Debbie Kaufman!

author of

The Doctor's Mission

~ 4 stars from RT!

Debbie Kaufman was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky with the exception of a few early years in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. She now lives in Georgia, giving her a mix of accents that leaves both Northerners and Southerners suspicious of her true origins.

Hooked on reading from a young age, Debbie’s favorite day growing up was the Saturday the local bookmobile came to her neighborhood. Because of the six-book limit at the bookmobile, she also rode her bike on a five-mile round trip to the library on other days just to keep her addiction satisfied. All that reading led to her mother’s famous refrain, “Get your nose out of that book.”

Her mother might have been giving her good advice. Debbie read continually through high school, which accounts for her failure to notice the soon-to-be-famous Margie Lawson wandering the same halls of the hallowed Westport High School. Debbie’s only consolation is that she knows Margie now and that they can both claim to be fellow Warhawks.

These days, Debbie lives in Georgia, writes award-winning stories, and enjoys spending time with her husband, her four children, her grandchildren, and her two dogs. Her first published novel is The Doctor’s Mission, an inspirational historical adventure from Harlequin’s Love Inspired Historical books.

Deep Editing Q & A for Debbie Kaufman

1.  What’s your writing process? Pantser? Plotter?

Both: Really, a bit of both.

I open with a scene I’ve pictured vividly in my mind, write the first couple of chapters to see where it goes, and then sit down to plot it out fully by writing a synopsis. The synopsis really helps me stay on course.  However, I don’t chain myself to what I’ve plotted, I still allow fresh ideas to completely alter the story’s direction.  After all, I can always rewrite a synopsis.

Do you strive to complete a first draft in a certain time frame?

Yes, but I’m not always successful.  I like to do it in 60 days or less, but it seems like there’s always a crisis to attend to that slows the process.  I’m thinking about sneaking away or cutting off all electronic communications for the next book.

How long do you allow to deep edit a complete manuscript?

2. This passage impressed me. My questions for Debbie are below.

“Nana Mala is an evil man who does not know the true God.  When he heard of the healing, he sent for Nana Pastor Joseph and Mammy Ruth.  They went to preach, but Nana Mala just wanted the secret of their magic.  When he did not like their answers, he killed them and took their magic for himself.  This is my fault.”  Hannabo’s eyes looked downward in shame.

Oh my.  This explained a lot about Pastor Mayweather’s calling.   But Hannabo shouldn’t carry the guilt for what another tribesman had done.  She sought to reassure him.  “This is not your fault, Hannabo.  You are not to blame for the actions of others.”

“But Mammy Doctor.  It was my fault.  I was that man.”

“Which man are you talking about?

“The one Nana Joseph healed.  I bragged to many people, especially Nana Mala.”

“Oh, I see.”  Mary masked her surprise.  Hannabo believed he’d experienced a miracle first hand.  She couldn’t tear apart his faith, but she could set him straight on his guilt.

“Hannabo, it was fine to tell others.  The Bible often tells of people who were healed and told many others.  It’s natural.  What’s strange is Nana Mala believing he could get magic from Pastor Mayweather’s aunt and uncle.”

“No, no.  Not strange.  Every bush man knows how to take magic.”

“Okay, so how did he think he could take their magic?”

Hannabo cocked his head to one side and looked at her like she was a simpleton.  Even his tone seemed one of patient explanation to a lesser mind.  “By eating them, of course.”

BLOG GUESTS – I wasn’t prepared for cannibalism. Great twist! :-))

That passage is easy reading, but we know easy reading is often tough to write.

Notice the body language and dialogue cue. A perfect fit for Debbie’s voice and the scene and the characters.

MARGIE ASKED DEBBIE:  This passage flows so well. Was it difficult to write? If so, what made it difficult?

First of all, thanks for bringing up cannibals!  Love Inspired Historical is taking a risk on my exotic setting and on my cannibals.  Not exactly traditional fare for inspirational romance.

Hannabo was a challenge because he is so beyond my world experience.  What do I know about being a bush native who had his worldview turned upside down by outsiders?  The research that I did to understand the missionary’s world only gave me glimpses into Liberia’s natives—sideways glimpses filtered through a white, Western perspective.  A perspective fueled by an often paternalistic approach to evangelism.

Which is exactly what made him so much fun to write!  As writers we get to climb into other people’s heads, try to see things from their perspective.  My imagination really stretched as I tried to flesh him out.  I didn’t want him to be a cardboard sidekick.  So I thought of him first and foremost as a man, any man, who has the same basic human nature as any man would.  Then I tried to write him as such with the worldview of his culture and customs.

Please read this passage out loud. The cadence makes the read more compelling.

Mary drank in the sight before her.  “Oh, Clara. I’ve never seen such beauty.”

Clara stepped in behind her.  “Oh, my.  It’s like something, something…holy.”

A cathedral.  It was like the aisle of a cathedral.  Tall cottonwoods with massive roots able to hide a choir of angels in their folds lined the footpath through the jungle. Light filtered through in random streams that caught the color of orchids adorning the vines, vines winding their colorful blossoms up and around the smaller trees.  Even the animals seemed to respect the solemnity, and little sound penetrated.  For a time Mary walked in awe of the beauty, forgetting how much she’d wanted to be done with this trek.

Ahead, a massive, fallen tree sprawled across the trail like an altar in the distance.  Porters scrambled over its limbs and disappeared from view.  Mary walked on, fascinated.  Clara kept pace behind her.

The heavenly atmosphere held until she drew close enough to see William standing at the blockade in front of her.  An impatient scowl planted firmly on his face.  Jabo waited at his side, smiling in bright contrast.

“Wonder what I did now?”

BLOG GUESTS – Debbie allowed the reader to enjoy the beauty of the jungle, then drew the reader into the next scene. Seamless writing. Well done.

MARGIE TELLS DEBBIE – Love your setting!

Thank you, after cannibals/adventure elements, settings are really my thing.  In everyday life, I am very much attuned to places—especially the feelings they evoke.  There are specific places I could never live just because of the feelings I get while I’m there.

For example, my husband and I once went to look at a house for sale, and I was disturbed from the time I passed through the door way.  It wasn’t haunted, LOL, but by the time I got to the last room my growing discomfort found affirmation in the fist holes in the wall and closet door of the master bedroom.  When I asked around later, my impressions were confirmed.  An abusive relationship had existed in that home and family for some time.

Obviously my jungle isn’t the same situation, but I try to evoke for my readers the intensity of feelings that real settings bring out in me.

Would you like to share how you scene-themed your setting? Was it scene-themed the first time you wrote it?

It was already scene-themed from the get-go.  I knew what had to happen between the H/H before their jungle trek ended at the mission compound, and I had this setting I’d been seeking to place in my story, one firmly in my mind from repeated historical descriptions of trees that lined up like pillars in a temple.  So I pictured it more as a cathedral, especially since we were dealing with missionaries and threw in the downed tree as an altar.

I really wanted to highlight the awe inspired by the beautiful environment before I slapped my poor heroine back to reality with the less than awe-inspiring attitude of the hero. Poor guy.  Too busy trying to control things he couldn’t to enjoy what God had created.

Do you write setting as you go, or layer it in?

I write setting as I go, but despite how vivid it is to me, it takes time.  Strong settings are slow writing for me because they play out in my head and I have to translate them to the page.  Keep in mind, that they do write so fully-formed because I have spent hours in research before I ever wrote them.  I do use a place marking symbol in the draft when I don’t remember a specific plant or item description.  Then I go back and retrieve it from my notes and add it back in.

What is actually hard for me is character description.  I know as a writer that I’m supposed to be observant about people, but I spend more time paying attention to their behaviors and underlying issues than I do on their physical looks or attire. Someone once talked about a long-time neighbor and friend of mine and, in the course of the conversation, commented on how fat my neighbor was.  I realized they were right and tried to conceal my surprise at the idea.  Yes, my neighbor was fat.  I’d just never thought about it before.

This lack of attention gave me problems once I started to write and realized how little I had to draw from to create the physical being of my characters.  I have to actually take time to think about what people look like to create those kind of descriptions.  I usually write their actions and dialogue and go back and layer the physical descriptors into the story.

4.  The excerpt below shows William recovering from Malaria. Hannabo is filling William in on events he missed during his illness.

William felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth.  She was taking charge of his compound?  And the men obeyed her?   Hannabo seemed unaware of his distress and continued to speak.

“Without Mammy Doctor, we could not have continued.  The workers were about to disappear back into the bush but she stopped them.  Because of her powerful medicine they listened.”

William finally found the hinge on his tongue.  “Her medicine?  Do they believe she is a devilman?”

“Of course, how else could she cure the sasswood or a white man of bad shaking sickness?”  Hannabo pressed on.  “Even though I explained it was the Father God, they only know their magic and believe that among the white man, maybe a woman can be a powerful devilman.”

Apprehension grew like a mushroom on the damp jungle floor.

MARGIE ASKED DEBBIE –  You like Hannabo. You write him so well, the reader likes him too. How did you capture this jungle man’s personality and speech patterns so well?

Research, research, research.  Often times missionary journals from Liberia would recount the conversations between themselves and natives.  They kept the Pidgin dialect.  The dialogues were fairly consistent between accounts, making it easy to blend them into Hannabo’s speech.

Was he less developed in the beginning?

As I went through the process of writing him from one scene to the next, he evolved from a simple porter serving up monkey meat to Dr. Mary to a trusted friend and brother in faith who challenged Pastor Mayweather to believe on a much deeper level what he was preaching to Hannabo’s people.  (For the record, Hannabo and his tribal people are not cannibals.)  But this evolving was in my mind as I wrote, not from the revision process.

After you finished the book, and knew Hannabo better, did you go back and add nuances to make this character more distinct, more real?

No, I’ve usually been churning my brain getting to know a character before I write him.  If I haven’t seen them yet, those types of nuances, body language, habits, quirks, usually show up as I’m writing the actual scene.  Characters in general spend so much time in my head before they ever make the leap to the page, that they make me look like it was somewhat effortless.  But it’s not.

Right now, a character is renting space in my brain while she figures out exactly who she is for a future book.  I’ll shamelessly talk about her with my husband from time-to-time while she listens on and gets more clues about who she is.  I started to evict her from her cozy synapses-laden residence to a new home on paper about two months ago, but the writing courts over-ruled me and she’s still a tenant till she more fully forms.

Margie, I have always loved playing with words, which is why, for me, you initially were a bottle of Jim Beam in a dry county.  I thought I might need a twelve-step program for word use. All those lovely rhetorical devices, how could I possibly use them all?

Who knew that imbibing the lecture advice could help me learn to curb my addiction?

Three of the tools you taught me have impacted the way I now use those words.  The English major in me often needs restraint, and your Deep Edits color-coding (EDITS System) helped me see some basic flaws in my writing.  The first manuscript I brought to your workshop at GRW’s Moonlight and Magnolias conference in 2008 ended up with a lot of yellow, the sign of too much internalization.  All that yellow highlighting gave me a visceral response (pink!) when I saw it on the page.

Now, after I write a draft, I especially look for the yellow, or as I put it, the coward’s way out of not working harder to convey things through dialogue (blue).  Yellow was a great color choice for that particular issue, LOL!

I also was drawn to the rhetorical devices, perhaps a little too much at first. (English major strikes again!).  I’ve since learned to use anaphora, asyndeton, backloading, and epistrophe with the judicious discretion that makes them truly powerful.  Every manuscript could benefit from a little rhetorical awareness.

Beyond rhetorical awareness and color-coded editing, I learned to analyze the writing of author’s I loved (English major geek now in state of Nirvana!).  That analysis has definitely impacted my writing.  Now I can more easily pick apart an author’s trademark voice for analysis.  Noticing rhetorical devices, analyzing the balance of internalization to dialogue, description, and visceral response, seeing the use of body language with a character, all of these come a lot more naturally now.  This type of awareness helps me learn from other more experienced authors so that ultimately I can improve my own writing.

You did the Margie Mind Meld, assimilated my deep editing systems and techniques, and used what you learned to enhance your voice and capture power on the page.

KUDOS TO DEBBIE!

BLOG GUESTS:  Debbie earned a most-commited-to-learning award from me.

She attended my full day master class in Birmingham in July -- and sat in the front row all day, with a broken rib.

It only hurt when she breathed.  ;-))

Sandra Elzie drove them from Atlanta to my master class in Birmingham. Sandra and I tried to convince Debbie to leave after lunch. But Debbie refused. She stayed the full day, in pain, then faced the three hour drive back to Atlanta, in more pain.

Again -- Kudos to Debbie!

Blog Guests:  Please post your comments below. You may win a copy of THE DOCTOR'S MISSION!

A winner will be selected Thursday night, 9PM Mountain Time.

See you on the blog!