16. [Show, don't Tell Page Review] Memoir with Susan McKelvey

In this powerful episode of Show Don’t Tell Writing, Suzy provides live feedback on a page from Susan McKelvey’s memoir. Susan shares the heart-wrenching story of losing her husband and grappling with her new role as the matriarch of her family while coping with hereditary disease in her children and grandchildren. Suzy helps Susan refine her page, offering insights on how to transform deep emotions into compelling storytelling. Together, they explore techniques to create an immersive experience for readers while staying true to Susan's voice. 

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Transcript

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Welcome to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction and nonfiction that will wow your readers, broken down step by step. This show explores writing techniques and shows you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writing careers and coaches writers live on their pages so you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you're just starting out crafting, editing, or currently rewriting your first book or maybe even your 10th, this show will help you unlock the writing skills you didn't know you needed but you definitely do. I'm looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas. From your mind onto the page in an exciting way for both you and your readers so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams while having fun doing it. Let's dive in. I am so excited to welcome to the show today, Susan McKelvey, who has been working on a memoir that is about grief for the husband that she lost. I first met Susan about six months ago. She took a course for me, the developmental editing mentorship. And her spirit and her resilience and all the things, her humor, sense of humor just absolutely amazed me. She brought with her the first draft of her book, which was really uniquely written in second person. And, you know, just, it was stuff that she started to write down when she wanted to yell at her husband or she wanted to get comfort from her husband and he wasn't there. And so it's written in that second person. You voice and it's just so very Susan. I can't wait to have you meet her on this podcast episode. And to talk about this one page that she has brought with her that she knew was such an important moment in the book, and she knew that she was telling. And so she brought it to me to give her some feedback. And yeah, there's a lot of things in that page that are really glossed over that could use a little bit more showing. So here's the page, I'm going to read the page for you and then we're going to meet with Susan and talk about it. So I hope that this helps you with your own writing and really makes it clear to you where you can take things that are really hard or those pages where you just know that they could be better and you're not sure how. Take these examples and see what you can do with your own work. Happy writing. So here's the page that Susan submitted for the Show Don't Tell podcast that we're about to discuss. Chapter 16, the transition. So now I found myself again, my Sue ism, the fun me, the confident me, the one you loved and I was actually proud of. What I realized was that there was a greater part of my healing that I had not yet embraced. I kept it hidden somehow in my sorrow so deep. That it was nowhere in my journey. I stayed at our son's home in Virginia a few weeks ago, and I was in the bedroom that you and I shared together when we visited him. I was lying there and I got overwhelmed in sadness. Suddenly, a residual of tears began to flow. Tears that had been dormant, hiding all this time from the storm of grief, trying to find their way out. Somehow, now, they surrendered. I was shaking, lost in a tsunami of tears that would not stop. I wondered why, after all this time and all my progress in healing, that I was yet again filled with sadness. Then I realized that this last step in my journey with grief was incomplete. I have found me. And transformed into the new version of myself, but I realized that the transition of being matriarch for our whole family alone without you to help me left me terrified and lonely again. With the myotonic dystrophy disease that infested our family, I was frozen in the bed, knowing that I will have to face it all alone. And that was too much to bear. I was so focused on trying to find me that I refused to realize that the dynamic of our beautiful family had changed since you are gone. Everything feels off. It's like the magic is gone. We need each other more than ever, but somehow push each other away. I am the glue, and I struggle without you to make it stick. Like every great family, we are perfectly unperfect. But now I'm the family's sole help, sole guidance. I love them all so much, it's terrifying to know that I must deal with all their worries alone. You manage the family issues so differently. You never got upset, but I, on the other hand, caught up in the chaos. In those moments, I miss you the most of all. Welcome, Susan. I am so excited to see you. Me too. I was so glad to see you again last week because it brought everything back. It got me inspired again over there. Oh, amazing. Did you come to a live session? Is that what you did? Did you come to the retreat? Yes. Both of those, they really help. I mean, I think it's just wonderful that everybody in your groups, inspired writers are positive. Well, and that's part of the reason I do this, right, because it's really easy. We have our own inner critics, right? We have our own little voices in our heads that are going to tell us that we're doing crap. Here's the thing, Susan, I've been doing this a long time and I've worked with thousands of writers. Everybody can do this. I mean, it's work and as you know, it's work, you've done my developmental editing mentorship in the past and you know, that's where you were like, Oh my gosh, it's going to be work. And guess what? You finished. I did. I was very proud of that. It was a lot of work. A lot more than I thought I signed up for. Right. And I think that's, that's something that I do want to talk about here before we dive into your one page is yeah, it is. It's more work than you think, right? Like it's like, Oh, I'm going to write a book and I'm just going to sit down and write a book. And I think the problem is, is people know that it's going to be that much work before, maybe they wouldn't do it. I don't, I don't know. I agree with that because I think I would have rethought it. I'm like, Oh, short story. Yeah, because it could have been a short story. And so when you came to the Developmental Editing Mentorship, you had quite a bit written, but it wasn't a book yet. And you, you didn't really. You know, that was one of the things that you were like, Oh my goodness, how am I going to get it there? And then I saw your email last night as I was preparing for this today. And you were like, I finished. And I, and I was like, okay, well, I needed 160. So I went with 161 pages. Yeah. So I opened it up and I saw that it was 160 pages. And I was like, amazing. It's a memoir. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your book here? Yeah, I did write the whole book as I'm talking to my husband who's deceased kind of like bringing him into the whole thing like, you know, yelling at them, whatever you do when they're dead, you know, when you even when they're alive, you know, and, and I like that because it kept me focused on The us and our story like it was never separating him from me It was like how I feel you're dying and like why are you doing this? Are you you know, help me in that kind of stuff, you know I mean, I think it puts a little more humor and a little more just Camaraderie, like normal dates, how you are with somebody that you, that you love and you're married to for 44 years. Yeah. That's one thing that's hard to teach writers is to put your voice on the page. And that's never been an issue with you, Susan. I just, you know, you've got such an amazing humorous personality and you have such spontaneity and such joie de vivre, right. And it is there on the page. And one of the choices that you did right from early on. Was that a lot of it is written in second person, right? Or first and second person. And that's not very common for a memoir. And so I think it makes it really cool. It allowed you to really have your voice on the page. Well, when I got stuck on this. I was trying to get some more, you know, chapters and figure out where I go, and I'm going to tell you the little story behind it. I was on of my sons who also has this disease. We didn't know my husband had it and that my grandson was born. Finally, we all had all that. But, to long story, I was staying in the room where he and I stayed together. Right. On the idea of being there for my three kids and five grandkids, suddenly I realized that that part of my grief I had not gone through. It was like I was trying to write, here I am, like the matriarch of this family. And I might have watched, possibly my daughter, but my, for sure my son, who's already bad and my grandson die. And like writing that, like when you write something to me, it like becomes a lie. And then it's staring you in the face. I like couldn't write it and I couldn't finish it. And I realized sounds easy, but it isn't. So it took me a while to write it down because once you write it for somehow it comes alive to me, like it's like there and now you can't. You have to face it. Yeah, right. And, and this process can be cathartic. Also, you're going to help so many people through this process of grief by sharing. I hope so. I know that you know that. I know that you know that and that's why you're doing it. So thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing this. Do you, can you just share a little bit, Susan, before we dive into your page, can you share just a little bit about the disease that is hereditary in your family that your husband has? Yeah, I do have a daughter. Very common. Yeah, I do have a chapter. It's a form of muscular dystrophy, which everyone knows about muscular dystrophy. Actually, it's your muscles. And so my husband, he had heart disease, he had diabetes, all the things that this causes, but were never connected to that disease. I mean, they felt he had this, he had that. Oh, he had five heart attacks, he had a quadruple bypass, then he had stents in his bypass, like all these things happened. Them allowing, but he just had the heart disease and that. But then when my grandson, my, my grandson was born, he was actually born dead and intubated. As he got to be like three, four, it takes a while, like genetically they do all these tests, but it takes a while for it to envision what it could be, so they're not just constantly, you know, insurances, they can't just constantly test for like everything in the world, so they have to wait. And then they figured out that he had it. Now, because it comes from, if it comes from the mother, which my daughter has it, they gave it to him. And my son has it, but if it comes from the mother, because it's on the Y chromosome, this is way past my math. Ability, but it's like, it's, they usually die. The boys don't survive. Yeah. And so he has the splints and bless his heart. He got in a trial. Now, my son and my daughter, because it came from their father, not me, they have the adult onset. Now, my daughter just turned 40 and my son is 45. Now he's been having AFib and heart issues. But now that we know he was tested and he has it. Thanks. Yeah, and then that's a whole other piece of grief, and so that's what, yeah, and that's what this page is about. Thank you for sharing that, Susan, and, and, you know, I actually have a first cousin who died at 19 from muscular dystrophy. It is, yeah, my aunt just wrote a memoir on the 10th anniversary of that. She just put her memoir out to help families that are going through this to celebrate, like he had an amazing life. And so, yeah, it's, it's that sort of balance. And you don't really think about it, but like, once I'm dealing with this kind of stuff, I started to write that, that chapter because I realized that I never transitioned my mind into the fact that it's me now. Like there's no, and I'm dealing with this alone and, and it's a lot, you know, and like I said, I tried to write some of the, finally I did put it down on the page cause I'm like, listen, that I can write this. So I did. You can write this. Yes. And I did, but the problem with it even being there is, you know, it puts you back in the funk. Yeah. It puts you back in the funk, but, but processing it and thank you. Thank you for this work. It's amazing. Okay. We're going to dive into this page, Susan, that I read at the beginning of the podcast for you. And. Can you tell us, this is chapter 16, the transition. So is this near the, this is near the end of the book? First of all, this one page is, yeah, it's that transition. And this is the moment that you realized that there was more than just the grief of his death. And this is that moment when you realize it. And you've done some things really well here, Susan. You've grounded us in a moment. So part of what's really hard about memoir is, you know, we're introspective and we kind of like share our thoughts and inner thoughts, which is one thing, but for people to really feel like we're there, you need to bring us into that moment. So you've done that. You've chosen a moment in time, which is when you are actually visiting your son's house. And you're laying in the bed that you used to share with your husband when this grief hits you that he's no longer here, you're the matriarch, all the things that you've just been talking about, which is perfect. So you've done that really, really well. There is some room and I know that this is a first draft and this is why you submitted it, right? There's some room to, there are, there is some room to bring in some more detail to make it even more alive. Right. And I appreciate that because I might have changed a little, but this was just such a hard chapter for me because it was like, it was an awakening for me too. Like, I feel like, oh, I'm grieving and that goes back and forth, but I'm doing better. And then all of this hit me. Like, I never even addressed this at all. Like, I never even. You know, you just don't even put it in your mind. And you want, and you want that, you want your readers to feel all of that. And so, you know, even hearing you talk about it now really helps. Uh, see what it is that you want to convey. So this is, you know, when we go through and you've taken my developmental editing mentorship. So you understand this, but when we go through, we want to know what the emotional impact is of this writing. So it's about more than just grammar and spelling. But like, when I hear you talk about this. I want this to hit your reader just as hard, and there's some things that you can do to sort of get those emotions onto the page that we're going to talk about now. You game? Okay. You ready? Yes. Okay. So the first thing is, before we dive into that, the first thing is here that this is near the end of the book, right? And so even though there's this new wave of grief and there's this sort of revelation, That happens. We actually have been with you on a long journey. We've been through 160 pages or however long it takes in the end. And this is just one page. We don't want to be introducing too many new things. And so sometimes when we write these sort of out of order, or when we write them as a chapter or a thought, we reintroduce things that the reader already knows. So, so I want you to take a look, especially in the introduction here. And know, like, how much of this world will we already know? Because you say, you know, we were in, I was visiting our son. Well, we're gonna know his name, right? It's in the book. Let's get as specific as possible and, because, you know, just give your readers some credit. They've been with you on this journey. They, they don't want you to be vague, right? They don't want you to be vague here. You know, you can refer to these events really specifically and connect these dots together, right? So we don't want to be introducing new topics. We're kind of wrapping things up, even though this is a revelation here. So that part is new, but the rest of it, it feels like a bit of a tease. I'm reading these, you know, the opening lines. When I realized that there was a greater part of my healing, I hadn't embraced, I kept it hidden somehow in my sorrow. So make sure that somewhere, maybe it's right here, that hidden somewhere in my sorrow that I really unpack that you can, you can add another sentence or two about what that feels like in your body so that we can suddenly be there. Right? Like, we're saying I saved my son's home. I stayed in our son's home in Virginia. Right? We've been with you on this journey. Hopefully, you know, we either use his name or change his name. We don't want to just call it my son throughout because it's very impersonal. If you decide not to use his real name, you can change it. Okay. Yeah, that part I had to decide it, but I think I'll use them as long as they're all okay. Yeah, as long as they're okay with it. And, and, you know, in Virginia, but where, right? Like, get specific because hopefully, probably we've already visited their home somewhere in this memoir, right? I'm not sure, to be honest, but in other words, you want me to just get more specific. It feels very generic. And for the last, you know, from the second last chapter in the book, we need to get a little bit deeper. So I'm going to send you all of these notes. You can see where it is. Oh, yes. Thank you. But again, like, give me like, and then the next sentence here, I was lying there and I got overwhelmed. With sadness, right? And, and so lying there around us in that moment, here's where your show to tell techniques need to be in here, right? So give me a detail or two of the bed even. So I made something up here. It's not going to be right because I've never been to your son's bedroom, your son's guest bedroom. But I said, you know, Yeah. That's good to know. I don't think I have. I don't think I have. Um, under the quilt that your mother made for the, you know, like I was lying there under the quilt that your mother made for him, my son, it was warm, but your side of the bed was ice cold, right? Like bring us there, bring us there. Or I, that may not be the right, that's what I've used throughout this about this cold side of the bed. And if that resonates with you, awesome. But if it doesn't think about that, what is it? Perfect. Cause I felt it. Yeah. So, but can you see the difference there between saying I was lying there and telling me where you were lying and bringing me there in the moment, right? And the same thing here in the second part of the sentence, I got overwhelmed with sadness, right? What did this feel? You can show that. Right? Show that overwhelm. I want to feel what we just talked about when we were catching up about what this page was about, why you decided to come on the podcast and why this one, you're so proud of this page because when you were writing it, something happened to you that you want to share, right? You realize in that moment why that was so powerful. We can feel that, but you gotta, you gotta let us in, and that's where Chonotel writing is so powerful, is in these moments. You don't have to do it everywhere in this book, but you've chosen the perfect page, and I think that's probably why you sent it to me. This is the most powerful emotion that you felt, maybe, when you wrote this? I don't know. Well, the first, just the first page where he was dying, those first couple pages were bad, but I got through that so long ago, and I've been kind of like, you know, you get sad to get it out, but this page crippled me. Right, and so thank you for being so brave. Usually when I ask, Writers to send in a page to discuss. It's the one that you know needs more. Yeah, I know it could be a lot better, but I just couldn't get it. Like every time I started writing it, it came alive. And I'm like, how do I do this? It came alive in your brain and how do you share that with your reader? Okay, so we're going to keep going here. So when you get overwhelmed with sadness, there's a lot of ways you're sort of, you're sort of naming an emotion there, right? Which is one of the tells, it's a tell. So what did that feel like in your body? So I, again, I'm going to make something up. It might be totally wrong because I haven't been there in that moment with you, but think about it this way. So I said here. It was as if a dark cloud of sadness settled over me and blankets and that cold space in the bed next to me. Oh, I love that. You're writing that down, right? Oh, yeah, you're getting all of it. But yeah, right. So rather than just tell us that you got overwhelmed with sadness, I want to feel it. I'm sure, you know, I haven't been in your specific moment of grief, but I can imagine that. And so, you know, give us something to hang on to what that feels like. It doesn't have to be anything. It doesn't have to be 10 sentences. It isn't even really that long, right? Well, to be as honest as I can, hearing you say it like puts me in it and knows that it's, it's grasping what I felt, but I was like crippled to write or even able to write because it was powerful in my emotions. Amazing. And as always, Susan, I mean, as an editor, like any suggestions that I make, you are welcome to take, but if they don't quite resonate, it's not about me saying that your story has to be different. It's about me helping you unlock that. So even if it's a different emotion, Or, or that's, or you're like, Susie, that doesn't make sense, but, but, or that isn't the way I felt. Sometimes that's even better when you don't like what I wrote because you're like, Oh, I didn't feel that way. Because it gets me to put the words of how I really feel like, yeah, I get it. Like you, I mean, the, the unlock is what I needed and I knew you were my girl. Yeah. I'm totally your girl for the unlock because really it's, it's, it's, you don't need my permission, but sometimes we need to give ourselves permissions as writers. We don't realize that people care, right? See, I think that's a true statement. Like, we wanna, we wanna say it and then we're like, are we really okay to say it? Like, there's some sort of a permission. Is a reader gonna care? Is a reader gonna care? You know what, this, this page is powerful as it is, but hearing you talk about it and saying that this absolutely crippled you, if, if it could absolutely cripple your reader just for that moment, just for that page, to help them feel that grief and help them see that there's something on the other side, that you're this strong matriarch of the family and all these things and One of the things that happens when we write memoir in particular is at some point you're going to have doubts, right? Because you're portraying yourself in one way and then you're like, uh, But Susie is not always really like that. That's okay. Right. That's okay. Because you're going to have ups and downs, but you're sharing one piece of this journey, which is from feeling lost to, you know, finding the strength to be there for the rest of them. Yes. Right. Okay, so, and, and in that moment, part of Show, Don't Tell writing is about being in your shoes for this, or being in this bed with you. That sounds wrong, doesn't it? No, but it's true. But, but it's true, right? Like being in this moment with you is about really being there. So every single comment here is about, you know, you've got suddenly a residual of tears began to flow. Okay, we're not in your body there. Okay. It's not tears pricked at my eyelids. What does it feel like? Right? Like flip it, flip it. Make sure that you're in your body. Okay. And probably to actually write this, you had to sort of feel like you were outside of your body. So this might be a little bit difficult, right? But, but yeah, the more that you can put us through the hardest emotions through the whole book that I was having, like, I guess I was dealing with it and I wasn't ready to like, look at it. Yeah. From someone else's standpoint to like make them feel it. You know what I mean? I, I totally understand and I, I am so honored that you trust me and this group and the listeners enough to, to share that because yeah, this is, this is the moment there might be other moments that you can gloss over. But if this is so like, every time you talk about this, I get goosebumps, right? Like, this is the moment that you have to bring in that showing to make sure, right? So then, then we've got, I was shaking, lost in this tsunami of tears that would not stop. Again, That's, that's really close, right? The tsunami of tears is an amazing visual, but here you could get an even more specific, right? You could show me a body part rather than I was shaking, which is a tell, um, make it feel less generic, right? My torso was shaking. My teeth were chattering, like put us in your body. I don't know if those are right. I don't know what you mean by that. When you say I was shaking, you know what you meant, right? Do you know what you meant? Yeah, I do. I think I, no, I think I was literally shaking like my legs, my head, like it was almost like a out of body experience that I was. Yeah. So put that, so put that and it's fine. I mean, you got through this whole thing in one page, Susan, one page for all of this. So this is a place where you could absolutely expand because you need us to really get it. And I think it's right at the time of the book where we've gotten through where I'm, you know, I found myself and I'm coping and, you know, all the stuff's in there. Manitonics, just like all the other chapters. And when I got to this one, I, you know, I knew this one was like one of the most important because it's showing that I still had something that I was hiding and never dealing with it. It was more emotional. And stronger than anything I've written. So I really wanted to get it through. And then I made one other Wormwood Dumpton, just kind of like ending it all out about how it all worked. And, you know, I, I needed more pages than I thought it worked. Well, and that's true. I mean, after something like this, like you could have an ending and then we have, what's called the denouement, right. And lots of story mountains now don't have this denouement concept and because it's a hard word. But basically, we want to know what the new status quo is. So if you've got another chapter that sort of says what your new life is and shows you after this transition. That's what I thought. I called it like redemption, like now I'm just redeeming, I'm finding my way through whatever. Yeah, it's kind of like. Now, you know what I mean? It puts you where I've done this and that and I forged through and all that. And it worked. I think I, the only thing that I have most trouble with, because I have to have it that way, I have to have the chapters mesh to each other. You have to have them what? Next to each other? Yeah. You know, no, like mesh in like, I think one has to immediately bring you to the other and you're still there. You know, like I get upset when I read a book and like, and then the new chapter, like, is like, Wait a minute, I was over here and now you put me here. Yeah, you know, you know how to fix that, right? We ground us in the, we ground you, right? Because it's true, as a, as a reader, we trust the writer to take us anywhere in time when there's a chapter break. And if they find that discombobulating, it's bad. Probably because they didn't do the grounding well, um, which is, which is where you share, where are we? Who's head are we in? Who's in the scene? And where are we in time and space? So like, where are we in is setting? And then where are we in time and space relative to the chapter that we just left? Because you're right. We can bring you forward in time. We can bring you backward in time and we can put you on the moon and, and readers will trust you. It's that doorway effect, right? It's like when you're looking for your key. Yes. And then you walk through the doorway and you're like, what was I looking for again? Because you trust that room to reset. Yeah. A new chapter resets your brain. Yeah. And you need that grounding. Even if it was just like, even if it's exactly the same thing, it's like, oh, I'm in a new room now. And then your brain kind of resets. It's like, oh, I'm in a new chapter and you need to feed them that information. So yeah, if you feel, if you read books and you feel like, Like disoriented as you go to a new chapter, they probably haven't done that. So even especially writers often resist this with me. They're like, but Susie, I just left them in the bed in the room. And the next chapter is still in the bed in the room. I'm like, so tell me that because I'm waiting for that information. Okay. So, and on that, yes. And on that, you need to give your reader like some, some credit, right? They they're on the second, last chapter. So here we need to make sure that we need to make sure that it flows. And so here, this next bit here in the middle of the page, I wondered why after all this time and all my progress and healing that I was yet again filled with sadness. So I'm a little bit confused here because at the beginning and the opening here, it kind of feels like this is the first time that you felt grief or like that this was the most grief that you'd felt. And so, and so here you're saying it's again, so I just make sure I haven't read the rest of the book yet. I will at some point, I'm sure, but, you know, at some point, make sure that you're keeping that consistent. So, if this is right back to where you were, or if this is, or if this is larger, sometimes a neat thing to do through a book is if you have something that feels repeated to make sure that there's new information or that it's building. Right. And this is a memoir, so we don't want to like, change the actual story. But if, if what I'm hearing you say is this grief was bigger somehow, yeah, I think feeling wise it was, I mean, when someone dies, well, I think, and I don't know that putting this back, you know, mean anything, but. There was a kind of calming it from my husband suffered so long that there was a little bit of, you know, sanctuary with it. Like, I, as much as I knew I was going to miss him, there was this side that I was no longer watching him suffer and he was in a better place. So that gave me some comfort when I got to this, this was like overwhelming to me because we had our own business. We worked together, we were partners together, lovers together, like it was us. Yeah. Okay. So when I got to this moment, I realized that I have all of this still to deal with and be strong for that's our family, but I'm alone and he's gone. And that kind of like really resonated. I don't know why it didn't resonate so much before, but it just right. It really kind of, I just kind of stopped in my shoes there for a minute. Yeah. So don't gloss over it and say yet again. This is something different. This is something new. It's not the same. It's bigger, right? Yeah, in my feelings. It was way bigger. Hey, I flagged all of the named emotions here for you. And again, it's really hard to see it because you can feel it here. It says I You know, the transition of being the matriarch of our whole family alone without you to help me left me terrified and lonely. What does it feel like in your body? You're naming emotions here and you can feel them, Susan. So if you can feel them when you're writing, share a little more, share a little more here. What does terrified and lonely feel like in your body? And again, we're glossing over it a little bit. I was frozen in the bed knowing that I will have to face it all alone. Show me would be a few specific things that you'll have to face alone to make this real define quote unquote, it all you're glossing over it. I'm going to have to face it all. I'm going to have to face this, that the other thing, you know what those things are list. Yeah. And I did put in there that I will actually, I could actually, and not long from now have to watch our son and grandson die. And that's what I couldn't write there, but I did write it and I knew it had to be there. Okay. Because that was what was bothering me, you know, and I think. Yeah, and I think it is really hard, Susan. And thank you for taking this hard step. And for those of you listening who are also writing memoir, I want to just say that writing a memoir does not give everybody an all access pass into your life. Like, you don't have to share any of this, but the things that you do choose to share. Go a little deeper, share them well, right? You don't have to do any of this and there's certainly things that you can leave out. But if you address them and you say it all or it or something, go a little deeper, right? Because we're not going to get it. I'm not going to get from this what Susan in the bed is actually thinking about because my mind hasn't gone there. I haven't been there. So take a beat, share with us what it is so that we can experience that grief with you and we can support you. I agree. And I think it, I think once I. Write it more more so. I think it, it does help. I mean, it, it is therapeutic to me as well. It's just hard to do. It is hard to do. And you are doing something that is really hard. Writing a book is harder than you could ever imagine, but it is worth it, right? Even this moment that you came to on this page is worth it. And if you can share that with somebody else. And prepare them for that or when this happens to someone else, who's in a similar situation, they can read this and know that they weren't alone. Susan, that is worth it. Oh, I agree. Thank you. No, you've been a great help. Thank you so much. You're so welcome. Okay. So we need each other more about somehow push each other away. Right. So, so here I'm asking again, this is because I haven't read the previous chapters, but have we seen this already? Are there some specifics that you can share here? I mean, this is kind of your wrap up, your ending. So you're pulling together all the threads. So rather than just kind of gloss over it and say, we need each other more than ever, but we're pushing each other away. We need each other more than ever, but this is happening. This is happening like some examples. Right. Okay. And now you're like, okay, I got to buck up. I got to get out of this bed. I got to go back and help. I got to go do this or whatever you're thinking in that moment, just, just be specific, right? And then again, I love them all so much. It's terrifying to know that I must deal with all their worries alone. You manage the family issues so differently. You never got upset, but I, on the other hand, get caught up in the chaos. Okay. So now you're comparing to how he would have dealt with us if he was still the patriarch. Right. And so again, I'd love some specifics. This is so important. You don't have to make it only one page. Okay. So I would love some specifics here because Our minds want, like, our minds will automatically be able to picture that if you do that, if you get more specific. Okay. Okay. So what are the examples? Like, how would you, how are you handling it? I don't know how you're handling it. I didn't read it, but maybe it's in there. Are you quicker to fly off the handle and he would be more patient? Are you, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not judging here or assigning anything. Are you more patient? And he would have flowed off the handle. I don't know. But if you've got some, you know, specifics to tie that to rather than just telling us, That he was, you know, he handled things differently. If you could show us, I would take a paragraph there, right? And then I miss you the most of all. In those moments, I miss you the most of all, really take a beat here. One last place in this submission where I'd love to know how that felt in your body, right? So here you could even tie it back. If you like that cold spot on the bed, if in these moments, the cold from your side of the bed seeps into my skin. See if you can do something that brings us into your body, that shows us, that brings us there. The metaphor that I've created, it sounds like it resonates with you, that cold, that cold side of the bed. I know that's true. Yeah, but if you, if you didn't, you could still, you know, stay true to your story and keep that authentic. Well, my son keeps, my son keeps it cold in there, so I was freezing, so I was definitely part of it shaking. Well, there, maybe that's why you were shaking, Susan. Maybe this is all, no. Um, but, but all of those details are kind of fun to put in there, and it makes it more well rounded. And I know how hard this page must have been to write. It probably took you a long time. Did this take you a long time? Or did it just come out? It just came out. Like I, I went and found, he has his printer down there, so I just got the pages and I just started writing it. But I realized those, there were things I couldn't write, like about realizing that, you know, seeing them die. And it was, it was, it was very, part of it was maybe lethargy, you know, like, I don't know, I just, part of it was healing and getting that last part of me where I didn't deal with that. And I'm, Facing it. Part of it was good because it made me realize that and I don't think I had and that I'm the person and I got a man up and be the person. So, okay, Susan, let me just, let me just back up for a moment. Were you at your son's house having this moment and then you got up and you wrote about it? Yes. Oh my goodness, down. I thought, oh my goodness, I never even saw this. This is like one of the hugest part of my healing. And people need to know that there might be something that they've wr they inside that is really something they've gotta do. And I just grabbed paper from a printer and I wrote it all. Oh, wow. I didn't realize that you wrote this in the moment. I thought that you've revisited it later. Well, I revisited and might have fixed a few words, but of course, of course, but the first draft and that's, that's one of the reasons why that's so raw, right? Is because you, yeah. And, and, you know, I, I would almost put that in here. You don't need to hide that you're writing a book. Well, that's true. Okay. You mean that I had to write this now because I had to go to bed and you wrote it down because, because I think, you know, all of these things, there's a positivity to it too. And like you said, at the beginning of this show, you know, you really want to bring that positivity to this, you know, really heart wrenching experience of life. This is life and death and all the things. And, you know, what are the, what are the next steps and how, how are you dealing with it? Well, one of the things is you're writing this book and you want to share that with other people. Um, so think about that. I mean, you don't have to put the writing of the book in there, but, but if you really, you know, got up and you were cold or whatever. I don't know about you, but I think when I get an idea, if it's the middle of the night, we all write it down. But this I, I wrote like three pages and like, I just kept writing it was like I needed to, and maybe I felt like I was feeling it. I probably held back on some of it. Like I couldn't write that I won't watch them die. And there were certain things because it was so it's a revelation, but, but I think some of my feelings are there because I was in that moment and feeling it as I was writing it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what's next, Susan, because last night as I was preparing and reviewing this and knowing that we were going to be talking today, I was so excited. Susan took a course for me in the spring and my developmental editing mentorship and, and it took her book so far. And I got an email from her last night that said, I finished it. And how did that feel? Awesome. It really does. And I like the way it came through this kind of put the ending and then I had another chapter which kind of brings it together, you know, like, because I feel guilty, like, you know, how wonder how it would be if it was reversed and I was gone. Like, how would you have handled things? I mean, it's just kind of like a bring it all together. And it kind of brings the chapters together. Like I had to cope. One of those coping, you know, I had to deal with this. I went to a medium and you know, it's all I kind of try to bring it all to here. I am now. Yeah. I'm a new me. I've got my Sue ism back, you know, Sue ism. I love it. I love it. And I think, end it saying here's where I am. And I even say, you know, everybody would probably like to think that there's a new person in my life, but this journey wasn't about me finding someone else. It was about me finding me. You know, that's kind of how it ends. Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that. Sue ism. You know, we, we share, we almost share a name. You and I, I'm a Suzanne, but similar by Sue, but I was Susie to my, anybody that grew up with me, my parents, there you go. Well, and that's the thing is I think, you know, most people grew out of the name. I never did. I worked on wall street for a brief time and I went by Suzanne because. If I introduced myself as Susie, they would say, Oh, Susan, it's nice to meet you. They wouldn't call me Susie. Cause it was just felt wrong. Like, and so they wouldn't do it. And so now I finally in a career where Susie, I can just embrace it. And my husband's name is Jamie and we're Susie and Jamie, and we just never grew up, I guess. I don't know. But one day. You're both, you know, Susie and Jamie. I like it. Yeah, and then we named our kids things that couldn't have any nicknames. So I guess don't have nicknames. So it sounds like that was planned, right? It was a little bit planned. We couldn't give them some junior names. Um, so yeah, so I'm excited. So when you say that you're finished, of course, this is the first draft you're going to go back through. That's why this was perfect timing to go back through. You've got this one page to work on. You're going to go back through your draft and find those moments, Susan, like it's the 80, 20 rule for writers, right? It's about not rewriting the whole darn thing, but taking specific moments in time. That are important to the story that are important to your readers experience and just giving them a little bit extra love, right? Just giving them a little bit of extra love. I'm finding those moments where you can, especially I'm seeing a lot of, you know, naming emotions. Look for those look for when you're glossing over something to get a little bit more specific. To ground us in that moment, and you're going to be off to that I was going to ask you, Chris, just to make sure. I, you know, I did the word count and all that stuff, and I'm okay. But the thing about it is, I have 17 chapters, and nowhere did it say, does it matter how many chapters you have? It doesn't matter how many chapters you have. Okay. I wasn't sure. No, it doesn't matter. There's no, there's no, there's no hard and fast rules, in fact, in publishing about how long a chapter is. There are some guidelines. Most people won't give you an answer. I always give you an answer. I would say if your child, you know, if your chapters and it depends, because I think I haven't read the whole thing, but the earlier drafts that I saw of yours, you do have some shorter chapters that are snippets, right? And that's allowed. Now there's some more, well, I added more content to every chapter first, and then I put these on the end knowing I would get my word, my, uh, yeah, my, all my, um, you know, In a sort of most of them have more. There's a couple of them, which only have maybe. Three pages or four. Um, okay. So, so Susan, yeah. So if you were writing like a long form novel, traditionally, a short chapter would be anything under seven pages and a long chapter would be anything over 25. But you're not writing that. You're writing a memoir where you've got sort of some moments in time. And so you can do whatever you want. If you look at like the format, everybody tells me that they want to write a book like Untamed, right? Like Untamed, it's got a whole bunch of one page chapters. There's a few that are less than that. And so yeah, but then it ends up being like 100 chapters. So there are no hard and fast rules. If you kind of want, you know, if you're writing a more traditional style, then you might want to combine some of those and you can use a scene break chapters are relatively arbitrary. The one thing I would say is that the only chapter break that matters is by the end of chapter 3, you kind of want to have yourself on that journey. Right? And so pay attention to that chapter 3 break because psychologically, Your reader, and again, I'm all about the reader's brain, your reader will give you those first three chapters to kind of set them on a journey and also an agent or publisher will kind of give you three chapters to set that tone. So sometimes when I'm working with a writer, especially if you've got. You know, if, if you've got these little snippets that are short chapters, we might want to combine a few of them at least. We're doing like the first three just to show that. I did put some, my husband and I, I always wrote like I was only one. one credit, one class short of a literary degree, but I went to business world like you did, you know, and, and got a real job like my dad thought I should. Okay. Got a real job like my dad thought I should. Absolutely. Sorry, dad. I know you listened to the podcast. Yeah. You know, so, but I wrote a lot of poems and a lot of poems for him. So I did put some of them in there. Like I was doing a remembering like how we met and I put some in there and then in the one where grief was, I put some in that I wrote. That I felt like will, will get people in the moment of how I felt. I hope the way I did it, it's okay, because I said you loved my writing. Remember this one, this was my favorite, and I put them in kind of giving them a basis of like our relationship. Absolutely. Yeah. That sounds amazing. Absolutely. Just, just pay attention to the spacing of them. The one thing I would say is something that writers don't do well all the time. If you look at the whole book and you've only got three poems, right? Don't put them all in the first chapter and then don't have any poems. Like it's kind of a contract. I think I have some in the remembering and then I know I have some in the grief because I wrote grief ones and I had one. You know, just pay attention to how they're spaced so that they're not sort of all in the one half of the book, because that could be a little bit jarring. Well, not overbearing. Even it's just, you have a contract with your reader about what kind of book you're writing and what they can expect. And when you break that contract, it can feel really like jarring. Thank you, Susan. We'll, we'll, uh, ask listeners to go and follow you on social media and follow this journey so that when this book comes out, they'll know where to find you. And we'll drop some links in the show notes. Thank you so much for being on the show. I can't wait to see what you do next and to help you. Okay. Bye. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori. Help me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing. planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. Also visit suzyvidori. com forward slash newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list to stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training. You're feeling brave, check the show notes, and send us a page of your writing that isn't quite where you want it to be yet for our Show Don't Tell page review episodes. Remember, that book you're writing is going to open doors you haven't even thought of yet, and I can't wait to help you make it the absolute best it can be. You're feeling called to write that book? Keep going, and I'll be right here cheering you on. See you again next week!