Hands On and Off

Hi Everyone,

The hands you see above are my youngest daughter’s hands. I have such love for this photo. I took it more than a decade ago and it remains one of my favourites. I love how her fingers reach and stretch into the warm air from our rented Mexican balcony.

I often think of my mom when I look at my daughter’s hands. They are shaped like my mom’s and she moves them around like my mom did. In my second book, A Year of Days, I wrote about my mother’s hands: “My mother’s hands were elegant, her fingers long and tapered . . . my mother’s hands had music in them . . . my mother’s hands also had medicine in them.”

My hands have words in them, so many words. Sometimes when my fingers get going on a keyboard, I feel like they’re moving on their own without any direction from me. My hands are not shaped like my daughter’s or my mother’s. They aren’t elegant. My fingers are short and stubby. These days, I often think of both my parents when I look at my hands. I have my dad’s hands—they’re wide across the knuckles. But now I see a bit of my mom’s hands in mine too, in the veins that have grown more prominent as the years go by.

The hands in the above photo are by Rodin, as seen in the Rodin Museum in Paris. This is another photo I took years ago that has always stayed with me. I love how these hands emerge out of the marble leaving viewers to imagine the arms still encased within the block. Artists have been fascinated by hands for centuries. Maybe because hands are so expressive of the person within. Or maybe because hands are such intricate structures. Their twenty-seven bones (eight in the wrist, five in the body of the hand, and fourteen in the fingers) make them an artistic challenge. In my first career, I was an x-ray technician. I made radiographic images of many hands. I can still see those bones.

I sometimes watch my hands as they perform the tasks I give them, as they squeeze lemons or grip a golf club. I love bending my fingers into claws and then stretching them out straight, and repeating that exercise several times to ease their aches after a writing session or a golf game.

An occasional amateur artist, I dabble in art. I especially like to draw. Here’s my right hand, as drawn by my left, accompanied by a random tree. I did this one a few years ago and I see now that I made my fingers longer than they really are. Wishful drawing.

Below is a drawing I made of someone else’s hand about ten years ago. I don’t remember when I made it or whose hand it is. It could be my son’s. It looks like his hand, strong and capable. His hands are nothing like mine. He has his father’s hands.

Recently, I did a reading from my new book. It was the first time I’d been in front of a live audience in three years. The evening of readings by local writers was capably organized and hosted by the effervescent Meaghan Hakkinen and the Federation of BC Writers. The event was held in a comfortable well-lit Kelowna cafe filled to capacity (kudos to Meaghan). It had been so long since I’d been at a microphone in front of real people that I’d forgotten how it felt to be on a stage. I’d forgotten how rewarding it is to speak my written words out loud in a room filled with readers. It brings the noise of life to the quiet act of writing.

Planning ahead for a reading is key. What should I read? How much should I read? How should I introduce what I’m reading? And of course, the essential question, what should I wear? I don’t have a picture of me at my most recent reading, but this is me reading at the launch of The Left-Handed Dinner Party in 2017.

Notice that you can’t see my hands.

Why did I wear that weird dress? I don’t know. Perhaps because it was big and baggy and I wanted to be comfortable. I still have that dress, but in a different form. Last winter, after it hung in my closet untouched for the last five years, I thought about getting rid of it. Instead, I cut it into a tunic. You could say that I edited it, shaped it into something better. I like the feeling of cutting fabric. I like the feeling of scissors in my hands.

I’m left-handed, so it’s most comfortable for me to hold papers in that hand when I’m reading to an audience. I prefer to have a podium for my reading material because if there isn’t one, I have to hold a book or a sheaf of papers without support from below.

My left hand has a slight shake. When the audience sees my hand shaking, they may think that I’m nervous. I’m not. I have what is known as “essential tremor.” My left hand shakes when I’m doing something like reading from a book or raising a glass to my mouth. I’m trying to train myself to use my right hand, but my left hand has been the boss of my body for a long time so the training is a slow slog. My doctor says my essential tremor is nothing to be concerned about. It’s benign, possibly genetic, probably won’t turn into anything serious, maybe will disappear, maybe not. Much as we would like life to be definitive and certain, it’s usually not. Life is a wishful drawing; many things fall into the probably, possibly, maybe, or what if categories.

My hands don’t shake when they’re on a keyboard, where they’ve been often lately. It’s that time for me - I’ve been working on the final proofing revisions for She Who Burns, the last time I get to touch my manuscript before it becomes a book. I’ve been waiting a long while for this moment and now that it’s here, I procrastinate. I clean off my desk, make new lists, dust the living room, do anything but sit down and open those files. I want to do it, but I don’t want to do it. What if I don’t like it anymore?

What if is a great question for writers to ask themselves when the novel is taking shape: what if this character met that person? What if that character fell off a mountain? What if someone isn’t who they say they are? That’s what makes the story grow in the development stage. But now, in the final throes of getting it out into the world, what if echoes in my mind in a different way, paralyzing me because the time for major changes is long gone. The creative what if has turned into a dreaded what if. What it it’s bad? So I procrastinate.

Finally I dive in. This editing pass is a labour of restraint. It’s hard not to fiddle with the words I’ve written and re-written, hard not to remove or add commas, hard not to put back the useless adjectives I’ve already taken out and put back in several times. It’s also hard to remember what I changed in the last time around, so I go to the scribbles I made in a small red notebook and try to figure out what I motivated me a few months ago to add or delete a word, chop up a long sentence, or connect two short ones.

Normally, I enjoy the self-editing process. I’d rather work with a messy page full of words that need revising than face the glare of a blank page at the beginning of a new project. But the last chance to touch a work before it goes out into the world is different. During all the previous edits, I was much more relaxed knowing there were more chances to come. Now it’s showtime.

For the first few chapters, I go really slow, afraid to let my eyes pass too quickly over words I know almost by heart. That’s the thing with words I’ve written. They feel like family, like part of me. Some of them have been in those sentences for years now. It’s difficult to cut them. Editing them out now would feel like cruel surgery.

I stall. I send whiny emails to my publisher. I lose myself in reading other books. I go for walks, stomping along my trail. And somehow I find calm again. My rational self returns. I know that my editing team is stellar. I never would have finished this book without the development and substantive guidance of my wonderful friend and fantastic editor, Kimmy Beach (kimmybeachediting.com). Every writer needs an editing angel like Kimmy.

Too many writers back away from the editing process. I don’t know why. Maybe they think they’ll lose authorship or something. Nothing could be further from reality. For my last two books, I was fortunate to experience first-hand the wonderful benefits a good editor can bring to a work (thank you Helen Moffett). We writers are so close to what we’ve created that we can’t see it through non-creator eyes. Even if we are good editors ourselves, and I like to think I am, we still need that informed, honest, professional perspective on our own work. A good writer-editor relationship is not only a joy, it is invaluable.

In the last year, in addition to Kimmy’s guidance, my manuscript has been thoughtfully copyedited and thoroughly proofread by my FriesenPress team. For me to mess around with it now could undo all the good achieved by those processes. During this last pass, these words become my mantra: Don’t mess with it. Just try to read it like you’ve never seen it before.

At the end, I take my hands off the keyboard, reach for the ceiling and stretch my fingers. My hands are tired but happy and not shaking. I close the files and send them back to my publisher, approved. It’s done, completely cooked, ready to go. There are no more what ifs. I know it’s good. I feel it in my bones. After ten years of these characters living in my head, driving me a little bonkers at times, waking me up in the middle of the night, stubbornly hiding from me when I most needed them to reveal themselves, I still adore them and their story. I can’t wait to get my hands on the real book.

Thanks for reading Me Who Writes. If you enjoyed this issue, please share it with a friend.