You have finished the draft of your book. Congratulations! You are ready to have an editor look at it to make sure there are no egregious errors in grammar or usage and to make sure the commas are in the right places. Hold on! Not so fast. You’re missing a critical step in the creation of a successful book: developmental editing.
Think of the developmental edit as a big picture look at your manuscript, a macro edit, if you will. Its purpose is to answer a simple question: Is the manuscript done? The final chapter is written, but are you done? Developmental editing analyzes the clarity, cohesiveness, and effectiveness of your manuscript, with the assumption that you’ll go back to work to improve it. (After that, you’ll really be finished.) You should be open to adding, cutting, changing or moving elements of your manuscript based on what you learn from the feedback you get from both your early readers and then the advice of a more professional editor.
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I remember high school chemistry (not all that fondly, I must admit.) where maintaining an up to date lab journal seemed the whole point of the class. I didn’t get it then, the journal seemed an onerous waste of time. But, now I do. The journal was supposed to produce some thinking about the experiments we were performing. As the great physicist, Max Planck explained, “An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.” A writer often confronts questions about the nature of the world she is creating in a book. As you work on a particular piece of writing you might want to keep your own Lab Journal.
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Wells might have gone on to advise writers of both fiction and nonfiction that exposition and narrative summary are neither.
If you want to tell a compelling story you need to do it with dramatic scenes. If your scene is going to provide both intense action and high emotion the outcome of the situation your scene portrays must alter the plans, hopes or dreams of one of your major characters.
To create the kind of high intensity scenes that will draw your reader into the story you need to begin, as Wells suggests, with conflict. Your character must be pursuing some specific purpose and be confronted with challenges that present obstacles that may seem, at least in the short run, insurmountable.( Let’s face it, if your character achieved her goal in every scene, you wouldn’t have a very long, or interesting story.)
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Are there working men and women in your family tree or in the book you are working on? In honor of Labor Day 2012, let’s look at a couple of excellent places to find out what the experiences of the people you are writing about might have been like. Both offer the kind of social history to add interest and detail to bring family history and historical fiction or nonfiction to life.
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Could you live without your public library?
I couldn’t. Nancy and I visit the Redding Branch of the Shasta Public Libraries once or twice a week. We take out seven or eight books, novels of all kinds from literary to decidedly not, how-to books for household projects (We’re currently putting a pond in our backyard.), and books for research related to our business. We have used the library community room to teach classes on a variety of subjects related to creating books. We check out books on CDs for road trips. Our library has a large family history/genealogy/local history section complete with volunteers to help researchers. All for free! (I know my taxes help pay for it.) I even wrote a post on Why I Celebrate National Library Week last year.
However, all is not well with our libraries. They are quietly becoming casualties of the recession.
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For a self publishing author it’s all about finding an audience for your book. So when you read about the authors who do break through with big sales figures for self published e-books like:
Darcie Chan with 400,000 sales of her novel, The Mill River Recluse
Michael Prescott whose thrillers earned $300,000 in 2011
Amanda Hocking self published e-book sales of paranormal romances led to a $2,000,000 deal with St. Martin’s Press
John Locke who has sold well over a million e-book downloads of his action adventure and westerns
the average author asks what they are doing to achieve such success.
Locke has written an e-book How I Sold 1 Million ebooks in 5 Months to describe his marketing system which he says is “100% workable” for anyone seeking to sell e-books.
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Stories are “…one of the primary sculpting forces of individuals and societies,” says Jonathan Gottschall in his new book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human.
What gives stories their power lies below the surface. There is the surface level involving what the characters do and say as the events of the story’s plot unfolds. But the deeper thematic level that poses the question, “So what?” explores the insights about life and the human condition a reader may draw from what’s happening on the surface. Whether your book is fiction or nonfiction, developing your its theme is at least as important as planning its storyline.
In fiction you may create events to demonstrate a particular lesson to be learned or truth to be understood. Genre fiction often dictates the book’s theme. A mystery must present the quest for justice. A romance must explore the search for true love. But what elevates a book to a more level is the nature of the themes their authors choose to explore.
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In The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews sings, “Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.” That may be good advice for the Von Trapp Family children, but a writer might want to think twice about it.
Many writers tell stories in a perfectly chronological sequence. This happened. Then that happened. Then the next thing happened. This method of telling a story is called linear narrative. Events are presented in the exact sequence in which they occurred. That’s a very effective way to tell some stories.
Sometimes, however, the drama of a story can be heightened by breaking out of strict chronology and employing a nonlinear narrative. I Am Born might have been a fine title for the opening chapter of Dickens’ David Copperfield, but few contemporary readers of fiction or nonfiction will cut an author the slack to begin a book that way. Your book must engage its reader in the first page or two. To do that you need to begin with a dramatic scene. That may mean starting your story at its chronological end or in the middle to begin on the high note you are seeking.
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As we sat around a campfire in the Trinity Alps on the other side of the Central Valley from the worst of the wild fires, Nancy’s nephew, who just graduated from high school mentioned that he had written his senior thesis on The Hero’s Journey. He enthusiastically took us through the great mythologist Joseph Campbell’s description of the universal elements of heroism in his classic, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. As Cam spoke, I wished some of the authors with whom we work were listening.
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I am the lead editor of Stories To Tell Books and a specialist in memoirs and family histories. We also handle fiction and nonfiction, but in memoir and family history a style has arisen called "creative nonfiction" for books grounded in fact and presented using the tools of literature.
These are special books, not only because of the subject matter, but because of the unique way they are designed - usually with photos, and in some family histories, a genealogist may want to include endnotes, charts, appendixes and an index. An illustrated book is a whole different project than text-only. As a book editor and designer, I enjoy producing illustrated books because they are so interesting to look at as well as to read.
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We’re visiting family this week and as things always do the conversation came around to books. My sister-in-law told us about a friend who had recently self published a novel. He chose not to use an editor. Since the book appeared on Amazon he’s gotten a lot of attention from reviewers, all of it negative. Some have focused on points of style that interfered with their reading experience others bemoaned errors that a good copy edit would have picked up and corrected.
The author, like many first time authors, failed to understand that self publishing is about access to publication which eliminates the need for a traditional publishing house, but it doesn’t eliminate all of the steps a publisher fulfilled in the process of producing a book. Quality books need quality editing, good design and an effective cover. Not many authors possess the skills to do all of these things themselves
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Many people who set out to write a memoir or family historian see themselves as reporters. Their duty is to recount things exactly as they happened. What’s important is getting the facts right so that their account is correct. Unfortunately the result is often boring.
Even nonfiction needs drama if it is to appeal to readers. Making sure your story has it means plotting it well. Certainly when one hears the word plotting one thinks of fiction. But in truth plotting is developing a dramatic way of telling any story.
One element of creating a dramatic arc for your memoir or family history is to avoid a rigidly chronological approach. Begin with a dramatic moment in your life or the life of an ancestor to create interest which will draw your reader into the story:
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A recent issue of the International Business Times “Business & Books” section bore the headline, The Latest Publishing Craze: Print Books?
The piece was triggered by a survey released by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) titled Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading . The report sponsored by Barnes & Noble, Baker & Taylor and the Bowker Market Research found that “the percentage of e-book consumers who exclusively or mostly purchase book content in e-book format has decreased from nearly 70 percent in August 2011 to 60 percent in May 2012.” Furthermore, “Over the same period, the percentage of survey respondents who have no preference for either e-book or print formats, or who buy some genres in e-book format and others in print, rose from 25 percent to 34 percent.”
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Stories are serious business. Or maybe not.
The last two New York Times Book Reviews have provided fascinating looks at stories. One serious and one playful.
They combine to demonstrate an important lesson for writers.
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In today’s tumultuous world of publishing more and more authors are seeking new paths into print. With publishing deals with traditional houses great and small becoming ever more illusive for new authors, and stories of self publishing success dancing on the horizon, authors are embracing self publishing in rapidly growing numbers. Unfortunately many of them lack a clear understanding of what self publishing means.
As a consequence many of them are only too happy when an ad for Outskirts Press, Author House or Xlibris pops up Google. Companies willing to help them navigate the world of getting their book into print, onto Amazon and marketed look like just what the doctor ordered. They aren’t.
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Dickens opened his biographical novel, David Copperfield, with the line, “I am born.” That worked in the 19th century, but it’s not the way to get started with a memoir today.
The opening lines of your book must interest and engage your readers or they are likely to put your book down never to pick it up again. A dramatic scene to hook the reader works effectively. It’s a technique you often see in fiction. Think of the mystery genre. The book opens with a murder. The hero – cop, private eye, whatever – comes on the scene with a pressing problem to solve, a killer to catch, and the story is off and running. The reader is immediately engaged and goes along for the ride.
Your memoir probably won’t start off with a murder, but there are plenty of less grisly dramatic moments. Place yourself at a turning point. Let the reader see why it’s a critical, life-changing moment. I am currently working with an author who begins her memoir with the moment when she is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and told she has two years to live. She can choose to accept the diagnosis and prepare to die or seek a more aggressive way of treating the cancer than she had been offered. She chooses the latter, finds a successful treatment and has, for the past fifteen years, been a vocal advocate for people in situations similar to her own.
Here's another excellent question from an author with a book in progress.
April H. wrote: I've been working on a chapter here and there as much as time allows, but in the process of selling my home, a lot of my research materials were minimally packed. I am trying to find a way to make a writing schedule even if it's short. Any thoughts?
April, I know you're not the only one with this problem! Real life has a way of intruding on less-urgent projects. it can make you lose your momentum. It's rare for authors to have the luxury of writing often, whenever they want, without interruption.
Here is the thing about writing in short segments: it may not produce your best work. You can't expect to just jump in and be creative, or to achieve a consistent tone in your prose after being away for too long.
So the best things to do in small chunks are the more mechanical ones that you really can't mess up, like sorting and scanning photos, or putting your research into order. That's all logical work. In the same way, small research projects, meant for filling in an unknown piece of the book, can be tackled when you're not really into the book as a whole.
If you brainstorm and make yourself a list of these pesky short-term tasks on one day, then each time you get a chance to do a short session, you don't have to figure out what to do, and you can cross one more thing off the list.
Ideally, if you are going to do the actual writing, the original creation part of the book, try to do it in longer sessions, say for 2 hours or more. Before you write, read over material you have written before. That way, your tone and style will carry from one session to the next, and the book won't seem choppy.
In my own experience, I have tried it both ways - long term, drawn out writing in short segments, and longer, intense, focused sessions of writing. Focused wins, each time, and not just because I get faster at composing sentences. It's because I start having fun with the project, and the ideas start flowing.
As a consequence, I have found that ultimately it's much easier, despite my busy schedule, to find the time to write in longer sessions, and to get lost in the work. I hope you get a chance to experience that pleasure, sometime soon!
The next time you sit down with your book manuscript think of yourself as a sculptor.
Michelangelo once said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it’s the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Manuscripts are often a lot like that.
First drafts contain a lot that needs to be chipped away to get down to the books essence. Too often writers to cram far more into their manuscript than one good book can possibly contain.
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It’s more years ago than I want to remember. I am standing in the batter’s box of the University of San Francisco baseball field. The pitcher’s next delivery is a curveball which bounces in the dirt. The count goes to three balls and one strike. I step out of the box, look down to the third base coaching box where Coach Dante Benedetti claps his hands and yells to me, “Be selective.”
Good advice to a hitter ahead in the count. Remember you don’t have to hit every pitch. Just look for the right pitch and hit it well. Be selective.
I heard that advice in my head as I read the New York Times Book Review today. I was perusing Elizabeth Samet’s assessment of Hospitals, Hotels and Jails: A Memoir by Anthony Swofford, the author of Jarhead. None too complimentary. It was when I came to Samet’s comment that, “Narrative momentum stalls in a welter of mundane details and contradicting memories,” that I heard Coach Benedetti’s shouted advice.
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What will the $116 million acquisition of Author Solutions by Pearson the parent company of Penguin, one of the “Big Six” publishing houses mean for writers?
“Penguin’s [CEO John] Makinson said that Penguin’s partnership with ASI ‘will fall somewhere between self-publishing as presently defined, and Penguin publishing as presently defined,’” reported Laura Hazard Owen on Paid Content. “He mentioned “curated self-publishing” and imprints drawing on self-published content.”
Author Solutions CEO Kevin Weiss said, “That means more opportunity for authors and more choice for readers.”
Really?
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