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Stories To Tell is a full service book publishing company for independent authors. We provide editing, design, publishing, and marketing of fiction and non-fiction. We specialize in sophisticated, unique illustrated book design.

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Filtering by Category: The Author’s Craft

5 Ways to Build Drama in Your Family History Book

Biff Barnes

A family history book begins with research. You search for much information about your ancestors as you can. After scouring all of the available sources you accumulate quite a wealth of such information. You have facts from the vital records, letters, journal or diaries your ancestors left behind along with colorful anecdotes and family lore. You want to put all that information together in a book that engages your audience.

Courtesy of Christine Zenino under Creative Commons

Before you begin banging away at the keyboard, take a little advice from playwright David Mamet. He said, “The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned in to watch drama.”

So how do you find the drama in the mountain of information you have gathered? Here are five places to look:

Look for the conflict in your ancestors lives.  Conflict is the heart of drama. What were your ancestors’ goals? What motivated them to strive for those goals? What obstacles did they have to overcome to achieve them? Or, if they were unable to overcome the obstacles, what adjustments did they make in their goals?

My grandfather, originally from upstate New York, was like a series of waves of young men who headed west during the late 19th century. He found his way to Alaska in 1898 in search of a fortune in Yukon gold. Plenty of drama there. But, grandfather didn’t find gold. After a year he headed east on his way home, but stopped in South Dakota where he me my grandmother. Now we’ve added romance.

Relate you ancestors to a larger story. Looking at the time and place where the events in your ancestors lives took place lets you see how what was happening to them was part of a larger story. The time and place can create a dramatic setting for events.

When grandfather met grandmother in 1899, life of the plains was anything was anything but sanguine. The revolt of farmer, who believed they had been exploited by railroads and bankers, had swept across the plains in the mid-90s resulting in the nomination of William Jennings Bryan for president on the Democratic ticket. When the Great Commoner lost to William McKinley in 1896 a lot of people on the plains decided it was time to look for greener pastures in the growing cities or farther west.

Look for turning points. In every person’s life there are points at which the direction things are moving shift and head in a whole new direction. Sometimes that means moving to a new place. The immigrant story where an ancestor decided to leave the old country and come to America is a classic. But deciding to enter a new business or become part of a social or political movement can be equally dramatic. Find these turning points in your ancestors’ stories and build upon the drama inherent in them.

My grandfather and grandmother got married, but they didn’t stay in South Dakota. They headed west, once again following my grandfather’s dream of striking it rich. This time the goal wasn’t as exciting as finding gold, although it did put them on the edge of California’s gold, country where they bought a hog ranch in Roseville, California, not far from the state capitol in Sacramento.

Find the values and themes that run through your ancestors’ stories. In nearly every family’s history there are recurrent themes and values evident in multiple generations. Some of them might include: searching for a better life, confidence that self-reliance will lead to success, dedication to their community and helping others, the importance of religious faith, a belief that education is essential, the entrepreneurial spirit, trust that hard work will be rewarded, confidence that love will help overcome our setbacks, certainty that family is the most important thing. Discovering and emphasizing these themes and values gives meaning to the life stories of your ancestors.

My grandfather never struck it rich. The hog ranch failed when hog cholera swept California’s central valley. He and my grandmother moved to San Francisco and grandfather opened a print shop, pursuing the trade he had learned before he left New York. He did well for a while, but like a lot of small businesses his was wiped out during the Great Depression.

The themes running through his life seemed to be optimism that he would eventually strike it rich, but when he failed he would be resilient and self-reliant enough to reinvent himself. His was a quintessentially western story. Was it dramatic? I have always been struck by the similarities in grandfather’s story to those described by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Wallace Stegner regarding his own family in the novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain.  

Discover the lessons your ancestors’ lives have to teach. One of the questions students often asked when I was teaching history was, “So what?” If I couldn’t provide a good answer, I wasn’t doing my job well. The same thing is true with family history. You need to answer the “So what?” question regarding the lives of your ancestors. What meaning did their experiences have.? Ultimately what any reader is looking for is an insight that will be useful to her. Make sure you make those lessons evident.

In listening to my parents talk about my grandfather I learned two important lessons. First, willingness to take risks can lead to great rewards, but failure can put you and those close to you in difficult circumstances. Second, preparation and hard work is a better formula for success.

By seeking the dramatic elements of the stories of your ancestors you can create the kind of engaging family history book that will appeal to an audience well beyond genealogists.

categories Memoir and Family History Writing Today, The Author’s Craft

Don’t Get in the Way of Your Characters’ Dialogue

Biff Barnes

“Readers tend to skip along through novels,” said Elmore Leonard, “but, they won’t skip dialogue.” That’s particularly true if you write crisp, clipped,rhythmic dialogue like Leonard does in his quirky, hardboiled, crime and suspense novels. Let’s look at some advice from the master on some ways to improve the dialogue you write. Leonard acknowledges the influence of jazz on his own writing and says, “Try to get a rhythm” when writing dialogue. Part of maintaining a rhythm is avoiding anything that interrupts it. Let’s at some easy ways to do that.
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categories The Author’s Craft

Writing a Book: Plan Your Writing Time

Biff Barnes

Life can get in the way of getting your book written. If you are working at a day job and your writing is a spare time project, that spare time may be hard to find. If you have a family to take care of it may be hard to control your schedule to give yourself the time you would like to write. What’s the best way to manage the limited periods of time you have available to get your book written?
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categories The Author’s Craft

Thoughts & Feelings in Writing Biography: Get into Your Subject’s Head

Biff Barnes

Recreating a person’s life is hard, but that exactly what biographers, family historians, and memoirists must do. That begins with a factual skeleton. Research can help you to answer most of the questions posed by the journalist’s 5 Ws: who, what, when, where, why and how. Gathering the accurate details of a person’s life is important, but it’s only the beginning of telling a person’s life story. An engaging account of a person’s life depends on discovering the answers to the last two questions: how and why. Those answers may not be readily apparent in the documentary records. David McCullough, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, knows plenty about how to do that. He advises, “I believe very strongly that the essence of writing is to know your subject…to get beneath the surface.” How do you do that? How can you know what a person now gone was thinking or feeling during their lifetime? That involves some speculation. The question a biographer must deal with is how to speculate within a factual framework. You have to make inferences and deductions from the facts you know to get at your subject’s inner life. Let’s look at the ways two of the leading practitioners of the art do it.
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categories The Author’s Craft

Writing a Nonfiction Book: Lessons from Tom Wolfe

Biff Barnes

If you’re looking for a way to tell your story whether it’s fiction or nonfiction you’d be well advised to look at the lessons offered by Tom Wolfe. His nonfiction, which reached its apogee in The Right Stuff, was a prototype for the so-called “new journalism.” His sharp reporter’s eye worked just as well when he began turning out novels like Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. In his New York Times review of Wolfe’s new novel Back to Blood, novelist Thomas Mallon wrote: Tom Wolfe’s move from the New Journalism to fiction writing, undertaken a quarter-century ago, now seems on a par with Babe Ruth’s shift from the pitcher’s mound to the regular batting order. But from genre to genre, the fundamentals of Wolfe’s game have stayed the same… Let’s look today at the time before Wolfe made the shift from the mound to the batting order, the days when he was changing the way true stories were reported. There are some key lessons there for anyone who wants to write good nonfiction.
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categories The Author’s Craft

Use All the Tools of a Storyteller in Your Nonfiction Book

Biff Barnes

A lot of people think creative nonfiction is an oxymoron. If you are writing a memoir, a family history, reporting on current events or historical ones, you are writing about things that have already happened. Your job is to recount the facts of those events as they happened. You are a reporter. Where’s the creativity in that? It’s in the way you choose to deal with the facts. Think of the way a young child recounts what happened. He presents a list of “This happened…” then “That happened…” statements as if the meaning of the events should then be self-evident. But meaning is really seldom self-evident. It is the role of the writer to turn the accounting of what happened into a narrative which captures the dramatic nature of the past and attempts to interpret its meaning.
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categories The Author’s Craft

Tips on Writing Good Dialogue

Biff Barnes

Well written dialogue in a book does not duplicate the way people really talk. It simulates how a real conversation might sound, but it doesn’t try to recreate one. Have you run across the advice that the way to learn to write dialogue is to listen carefully to people’s random conversations and then to incorporate the elements of what you hear into your dialogue? That’s a good idea because it will help you to reproduce the way speech sounds. Novelist Elmore Leonard, who writes some of the most crisp, witty dialogue around, said, ““I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.” Listening to people talk can help you to get a feel for their rhythms. But don’t try to reproduce the way they actually talk. Real conversation contains a number of things that will kill the dialogue in a book.
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categories The Author’s Craft

Does Some of Your Book Belong on the Cutting Room Floor?

Biff Barnes

I love newspapers, especially the Sunday editions, because you never know what interesting idea or insight you might come across. This weekend San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick La Salle responded to a reader’s question in an exchange in Sunday Chron: Q: Why are so many movies so long these days? A: Very few movies need to be longer than two hours. Directors should make movies, not take hostages. There’s an important lesson for writers in La Salle’s comment. Most first drafts have a lot in them that doesn’t need to be there.
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categories Editors and Editing, The Author’s Craft

Lee Child Tells How to Grab & Hold a Reader’s Attention

Biff Barnes

How do you grab your reader’s attention with the first chapter and hold onto it all the way through your book? Thriller writer Lee Child offered a method in the New York Times Sunday Review this week with an article titled A Simple Way to Create Suspense. “As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer,” said Child. Let’s look at two of my favorite classic movies to see how it works.
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categories The Author’s Craft

4 Ways to Overcome Winter Blues and Get More Writing Done

Biff Barnes

As the skies get grayer and the daylight hours shorter, do you find yourself growing less productive? I know I do, and a surprising number of people I talk to say they do too. So today, let’s see what we can do to turn that slide around with some ideas to help you get energized and get more writing done. First, the change in how we’re feeling really is physical as well as psychological. Whether you call what you are feeling “winter blues’ or go for a more scientific cachet with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) there is plenty of research on the subject. But, let’s focus about what to do about it.
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categories The Author’s Craft

How Your Book's Audience Should Shape Its Content

Biff Barnes

Who is your audience? How should that shape your writing? Too many nonfiction writers think of neither of these questions as they draft their books. Their focus is strictly on what they want to say. The result may be that when their books are completed they fail to connect with readers. Let’s take a look at how thinking about a books audience might influence the type of book an writer might create.
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categories The Author’s Craft

A Plot Is Just a Plot: Great Characters Make a Great Story

Biff Barnes

What makes a book memorable? I think we’d all agree that great characters make great fiction. Unfortunately many writers forget that truism when they are writing what they see as a plot-driven story. I have been reading a number of such manuscripts lately. Usually they are genre fiction – mysteries, thrillers, action adventure and alternate history, but it happens in memoir as well. The authors are caught up in the intricate events of their plot. You can almost hear them asking themselves, “What happened next?”after each plot twist. Often they come up with interesting answers to the question. But when they are finished their story is unsatisfying. The reason is usually the same.
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categories The Author’s Craft

Read Like a Writer

Biff Barnes

We’re getting ready to head for Portland, Oregon for Wordstock literary festival. We’ll be talking with people about writing all weekend. That’s great, but I hope the people we’re talking to are taking advantage of the festival to line up some good reading, because as Stephen King once advised,” If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” So here are some suggestions for you as you plan your reading.
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categories The Author’s Craft

Writing When You Don’t Have Time

Biff Barnes

If you’re not a full time writer, you have probably found that life often gets in the way of finding time to work on your book. Recently a client dropped us a note: 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? We understand. We have some ideas on ways to make productive use of limited writing time.
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categories Planning Your Book’s Contents, The Author’s Craft

Want to Hit the Bestseller List? Write a Memoir

Biff Barnes

It’s not a surprise when anyone points out that we live in “the age of memoirs.” The number of memoirs published increased 400% in four years leading Ben Yagoda in his book Memoir: A History to observe that, “Memoir has become the central form of the culture…” The current list of Hard Cover Bestsellers includes three memoirs among the top 15 titles. Chery Strayed’s Wild, an account of the author’s transformational 1,000 mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail is #4; Olympic soccer team goalkeeper Hope Solo’s book Solo is #12; and Kati Marton recalls her marriages to Peter Jennings and Richard Holbrooke in Paris: A Love Story which is #14. 9 out of the top 25 e-books are memoirs. But what is interesting is that our fascination with memoirs is less recent than we often think.
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categories Memoir and Family History Writing Today, The Author’s Craft

Style for Writers: You Can Look It Up!

Biff Barnes

“Should self-publishing be hyphenated?” I asked. It seemed like a simple question, triggered by a desire to be consistent in the way we handle a word we use a lot here at Stories To Tell. But the discussion it provoked was rather protracted and, I think, an important illustration of something to which writers should pay more attention – consistency of style. We discussed what you see in common usage. Many pieces of published writing have hyphens. But what seems an equal number don’t and that number seems to be growing. We talked about grammar. If you use the word as a verb without a hyphen you are saying to self. That doesn’t make sense. So you should use a hyphen to self-publish to make it grammatically correct. But as an adjective, as used in self published book, would the same thing be true? Of course your grammar checker in Word says it’s not correct. But, I hope everyone knows that’s not always a guarantee of correctness. Finally, we did what we should have done in the first place, we checked the Chicago Manual of Style.
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categories Editors and Editing, The Author’s Craft

Is Your Book Finished? Ask Your Friends…and Your Editor

Biff Barnes

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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categories Editors and Editing, The Author’s Craft

A Lab Journal for Writers

Biff Barnes

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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categories Planning Your Book’s Contents, The Author’s Craft

Your Story in Scenes = Action, Emotion & Drama

Biff Barnes

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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categories Memoir and Family History Writing Today, Planning Your Book’s Contents, The Author’s Craft

Use Theme to Guide Your Story

Biff Barnes

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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categories Planning Your Book’s Contents, The Author’s Craft