Persistence is Everything
My 15-year journey of writing a memoir finally leads to publication
When I began to write my memoir nearly 15 years ago, I did not imagine how long it would take, or how much give and take, and revision, would be involved.
I finished a complete draft of Face, A Memoir, in November 2012. Sent it off to my agent thinking I was done. But I was in for a surprise. I had worked for seven years, tinkering, revising, sweating over every verb and noun, not to mention the structure and tone. Buy my agent said, “Why don’t you have a professional editor look it over; there are some repetitive passages, and it’s always good to have another set of eyes on a manuscript.”
How could I refuse? I was an editor and agreed with everything he said. But who? I knew many exceptional editors, but I didn’t want to hire someone who knew me and my work.
I thought of the teachers at Antioch University Los Angeles, where I studied for my MFA in creative writing. I didn’t want to hire anyone I had worked with directly, but there was an adjunct professor in fiction — Christine Hale — whose residency workshops were exceptional. I emailed her: “Do you do developmental editing?”
She said no, but her husband did. Mc McIlvoy is a retired creative writing professor and founder of the Warren…
