Twiddle and Tweak with Mark

It will be two years in May since I met Mark S. Williams and we began work on his book. It has been a long and bumpy road but I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. One thing I have learned through all of this is that I am very glad that I write fiction — non-fiction is much more problematic! But we’re getting there.

I know I’ve raved about it before but Mark has written a remarkable book! The plain truth of the matter is some writers — real writers — just have a natural gift. You can learn to write, you can take courses, join groups, get degrees and certifications and you may well wind up a darn fine writer but then a guy like Mark comes along who hasn’t written anything more complex than his daily loran coordinates and writes something as remarkable as this book. You can’t help but think it ain’t fair. What blew me away when I first started working on it was how he structured the book. It opens with a fairly explosive first chapter then goes back in time to his youth working on the docks in Gloucester and carries the reader forward through story after story until you reach the final chapter which is the resolution and conclusion to the first one. He did all that on his own before he met me.

My job has been to edit, refine, clarify. Clarification has been a big job. For all the years he worked as a lobsterman he went through his daily routines without a whole lot of thought to the step-by-step processes involved. Once he began writing he had to go back and re-examine all the steps he took in order to describe them. Once I began reading I would say to him, “Okay, I don’t get this... you say you use the davit here but what the heck is a davit?” He would stare at me for a minute as though finding it hard to believe that anyone could get through their day without using several davits, and then go back to his truck to try to describe a davit.

For the entire first summer of our collaboration we meet several times a week to work on chapter after chapter — I couldn’t believe how many of them there were! I call this process “twiddle and tweak”. You twiddle with the language here to make it flow better, you tweak the description there to make it clear. We met out at Good Harbor Beach a lot. Sometimes we would go to Halibut Point for a couple drinks — our collaboration turned into a social relationship that was good for both of us. We are both solitary creatures by nature and it became both pleasant and difficult to have another person become such a regular part of each other’s lives.

Sometimes I would read a chapter and question whether we should include it. He didn’t like that. Sometimes I would read a chapter and laugh as I read or be dazzled by his ability to so meticulously observe and record the natural world in which he spent his days alone. When I read “Garand Afternoon”, a brutal description of a territorial war between Mark and another fisherman that builds to a deadly climax, I was so shaken I couldn’t sleep that night and wound up writing him a letter at 2 in the morning saying that I would spend as much time and energy as I could to help him get this book to print. It was that remarkable.

Yesterday we were having coffee at Cape Ann Coffee and looking at cover designs for the book. This winter has been long and filled with delays and some conflicts over the legal issues that have to be considered in books like this. Both of us were pretty naive about that, Jane from our Hovey House Writers Group helped tremendously. We live in a nastily litigious world. Even the best of friends, when they smell the money, can turn on each other. We don’t want that to happen. But we are getting close. The beginning of May will hopefully see F/V Black Sheep in print.

Later, I said to Mark that this was getting very real, that he was almost there. He smiled and started his truck and then said in that quiet voice of his, “Yeah, well ... see you tomorrow.”

Thanks for reading.