Our Story

In the spring of 1994 I took a six-week evening class on writing the novel at a community college here in Tulsa. It was a good class. On the last night, the instructor told us that the most important thing we could do now was to find other writers and keep showing each other our pages, because nobody can see their own book. Then she wished us luck and went home, and twenty-two of us stood around in the parking lot not knowing each other's last names.

I put a card on the bulletin board at my branch library. It said: Wanted: people writing books, to read each other's work and be honest about it. Tuesday evenings. Bring coffee. Five people called. Three of them are still here. The library gave us its little meeting room in the back, the one with the long table and the portrait of the man who donated the building, and we have met there every other Tuesday since, from 6:30 until 8:45, because the library closes at nine and the night staff likes to go home.

We named ourselves the Second Draft Society because nobody's first draft is any good, and everybody's real work starts on the second one. It's also a promise. If you're in this group, you finish the first draft. You don't get to polish chapter one for three years. (One of us tried. We were very kind about it, and then we were less kind.)

I'm Jacqueline Bryant. I'm 42, and in the daytime I supervise the billing office at a hospital, which means I spend eight hours a day reading the least interesting prose in America. At night I am on the third draft of a novel about three sisters cleaning out their mother's house. I started it in 1993. I'll finish it. That's what the group is for.

How We Critique

These are the rules. We read them out loud whenever someone new visits, and sometimes just to remind ourselves.

The Six of Us

Jacqueline Bryant — What We Kept, a novel. Three grown sisters have nine days to clear out their late mother's house, and nobody agrees on anything, starting with the Tupperware. Third draft, chapter eleven of nineteen. A piece of chapter four is on the Pages page.

Elma Anselmo — a cozy mystery series. Elma retired in 1997 after thirty years as a school secretary, which she says is the best possible training for a detective, since a school secretary knows who did everything. Her sleuth runs a resale shop in a small Oklahoma town and keeps finding bodies under the donated furniture (very politely; Elma's corpses are always tidy). The first book is finished and the second is half done.

Melinda Benz — a sweet historical romance set during the Land Run of 1889, about a schoolteacher from Ohio and a railroad surveyor who are racing for the same quarter section. No bedroom doors are opened in Melinda's books, but a lot of hands are held, and you would be surprised what she can do with a held hand. She has three children and writes in the car at soccer practice.

Timothy Eoff — Low Water, a young-adult novel. A fifteen-year-old boy spends a drought summer working at his uncle's bait shop on a lake that is slowly disappearing, and finds out why his father left. Tim teaches seventh-grade science. He joined us in 1996 as our youngest member and is still our youngest, though he says he's starting to feel it.

Noah McManus — Voir Dire, a legal thriller. Noah practiced law in Tulsa for thirty-five years, mostly in courtrooms, and retired in 1995 to write the kind of book he used to read on airplanes. His procedure is perfect. His villains are very good. We are working with him on the paragraphs that explain the rules of evidence. A scene from chapter two is on the Pages page.

Nellie Lowrey — The Lease House, a family memoir. Nellie was born in 1921 in a company house on an oil lease east of here, where her father was a tool dresser and her mother ran a boarding table for the drilling crews. She writes it for her great-grandchildren, in longhand, and reads it to us in a voice that makes the whole room go still. Nellie is a founding member and has never once missed a meeting.

News

Coming Up

Tuesday, September 28: Melinda (chapter nine) and Noah (chapter seven).
Tuesday, October 12: Tim and Nellie.
Tuesday, October 26: Elma and me. It's the week before Halloween, so Elma has promised a body.

Can I Join?

We stay at six. Any more and nobody gets to read often enough, and the meeting room only has seven chairs. When somebody moves or stops writing, we'll take the next person on our waiting list, and we're happy to put you on it. Write to me and tell me what you're working on and how far along you are. You must have written something. Wanting to write doesn't count, though we all remember wanting to.

If you're not in Tulsa, or you need a push before you've got pages to show anybody, three of us do the weekly exercise at The Wednesday Prompt, where a retired newspaper copy editor posts one idea every Wednesday morning and you write for twenty minutes by a kitchen timer. Nellie times hers with an egg timer shaped like a chicken. It counts.

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Readers since we put this up in March 1998:


Write to Jacqueline: [email protected]
Last updated September 21, 1999