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Creating a book is often viewed as if an author were some sort of alchemist transforming the base metals of an idea into the precious golden prose of a book. Let’s take a step back and look at creating a book in a less pretentious way. Creating a book might also be viewed as an exercise in project management.
“There’s a sucker born every minute,” said P.T. Barnum. And this afternoon I found out I was one.
While working on my last post encouraging writers to get their books finished, I came across a website called Is My Book Done?, created by Boston based writer and multimedia developer Brendan Gannon.
The site offers a special tool BookCheck. It explains, “BookCheck is a tool that scans your writing and determines whether it’s done.”
Ridiculous, said I, no software program can make that kind of judgment.
Remember when you were a kid in the backseat of the car on a road trip? How many times did you ask, “Are we there yet?”
Finishing a book can be a lot like that. You finish a manuscript, set it aside for a few days, get some feedback from people you trust, identify some things to revise and make the changes. You’re done. Or maybe not. Authors often second guess themselves. A little more reflection and they think of something else that needs to be tweaked. Revise it one more time. The process turns into a feedback loop that never seems to end.
Novelist John Dos Passos once said, If there is a special hell for writers, it would be the contemplation of their own works.”
I have watched too many writers, especially those completing their first book, going through the agony of trying to decide whether they are finished. Is there a way to help them escape back across the river Styx?
I think so.
A good story, like a good picture, is more striking with a frame.
A memoir or family history is intended to give your life (or at least the stories you’ve chosen to tell about your life) context and meaning. Your stories are usually illustrations of a larger point. But will your readers see your point?
A frame is a device to help your reader see what the point of the story is. By framing a story with a brief introduction and conclusion, you can add levels of meaning that aren’t explicit in the story.
When you set out to write a person’s life story – your own in a memoir, an ancestor’s story in a family history, or a biography – one of the most difficult problems is deciding what to leave out.
Many of us, particularly if we are inexperienced writers, see our principal job as reporting. We try to create a factual chronicle of what happened. All events great and small. That’s legitimate, but it’s not necessarily very dramatic, or interesting.
If we want to engage our readers we need to root around in the facts to discover the stories buried there, because stories create meaning from events.
In science fiction and fantasy, writers refer to it as “world building”. They must create a believable universe that allows a reader to feel as if she were there. But the problem is the same for writers dealing with less fanciful settings.
Strunk and White observed in The Elements of Style, that, “If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on one point it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the reader is to be specific, definite and concrete. The greatest writers…are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter.”
The gathering and organization of biographical details is the initial task of any memoirist or family historian. For a memoirist it’s a matter of recalling the event. For a family historian it’s a matter of researching them. In either case one collects a list of factual events and experiences, usually assembling them into a chronological sequence.
But as William Zinsser wrote in his Introduction to Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography, “Research, however, is only research. After all the facts have been marshaled, all the documents studied, all the locales visited, all the survivors interviewed, what then? What do the facts add up to?”
Writers can use mind maps in two distinctly different ways.
The first is visual brainstorming to trigger creativity and capture ideas. It’s sometimes referred to as clustering. From a central idea you create radials leading to related sub topics. Each subtopic may suggest additional details radiating out from them.
The second way to use mapping is to focus on details.
We’ve explored, in recent posts, some technological tools to help you organize your memoir or family history book project. Today let’s look at a low tech, or even no tech, approach to the organizational process.
Writing a book can be a very complex and daunting task, especially if you have never written one before. You have gathered a mountain of research and jotted down notes on ideas and anecdotes you want in the book. How do you get started and stay organized throughout the process?
The Scrivener software program from Literature and Latte, a small shareware company, may be just the tool to help you do it.
“Just get it down on paper and then we’ll see what we can do with it,” advised the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins who edited Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins believed that the key to a quality book was revision. How could one disagree when one looks at the books his authors produced.
Until you have a draft of your manuscript of your memoir or family history your book is nothing more than an idea and a pile of research. But when the draft is finished you have something with which you can sharpen the ideas and polish the prose until you have a quality book.
When you begin to think about writing a memoir or family history it’s best to do so from two perspectives.
The first is, of course, your own perspective as the book’s author.
But there’s another perspective to consider as well. Who will read your book?
A family history writer is something very different from a family history researcher even if they are embodied in the same person. A researcher ransacks the vital records to discover the facts. A writer goes beyond those facts to find their meaning.
I love tools that make it easier to do things. We just discovered a simple web app that will help you plan and organize your book. It's called Thoughtboxes. The app will allow you to brainstorm ideas and organize them into categories and subcategories. This is exactly what an author does in developing an outline for a book. Let's look at how that might work.
Is there a danger for writers who employ the tools of creative nonfiction?
That’s a question worth some reflection. I have recommended that memoirists and family historians employ the techniques of creative non-fiction in telling their stories. The goal is to help them to bring documentary evidence and historical context to life by using literary tools like details of setting, scene and dialogue. So, should that advice come with a caveat?
We are getting ready for the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree next week at the Los Angeles Marriott Burbank Airport. We hope to see you next week in Burbank.
Why did Lyndon Johnson always seem to be running when he came to work on Capitol Hill?
Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Robert Caro explained the answer to the Second Annual Compleat Biography Conference at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.
Caro, who won the Pulitzer for his 1975 book on Robert Moses and again in 2003 for the third volume of his study of Johnson, Master of the Senate, focused on the importance of setting in biography.
“What, exactly, are good journals?” asked Toby Fulwiler, of the University of Vermont, in his classic guide, The Journal Book.
If you currently keep a writing journal or are thinking of starting one the list of features Fulwiler uses to answer the question is useful to think about.
Call it a journal. Call it a diary. Call it a writer’s notebook. Call it what you will. If you are contemplating or working on a major writing project like a memoir or family history you should keep one.
Who knew that Canadian author Margaret Atwood was a stand up comedian, too? She appeared this year at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference to speak about "The Publishing Pie: An Author's View". Her humor and intelligence make this a wonderful presentation.
The author, Atwood says, is the original source – the one who generates the content that keeps the whole publishing world in motion. Yet authors are getting less of the pie. Ebooks, in particular, make it unsustainable to write as a career. Atwood explores new publishing models and the concerns of the changing marketplace.
Atwood discusses many ideas about the value of stories and books. And, for those of you who have been forced to read too many PowerPoints, she even drew cartoon illustrations for her slide show!