anecdote about a teacher we don’t know and who will have nothing to do with the action of the book interrupts the establishing process, so I asked Lisa to cut it.
  • “I began bawling so hard . . .”: Basically the same problem as “pee your pants” above; I don’t know and love Emily so much at this point in the book that my fondness for her overcomes my disgust at her telling me about her boogers! Better to cut.
  • “Girls, go directly there!”:  This was a case of misplaced dramatization, as the point of this scene is showing the reader how close A.J. and Nicole and Emily are, and therefore how sad Emily will be to leave them. Given that, Mrs. Spence is important only because she sends the girls out of the room—we don’t need to hear her words directly. Cut.
  • “That makes seven years of best friendness”:  To the explanation on the page, I’ll add that as a paragraph of solid description, this stopped the action dead—not something that should happen in the first scene! So I asked Lisa to establish the girls’ characters through their dialogue rather than their appearances, as the dialogue reinforced the girls’ friendship, thus serving the point of the scene.
  • “When I got home from school”:  This created a transition from the school day to evening at home.
  • “I packed my Elmo tape recorder”:  Again, just moving the important information to the front of the sentence.
• Third draft (#10, back in the Word document):
  • Again, note the changes Lisa made from the previous draft:  Besides the little corrections, she replaced the physical description of the girls with emotional dialogue binding them together (using the Mr. Kinnoin anecdote that had been in that first paragraph), and added the line about the hamster, which flows nicely into their all crying again and “beyond ultimate sadness”
  • So we’ve gotten the content in such strong shape that my edits here are really coming down to individual words and little tiny emotional reactions, as you can see.
  • I suggest running the first two paragraphs together because (1) You don’t want to give readers a place to stop until they’re thoroughly hooked in the book; and (2) ending the paragraph with “teachers aren’t supposed to cry” makes that thought sound really important and pithy, and while it is funny, the emphasis here should not be on the teacher or thoughts about teachers, but on Emily’s sadness at leaving her friends. Putting those two paragraphs together changed the focus of the paragraph to just that.
  • Here I suggested adding “After we stopped laughing” for the same reasons we added “When I got home from school” above:  It created a transition from one setting (or in this case, emotion) to the next.
  • Both “Trembling” and “recalled” sounded out-of-tune with Emily’s slightly dizzy voice, so we cut them both, which with “recalled” necessitated some word juggling to avoid repetition.
  • The “It is beyond ultimate sadness” paragraph:  This was something that the reader could understand by this point without Lisa having to state Emily’s feelings outright, so we didn’t need these three lines.
  • And the last two paragraphs are again just perfect.
• And that is more or less the way it appears in the final printed text, in #11 in the PDF.