"Roundheads and Ramblings"
writing process
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Rachelle Gardner: Posted on Wednesday, May 02, 2012 1:54 PM
Today I discovered a wonderful blog directed at the family members and friends of writers. The advice offered by Rachelle Gardner comes from long years of experience as a literary agent. Here's just a part of what she has to say:
Here are a few “don’ts” for you: • Don’t belittle or demean your writer-in-residence for their dreams. • Don’t assume “success” must be correlated with income. • Don’t ever refer to their writing time as “wasted” and don’t think about how much money they could be making if they spent the time differently. This is who they are. • Don’t say “have you finished that book yet?” Instead, say things like, “did you have a good day of writing?” Support your writer and show you care by doing things that are meaningful to them.
You could do things like: • Help them to create a special writing space inside your home, whether it’s an entire room or just a corner somewhere. • Help them create time for their writing, and encourage all members of the family to respect that time. • Ask them about their writing, or why they like to write, or what their hopes and dreams are for their writing. • Get them little writing-related gifts that show you’re taking them seriously: books about writing, new desk or computer supplies. • Give them a gift certificate for something like a weekend “writing retreat” at a local hotel; or a few days away at a writer’s conference. • Ask them how you can help support their writing.
Most writers are smart, passionate, interesting, driven, and eager to share their words with the world. (And yes, okay, a little moody and possibly bi-polar.) Enjoy the fact that they have depth and ambition, and something to say! And definitely make sure you have your own hobbies, passions and interests. You’re going to need them.
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Posted on Tuesday, April 17, 2012 9:11 AM
Some time ago, I read a blog post that argued for making a distinction between an author and a writer. I haven't been able to find it again, but the main point has stuck with me. I think it went something like this:
"The Writer" works in the present tense. You are a writer if you regularly pick up a pen or turn on your computer and start using words to express your ideas, your dreams, your fantasies, your fears. You are a writer when you put words together to communicate with others. You can write on paper, on a screen, or in your mind. You can be a writer without ever publishing a single piece. You can write a secret diary that will never see the light of day. You' can be a writer of letters, a writer of a blog, a writer of headlines, or a writer of the next great American novel. Genre doesn't matter. Format doesn't matter. What really matters is that you are actively doing the writing.
"The Author", on the other hand, lives in the past tense. An author is someone who was once a writer, and then published what she wrote. Again, the genre doesn't matter; the format doesn't matter. What matters is taking that final step--publishing the written word in an effort to communicate with a reader. You're not an author until you've finished the writing.
Another way to look at the difference is this. Writing is a solitary occupation. Being an author requires a reader to complete your effort. And that's important. I think it was in the same article that a second distinction appeared. A writer can be an introvert. An author must be an extrovert.
I've been thinking about all of this because I'm entering my least favorite part of the writing process. I'm finishing a book manuscript. "The Road to Frogmore" is over 85% finished. Four or five chapters to go, and then will come the editing, the polishing, the design decisions, the pre-publication steps, the launch, and then the marketing of this book I've been harboring in my imagination for the past three years. It can be an exciting time, but . . . introvert that I am, I'd rather be writing.
There's something exciting and inspiring about starting a new book. I love the research, the period of character development, the plot outlining. I'm happy as can be in my little office hideaway, pounding out sentence after sentence, chapter after chapter. I'm eager to know how it all turns out. But when a book is finished, I'm less enamored of the role of author. That means appearances, book signings, advertising, promotional bric-a-brac, reading reviews, and counting sales.
And then comes the real dilemma. Do I ride this book into the sunset? Or do I start a new one? And can I do both? Is there time to promote the books that are finished and explore a new world of colorful characters and intriguing plot twists at the same time? At the moment, I don't know the answer to those questions, and I'm feeling very unsettled.
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Posted on Tuesday, April 03, 2012 10:31 AM
"How's the new book coming? It's a question I'm hearing more and more frequently. It's also the question I have the most trouble answering, which means I probably need to stop and think about the answer. I can always cite the numbers: I've written 41 chapters, as well as 8 short interlocutory sections spoken by a slave woman who watches Laura's progress and comments upon it. Altogether that comes to 97,614 words -- with 9 chapters and 4 more commentaries to go. The finished product should be around 125,000 words or 350 pages. So the book is 80% finished.
So when will it actually be done? That's an entirely different matter. The people who run NaNoWriMo every year would tell you that it is quite possible to write 50,000 words in a month. I could, I suppose, be finished in two weeks. But I'd also like to lead a normal life, so, NO, it probably won't be finished writing until sometime in May. Then will it be finished? of course not. It will still need editing and revising. Actually, my editor is working her magic about two steps behind me. She has finished a careful line edit of the first 89,000 words(37 chapters). But we'll still have some reorganizing and revising to do once the entire book has taken shape.
There are other matters to think about, too.
The "new book" is already titled "The Road to Frogmore," but recently someone pointed out to me that a new reader would have no idea what that meant. If I want to keep the title, it's going to need an explanatory sub-title. But what? The story revolves around the true story of Laura Towne, an abolitionist, a Unitarian, a student of homeopathic medicine in an era in which women doctors were frowned upon, an independent woman who has no intention of marrying just because society thinks she should.
In 1862 Laura traveled to South Carolina as part of an experiment to prove that when slaves were freed they could be taught to become fully productive citizens. Although most of the group returned home after several months, Laura and her closest friend, Ellen Murray, stayed for over forty years. Frogmore was the name of the plantation house they eventually bought and used as their home. The term, "the road to Frogmore," refers to several different facets of their lives: (1) the metaphorical road that chronicles how Laura and Ellen became the founders of a school for freedmen, (2) the literal road leading to Frogmore, which had a reputation among the slaves as being haunted, and (3) the symbol of the kinds of superstition that these two white women had to overcome before they could gain acceptance among the black population of St. Helena Island.
The sub-title needs to identify the heroine and her purpose, and it also must offer a "hook" that will entice a browser to pick up the book and investigate further. "A Novel Based on the Life of Abolitionist Laura M. Towne" might do the job, but I find it dull. Any suggestions?
The book will need an appropriate cover. One of the advantages of being a self-publisher lies in having full control of the images that represent the book. No money-hungry publisher is going to foist an image of a half-clothed maiden onto my story of a mature and self-possessed woman. One of the disadvantages of being a self-publisher is that I have to find the appropriate images for myself. There are some actual photographs of Laura and Ellen, as well as their school and their home at Frogmore, but the foundation that grew out of their school has carefully preserved their copyright of those images. It is possible to purchase permission to use the images for a single use, but they are prohibitively expensive. Right now I'm considering using an oak tree draped in Spanish moss as the central image. The slaves had their own legends that explained the moss as a sign of "Haunting." The problem is that moss is usually gray, which does not make an eye-catching picture. Once again, I need ideas.
I also need to be thinking about a video, bookmarks, postcards, and all the other advertising materials that go into a successful marketing campaign -- just in case I run out of things to do!
As for when you'll be able to lay hands (or eyes) on the book itself, my target release date falls around September 15 to October 1. The absolute deadline, if I want to tie the book to the 150th anniversary of the founding of Laura's school, is November 1st. We'll see!
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Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2012 2:09 PM
An old saying begins: "If I had a nickel for every time I _____________, I'd be rich by now." If I had to fill in that blank, I'd say, "every time someone asked me a question about how to get a book published. . ."
Seriously, it sometimes seems like every person I talk to has a secret ambition to write a book. If you're reading this blog, you are probably one of them. You have family stories to tell, or family recipes, an idea for the perfect murder, an inspirational tale about a friend or neighbor, a collection of photographs, a secret stash of poetry -- something that is so important to you that you want to to turn it into a book. But of course, the very reason you ask how to get started is that the question is too big to be answered.
For a while I tried to provide some guidance on this blog. In one post, I wrote, "Start exploring the advice available on the Internet, keeping in mind that not all sources are equally valuable. If I had to choose one blogger’s advice, I’d go to Dana Lynn Smith’s Savvy Book Marketer site. For general money saving tips, you can’t go wrong using Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s series of “Frugal” web publications."
For the rest, you can find dozens of bloggers and columnists who have made successful careers out of telling others how to use the resources of the Internet to write a book. I decided not to recommend any one over the others, because much depends on your own needs and personality. I subscribed to one promising blog, only to discover that the writer knew less than I did about the Internet and could provide only the most basic bits of advice. Her simplistic remarks sent me pounding on the delete key. Another site turned out to be written so far above me that I felt I was reading a foreign language. My best advice was to sample widely and find a few resources that prove helpful.
 Eventually I realized that if there were ironclad rules for "writing a book," someone would have laid them out a long time ago. Instead, I decided to tell my own story, from the first decision to self-publish to that heady moment when I found myself at the top of one of Amazon's bestseller lists. My choices won't work for everyone. My problems were specific to my own book. But I learned a lot along the way, and I'm happy to pass along any tips that will help you to get started on your own writing project. That's how The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese came to be.
Don't expect to find a heavy volume of unbreakable rules and stuffy grammar. This is a light-hearted anecdotal account of my ups and downs as I learned about the publishing world. I want you to smile while you read it. My little cartoon mice pop up occasionally to remind us all that if you're not having fun at what you're doing, you probably need to do something else. One reviewer commented that she felt like she was chatting with me over a cup of coffee. So if you've ever thought about writing a book, click on over to the Book Launch page and find out how you can get your own paper copy at a reduced price or a Kindle edition for only $0.99. You might even qualify for a prize. Then grab a mug, pull up a chair, and let's talk about self-publishing. |
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Posted on Monday, July 25, 2011 8:38 AM
I'm going to spend several days this week going over tips for doing your own preliminary editing. Not that I'm at the editing stage of the new book yet -- far from it --but maybe if I think about the rules now, I won't have so much work to do in October.
"One of the best things you can do to improve your writing is to just read through all of it and get rid of all the little words that you really don't need."
Now there's a fine, wordy sentence for you. What does it say? How about: "Improve your writing by removing unnecessary words."
Yes, you're right. That's going to reduce your word count, which is why I don't worry too much about wordiness while I'm doing NaNoWriMo exercises. But while reducing your word count, it's also reducing your reader's irritation, and that's a good thing.
Here's a list of little words you don't need:
SO (as in "I was so glad to see him.") There's an exception here: "so" is acceptable only when it is followed by a "that" -- as in "She was SO short THAT she only saw people from the waist down."
VERY (as in "I was very, very tired.")
THAT (as in ("I thought that I should leave." )
ALTHOUGH ("Although, I'm not sure I should."")
YET ("She hasn't arrived yet.")
RATHER ("It seemed rather rude.")
JUST ("I was just waiting for an excuse to leave.")
NEARLY ("I was nearly exhausted.")
EVEN ("Even the other guests were bored.")
SORT OF ("The milk was sort of soured.")
ALMOST ("The roast beef was almost burned.")
IN SPITE OF ("I was irritated in spite of myself.")
PERHAPS ("I could, perhaps, take a nap.")
QUITE ("I was quite tempted to do it.")
FOR A MOMENT ("I hesitated for a moment.")
THEN ("Then I walked out.")
SUDDENLY ("Suddenly I stopped.")
I copied the list from another blogger several years ago, and I've used it ever since. Once your manuscript is complete, go to the "find and replace" function in your word processor, and scan the whole manuscript for each word. That means you'll go through the whole manuscript about 18 times, but you'll be surprised at how many other errors you'll spot along the way.
Every time you find one of the words on the list, ask yourself if the meaning of the sentence changes when you take the word out. If it doesn't, drop it. Now granted, the sentences above sound a bit choppy once the "little words" are gone, but you can always add a more inventive phrase when you need to.
One final caveat: Don't just do a blind "find and remove." You have to look at each instance and make a conscious decision. The word "that," for example, is necessary in many places. (This one is spoiled; THAT one is not.)
And sometimes these words make an important point about your character. If she always states her opinion by prefacing it with "perhaps," we realize she is unsure of herself. In her conversation, leave it in. In your narrative, take it out.
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