The "Ruff, Ruff" Draft

Post date: Apr 3, 2016 6:17:50 PM

Blog Post – The Ruff, Ruff Draft (Progress on my Suckow Chapter)

Whatever else I’ve been, I’ve considered myself a writer for pretty much my entire life. I’ve been writing stories since I was a little girl; I worked on the High School newspaper, wrote copy for a radio show at College, did Public Relations work as a volunteer for a nonprofit, and wrote grants, press releases, and newsletters at one job. At another job, I helped develop materials for teaching teens about sex (please wait! But if you don’t, here is what you need to know to keep safe) including a rather graphic flyer about Sexually Transmitted Infections, a Teen parent manual, and other instructional materials. I also served as a Technical writer for a major Iowa Insurance company, where I learned about Information Mapping and maintained manuals. Another Technical writing job—this time for a small public utility—had me using Information mapping to develop curriculum for electrical workers, and learning more than I ever knew about our Transmission and Distribution system. As a graduate student I did an internship with a social services agency in Ames, where I prepared brochures, press releases, and training materials to help young single moms become self-sufficient.

As a young minister, I wrote sermons, church newsletters, reports, children's Christmas plays, and letters. I also wrote poetry off and on, and kept a journal sporadically. As a Community College teacher, I’ve written lesson plans, prepared power point presentations, written and updated our official course guides, prepared reports and memos and grant applications. I’ve served on Committees and had to prepare agendas, go over minutes, and keep in touch with a number of people and Departments of the college. As the webmaster for the Ruth Suckow website, I’ve worked with my friend and the President of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association, Barbara Lounsberry, and my husband, Mike, who designed the first website. I did an application for the Google Nonprofits program, which gave us a larger web space. We have worked hard to gather documents, organize them in a way that will be helpful to our readers, and we continue to find new treasures to post.

I’ve written a monthly column about some aspect of technology since the spring of 2012: by now, I’ve written at least 43 columns ranging from the value of social media to small businesses to smartphone addiction on the job to how people are using smartphones to shop, look for jobs, and do just about everything else! I’ve been blogging for almost a year on the Geeky Grandma website – and even through surgery managed to post something about once a week, even if it happened to be a top ten list.

One of my major dreams/goals in retirement is to write a trilogy of books based in part on family history: some of my relatives were early settlers of Tama County, and my mother left me a legacy of letters, genealogy notes, pictures, and notes.

With all of the experience in my 60+ years, you would think that writing comes easy to me. However, I am struggling somewhat with the task at hand: I am writing a chapter/essay about Ruth Suckow and her contribution to Midwestern literature, as well as her place as a Regional writer. I have been working on gathering sources since last summer; however, with the busy fall and grading assignments for five classes, I didn’t make as much progress as I had hoped. My proposal was accepted, and I had laid out my basic plan, which I converted into a working outline, and then began the hard work of reading sources, summarizing them and inserting my notes into the outline. I’ve been practicing what I preach to my students!

Another element that has slowed me down is that I am using Endnotes—Chicago style, instead of the more familiar MLA documentation style. Fortunately, Word has its built-in tools and I have my wonderful Handbook by my side. However, working with so many different sources has been a challenge. I’m using three books and a dozen articles at least: some of the articles came from Journals from the 1920s and 1930s, so thank goodness for Google and the many large Universities who have spent their resources scanning in valuable old articles and making them available online.

I have felt like a detective during the earlier part of this project: I had a lot of background information to gather and read to feel competent to write about the topics. I found some gaps in my understanding and stopped to do more research: now, I feel like I have developed a logical flow of ideas, and can see progress, but I thought I would be done by now!

Instead, I have reached the ruff, ruff draft stage. I have 31 pages—about ten thousand words--and 38 end notes, and I am not done citing things, because I got to page 15 and took a break to watch television with Mike last night. But I have inserted notes for all of the sources I had promised to use and am now going back and turning those notes into more coherent prose and citing the sources, doing some rearranging and editing, but working hard to get to a decent rough draft.

After all of these years of coaching my students, being as patient as humanly possible with their “slogging” the way through the drafting and revising process, I am re-discovering that when you write about a complex topic, using a variety of sources, it gets complicated! I worry about all that I have not yet addressed, and even made a list that grew to half a page of the ideas that I have not covered yet. I find myself fretting over word choices: does it sound better to call Suckow a Reluctant Regionalist or a Regionalist Challenger? I worry most that I will impose my own opinions and not reflect the ideas of Suckow or the many scholars I’ve read analyzing her work and words. I want to show respect to her, and to them—all of those folks I’ve read and quoted.

While the combination of recovering from surgery and trying to focus on an important task is itself a challenge, it has been a great way to spend my time and energy while healing up. I curled up in my big lift chair and read through sources and made notes. I drafted ideas on the laptop that Mike had installed remote desktop on, and that was extremely helpful. As I worked, I found myself thinking again about the magic of language, of writing, and how it is like a time machine. I was reading journal articles from the 1920s and 1930s, making notes on stories written in that same era, and reading books written in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of these materials would be long lost without the magic of libraries and the internet—and the help of wonderful librarians like my sweetie and our Hawkeye librarian, Candace.

I’m pushing to get as far as I can before I return to Hawkeye on April 15^th. Once I return, I will face the daunting task of grading four sets of major papers only to get the next batch of major papers and wrap up the semester a few weeks later. So, I will switch “hats” from writer to teacher, even as I continue working on my own manuscript. In the end, however, I am confident that I will find a way to balance slashing 4,000 words with introducing at least a few of those items not yet discussed. I will meet my deadline and then look forward to feedback from the editor, and hopefully, the publication of the book of essays next spring. Then, it will be time to move on to the next project!

Last Updated on April 3, 2016