Jennifer Jordan

I am working on the eighth draft of my memoir manuscript, but there are more drafts than that. This is the eighth draft of the book with its current name. In Google docs, it’s called Life in Flight version VIII (it sounds fancier with Roman numerals).

My manuscript at its root is a mother-daughter story. This go-around, I am revising the structure of the book and refining the voice. I previously had a modular structure that my friend Dana Salvador said wasn’t heightening the suspense in the book the way it could. She told me this a couple of years ago, and I really couldn’t bring myself to revise the book before now.

It’s not like I always do what Dana tells me. I also read through the book and realized she was right. When thinking about telling the story chronologically, I was able to think of new ways to heighten the suspense if I teased apart the two storylines. This is also a big deal because I have been against chronology my whole life. I make things harder than they have to be for sport.

In the first part of the book, and I’ve written about before here and here, it is set during my childhood in the eighties. This will set up the suspense for the second part, which is set during the early childhood of my own children in the mid-aughts.

I have had the damnedest time putting the whole manuscript together. There are a lot of little loose strands in the narrative that I love, and I want to find a way to let them stay while still moving the story forward, but I am definitely cutting, too.

There are other reasons why I haven’t finished this book. There’s the little time I’ve had to be creative since having children and getting a tenure track job. Also mentally, I had to separate myself from the events in the book and reflect more objectively. I definitely experienced that cliche that I had to be further removed from the story in order to tell it.

Yesterday, I re-arranged the structure of the whole book, and I’m thinking about how there are two different childhoods represented in the first two parts of the book, my childhood and my kids’ childhood. The arc of the conflict impacts me the most since I am the protagonist in each, but my character’s agency changes from part to part.

There are also two different parenthoods represented in each part of the book. I am the protagonist when I am a child in the first part and I interact with my mother, and in the second part of the book, I have more agency and choices, but I refuse to let myself feel powerful. I am holding myself back in the narrative, which is true. I often hold myself back out of fear or worry. Or I think and worry about whether I should hold myself back, and then I plow forward clumsily.

My character is hard to write. How do I persuade the reader to believe that I can be objective when I write about my own short-sightedness and tendency toward irrational thoughts? Can I reflect on my previously unreliable narrator with objectivity? Is that even possible? How will the reader believe I’m not just having persona problems?

Drafting my book this time through feels purposeful because I have a plan to revise for structure and voice. My goal is to have a draft ready for querying in the fall. Wish me luck!