Some writers absorb the books they read into their own craft. It is instinctive and subconscious on their part. As gifted artists, they take the given into the workings of their own creativity. They are not fully aware of how books are put together or at least cannot verbalize their knowledge.
Other writers are keenly conscious of the form books take and how the writers of those books attained that form.
Most writers, (whether of fiction or nonfiction) however, would do well to become more conscious of literary form. It shouldn’t hurt their creativity for them to step away from their writing of a novel, for instance, and examine other similar novels. How are they structured? How long are they? How are the plots constructed? How is dialogue handled?
This kind of analysis is a must for writers of genre fiction: mysteries, thrillers, horror novels, science fiction, etc. Why? Because these novels follow strict formulas in terms of style, length, and even plot. The best genre fiction writers learn to follow the formulas while bringing a unique voice to bear.
Writers should also research the publishing history of the type of books they wish to write. How have they been published? As hardcover or quality paperback originals? By which publishers? Were they reprinted and sold as mass market paperbacks? By which publishers?
So before you put pen to paper again, pick up your favourite novel or nonfiction book and try to figure out just what is so likeable about it. Remember, you should be absorbing books that absorb you!
DB
Are you using social media the wrong way?
In addition to our usual focus on writing tips and publishing, we'll also be chiming in every so often with our musings and tips about online book marketing. This short post will get the ball rolling.
Whether you're a published author, or an aspiring one, you'll be aware that social media platforms have taken on a huge role when it comes to marketing books online.
My guess is that you've already come to the conclusion that it is necessary to develop your online presence using social media. But if you're already active on social media platforms, there's an important to ask yourself: Am I using them the right way?
I came across this great video recently, and I thought it worthy of a mention on the blog. It's a very short interview with online marketing guru Chris Brogan, in which he offers some great tips on how authors can use social media effectively. Hint: two-way communication!
I have worked on so many non-fiction books that I sometimes feel like a family doctor who has cared for so many patients he can diagnose a problem almost before it hoists itself up onto his examining table. Here are seven problems that I often encounter as I read manuscripts.
The manuscript is just not good enough.
Okay, so this is a little obvious, but often a manuscript, though it may cover an important topic and do so exhaustively (and not necessarily exhaustingly), is poorly constructed, at both the sentence-by-sentence and structural levels. Sometimes I actually say out loud, in an aggrieved Kramer-like tone, “Why don’t you just tell me what you mean?”
You can “control” for this by showing your work to tough-minded and frank-tongued readers. If they can’t say back to you what you’re writing …
The manuscript lacks a clear beginning, middle, and ending (or, like speeches you have probably suffered through, it has more than one beginning or ending).
Beginnings are particularly tricky. Writers often “start over” several times at the beginning of their manuscript because they feel the need to get a proper run at their subject. Sometimes they are unconsciously searching for a premise on which to base the writing.
You can strengthen your writing on this point by developing an “elevator speech”: an utterance of four or five sentences describing your book. I can imagine, Tony Horwitz, the writer of A Voyage Long and Strange: A Rediscovery of the New World, describing his book to someone this way: “When I was finally able to look at Plymouth Rock, two things struck me. First, that it looked more like a pebble, and second, that we wrong to fixate on the Pilgrim Fathers as being the real discoverers and founders of America. Several nations had boots on the ground and oars in the water across the continent before and during the settlement of the New England colonies. My book looks at the America those explorers knew.”
His book has a strong beginning (it sets the premise and promise, defines its audience, and clearly indicates what’s to follow and the value of it), a strong middle (each chapter deals with a different nation’s discovery), and a conclusion that rounds it all off.
Simple, simple, simple (but not easy).
The manuscript is unclear concerning its audience.
Establishing an audience is another early-in-the-manuscript challenge. Writers not only search for a premise early in their writing, they also search for their readers. A piece of writing should clearly identify a main audience and speak to it at all times.
You may find it helpful to imagine the reader asking, “What’s in it for me?” This will help you establish your premise and promise … and who the “me” is: your audience.
The manuscript is written at the wrong reading level for its audience.
Some manuscripts have a clear audience, but the writing is either too elementary or too complex for that audience. “Know thy audience” is almost important an injunction as “know thyself.”
The manuscript is boring.
Here’s where I make a distinction between the logic of the content and the logic of the reader. Sometimes a writer’s expertise comes across as boring because it fits the logic of the content but not in a way that is logical for readers. For example, a writer exulting in a topic may not have established for the reader why the topic is significant and why it would be well worth the reader’s time to read what she has to say about it.
You may be able to fix this problem by making sure you have erected adequate “signage” for the reader. It’s amazing how much better a trip goes when you have a sense of where you’re going, why you’re going there, and what delights await you once you’ve arrived.
The argument is unclear or lacks concreteness.
The words “for example” are the abracadabra of good writing.
The manuscript is repetitive.
Authorial anxiety can create bloated word counts. My suggestion is that you look at the second time you say something to see if it is better constructed than the first time you say it. Often the second statement is the result of the author’s subconscious realization that something needs to be said more clearly.
A key difference between writing and speeches may be of use here. Speeches need to be somewhat repetitive (though artfully so) because the audience includes people who “get” things at different speeds. In fact speeches make a virtue out of repetition, using such rhetorical flourishes as: “I’m not here to tell you xxxxxxx. And I’m not here to tell you yyyyyyy. I’m here to tell you zzzzzzz.”
Writing shouldn’t be repetitive; slower readers can always go back and read something again. Let them do the repeating for you.
DB
"Easy reading is damn hard writing."We had Christmas late this year – a few weeks into January – because right around Christmastime two of our children flew off to London, England, and two to Winnipeg, and then my wife and I also visited London.
And so it came to pass that I received from my daughter this month the fourth volume of The Paris Review Interviews (New York: Picador). A wonderful gift!
You may remember from a previous post that I like to mine these interviews for their insights on writing and editing. Following are two quotes from this volume. Both speak of the difficulty of writing.
The last writer I would think of as “out of control” is the essayist E.B. White, yet here is what he says about the experience of writing:
When I start to write, my mind is apt to race, like a clock from which the pendulum has been removed. I simply can’t keep up, with pen or typewriter, and this causes me to break apart. I think there are writers whose thoughts flow in a smooth and orderly fashion, and they can transcribe them on paper without undue emotion or without getting too far behind. I envy them. When you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under a great strain. Writers care greatly how a thing is said – it makes all the difference. So they are constantly faced with too many choices and must make too many decisions.
I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn’t know where else to go.
Maya Angelou speaks of an unusual writing discipline:
I have kept a hotel room in every town I’ve ever lived in. I rent a hotel room for a few months, leave my home at six, and try to be at work by six-thirty. To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses. I never allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there. I stay until twelve-thirty or one-thirty in the afternoon, and then I go home and try to breathe; I look at the work around five; I have an orderly dinner – proper, quite, lovely dinner; then I go back to work the next morning.
After quoting Nathaniel Hawthorne’s statement, “Easy reading is damn hard writing,” she says of critics who call her a “natural writer”:
Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language. On an evening like this, looking out at the auditorium, if I had to write this evening from my point of view, I’d see the rust-red used worn velvet seats and the lightness where people’s backs have rubbed against the back of the seat so that it’s a light orange, then the beautiful colors of the people’s faces, the white, pink-white, beige-white, light beige and brown and tan – I would have to look at all of that, at all those faces and the way they sit on top of their necks. When I would end up writing after four hours or five hours in my room, it might sound like, It was a rat that sat on a mat. That’s that. Not a cat. But I would continue to play with it and pull at it and say, I love you. Come to me I love you. It might take me two or three weeks just to describe what I’m seeing now.
And all this isn’t to speak of the hours writers spend with editors to bring their work to an even greater pitch of perfection. Most people simply don’t realize just how much work is involved in writing and publishing a book.
This reminds me of the joke in which a brain surgeon says to a writer at a cocktail party, “You’re a writer, you say? I’m thinking of becoming a writer when I retire.” To which the writer says, “That’s interesting, because I’m thinking of becoming a brain surgeon when I retire.”
DB
Get your "elevator pitch" right with a successful blurb.I sometimes advise authors to write their own blurb about their book in progress, to see if that helps them focus on what I call their book’s premise and promise, whence they can build a clearer structure overall. (This also helps them, and me, to come up with a description of the book for my own publishing list or other potential publishers.)
It may help you to take this exercise yourself.
By “blurb” I mean a condensed, concise, and compelling description of your book, á la a book advertisement, a book publisher’s description, or a review comment.
I am in England right now and so will consult my stack of book-review pages from several newspapers to see if I can find some examples.
Here’s one from the Sunday Times. In this case it’s the paper’s own lead-in description in its review of the book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World:
The American obsession with putting a positive spin on almost everything has had an extraordinarily negative effect on the nation, as this entertaining study of the happy industry shows.
The lead-in line for a review of Nazi Literature in the Americas reads:
Robert Bolano’s light-hearted work is not quite a novel, more of a spoof encyclopedia of imaginary fascists and their worthless literary endeavours.
I have a couple of issues of the book review section of the New York Times with me, too. Let’s see what it yields.
An advertisement of the book The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld leads off with the words:
The powerful true story of three brothers who took on the mob and became counterculture icons.
Some words excerpted from Kirkus Reviews are quoted and give further information:
Riveting, richly atmospheric pulp nonfiction … prose as tight and hard-boiled as any James Ellroy novel … a novelistic study of an iconoclastic criminal in revolutionary times.
I’m not suggesting that the author of such a manuscript say to those who ask what they’re working on (or put this in their book proposal to a publisher): My book is riveting and richly atmospheric. It is as hard-boiled as any James Ellroy novel…”
However, saying that it is a dramatic true story of three brothers who took on the mob and became counterculture icons and so forth is a clear way of describing the book and bears clues regarding how a book could be constructed. Note also how the subtitle of this book describes exactly what the book is about.
A full-page advertisement of the book Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortenson bears the words:
In Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson showed how to change the way we think about this volatile region of the world. Now, in Stones into Schools, he takes the next step, revealing how to promote peace there – stone by stone, school by school, one child at a time.
That’s an example of good publishing and good writing.
Consider a few descriptions of book from the best sellers list:
The nonfiction book A Lion Called Christian by Anthony Bourke and John Rendall is described thus:
Two men buy a pet lion cub in London, bring him to Africa when he is grown, and later have a heartwarming reunion; update of a 1971 book.
A short review of The Fleet Street Murders begins this way:
Charles Lenox, the amateur detective … is finally given the chance to pursue his dream of becoming a member of Parliament. But the hastily called election in far-off Stirrington comes at a most inopportune moment, just as this amiable gentleman sleuth … has involved himself in the baffling murders of two politically adversarial Fleet Street journalists.
I suppose a book blurb is analogous to the elevator speech in business: the statement of your program proposal or business pitch condensed into a compelling statement that can be made to an executive in the time it takes you to travel together from the ground floor to your office floor.
So spend some time working your manuscript into a short blurb. You may be unable to come up with a compelling statement, and this may indicate the need for a radical rethinking of what you’re doing. However, this exercise is likely to help you clarify for yourself, and for your prospective readers, just what you’re up to when you’re absent from society performing that most solitary of tasks: writing.
DB
"The finest available inquiry into the 'how' of literature."
-- Salman Rushdie
In my last post I mentioned that two of the best ways to improve your writing skills are to study good books (more on that in my next post), and to read books that discuss writing.
I shared some inspiring quotes from the The Paris Review Interviews, a collection of conversations with some of the world's foremost writers. Described by Salman Rushdie as “the finest
available inquiry into the ‘how’ of literature,” this series is an invaluable resource for authors of all stripes.
Without further ado, here are some more words of literary wisdom from The Paris Review Interviews:
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone.”
- Stephen King: “When I sit down to write, my job is to move the story. If there is such a thing as pace in writing, and if people read me because they’re getting a story that’s paced a certain way, it’s because they sense I want to get to where I’m going. I don’t want to dawdle around and look at the scenery.”
- Joan Didion: “When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to back to page one again and start rewriting. At the end of the day, I mark up the pages I’ve done – pages or page – all the way back to page one. I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past that blank terror.”
DB
Becoming a skilled writer is no picnic
If you would like to hone your writing skills but lack the funds or time to get a bachelor’s or master’s degree in creative writing, you can “correct” for this by attending writers conferences or workshops. Even less expensive and more convenient are the two methods I describe below. They’re cheap because you can do them without having to leave your house.
1. One of the methods is to study good books. To do this you’ll have to change the way you read. Instead of reading for enjoyment or information, read for reading: Examine the way writers put together sentences, paragraphs, essays, stories, whole books. How they handle dialogue. How they keep things moving. Instead of just tucking gratefully into the sausage, pluck up your courage and examine how it was made.
2. The other is to read books that discuss writing. My favorites (partly for the wonderful series design of the covers and text) are The Paris Review Interviews, published in four volumes by Picador.
Here is a smattering of the advice to be found in these books:
- Asked whether he knew of devices for improving technique, Truman Capote says: “Work is the only device I know of. Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Even Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman: he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners. Too many writers seem to consider the writing of short stories as a kind of finger exercise. Well, in such cases, it is certainly only their fingers they are exercising.”
- Martin Amis: “Plots really matter only in thrillers. In mainstream writing the plot is – what is it? A hook. The reader is going to wonder how things turn out. In this respect, Money was a much more difficult book to write than London Fields because it is essentially a plotless novel. It is what I would call a voice novel. If the voice doesn’t work you’re screwed … I was fairly confident that … this idea of a woman arranging her own murder pricked the curiosity. So although nothing much happens in five hundred pages, people are still going to want to know how it ends.”
- Eudora Welty: “When I read, I hear what’s on the page. I don’t know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me … I see everything I write, but I have to hear the words when they’re put down.”
- John Gardner: “To establish powerful characters, a writer needs a landscape … Setting is also a powerful vehicle of thematic concerns … You choose the setting that suits and illuminates your material.”
That's all I'll give you for now, but fear not, in my next post I'll be sharing some more inspirational quotes from The Paris Review Interviews.
DB
"That's it, I've had enough!" Kevin bellowed angrily.
Fiction writers are often anxious that their readers will not see what they want them to see. This anxiety can be creative, but it can also be destructive: It can cause them to actually block readers from seeing what they’re describing.
One way writers do this is by avoiding the perfectly good and simple dialogue tags of he said, she replied, he answered for the seemingly more descriptive tags of she offered, he barked, she effused.
Why is this a problem? Because these more exotic dialogue tags TELL readers what they should be seeing, instead of letting the writing SHOW them. Just when a poor reader is imagining the action, he or she is interrupted by the author’s attempt to make sure they are imagining the action.
Which would be more enjoyable: basking in the radiance of a Rembrandt painting or trying to see it through a thicket of yellow stickies telling you what to see?
A sentence I recently edited had “his teacher interjected” as a dialogue tag. That interrupted my view of what was happening, which was clear because the student was mid-sentence when the teacher responded. The interjection was actually obscured because the author interjected the word interjection to make sure I saw that the teacher was interjecting. You get the idea.
Some writers go one step further and add an adverb to the dialogue tag. They not only have the teacher interject, they also have the teacher interject rudely or suddenly or peevishly. In good writing, the description of the teacher is implicit in what is actually happening: It exists between the lines.
Speaking of which, isn’t it true that the best reading experiences are the ones in which you’re not aware that you’re reading? When this happens, you’re reading between the lines.
I remember having this experience when I was in high school. It was late afternoon and I was lying on the couch in our living room deep into John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I had just read a scene describing a rare and sumptuous meal that the nomadic Joad family had been able to scare up when my mother called me for dinner. I was disoriented, because, in effect, I had already eaten.
Some further thoughts on adverbs (and adjectives, too, it turns out):
The French novelist Georges Simenon was asked in a Paris Review interview to describe how he revised his manuscripts. Here’s how he responded:
GEORGES SIMENON
Just one piece of general advice from a writer has been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short stories for
Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and again. Finally she said, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice. It’s what I do when I write, the main job when I rewrite.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by “too literary”? What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?
SIMENON
Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence – cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.
DB
Submitting a manuscript to a publisher?
First take a close look at what's already in bookstores
You're writing a non-fiction book proposal or may be writing the actual book. Here are four questions to ask before you send your work to a publisher. (Hint: These are some of the questions publishing house editors ask when they consider proposals and manuscripts.)
First, is my manuscript well written? (Related questions are: Is it as good as or better than other books of its type/subject matter? Is it accurate, factually? Is it viable, legally?)
It is very difficult to determine whether the quality of your own writing is good or bad. I suggest that you visit a bookstore and take a hard look at books similar in style and audience to your own. Analyze the books. Then imagine picking up your hyopthetical book. How does it measure up? For example, have you gone to the same effort as the other authors in documenting your facts? Is the “journey of reading” as clear in your book as in the bookstore books? What does your book promise to readers? Does it deliver on that promise as well as the books in the bookstore?
Second, is my manuscript written for readers?
That may seem a silly question. However, it's worth considering a distinction between the logic of the material and the logic of the reader. Experts sometimes write books that make sense in terms of their discipline, but not in terms of what readers need or want to know – and when they need to know it.
For instance, a book may spend two chapters dealing with definitions and distinctions that the author feels readers must know before they read the rest of the book. Readers, however, want to know what the issue is before they will consent to going on a journey with the author through those important definitions and distinctions. That's why most of the editorial work on manuscripts focuses on the way they begin. If readers ask themselves, "Why am I reading this?" then the author and editor have failed.
Third, who are my readers?
There are two reasons for asking this question. First, a book lacks unity as a book if it is does not address a clearly defined audience. And second, books are typically destined for sections within a bookstore. Non-fiction books aren't just books. They're political books, how-to books, biographies, autobiographies, etc. Your book may be well written, but if it doesn't fit the type of books the publisher wants (i.e., the sections of the bookstore that they sell to), it's a non-starter.
Fourth, what is my “author's platform”?
Nowadays publishers reflexively ask of any manuscript they are considering, “What is the author's platform?” They want to know what authors bring to the party in terms of expertise, connections, the number of people they speak to regularly, their ability to travel, and so on.
Just as your book must itself show unity of concept, writing, and audience, so it should be written by the right person in terms of promotion. I remember rejecting an excellent book on the stock market because the author was not part of the finance industry and therefore lacked the credibility and reach that we needed for promotion. Yes, it's possible that a non-finance author could write a book that is better than one written by a financial advisor, but the book is not better from the publisher's point of view, because it lacks an author who can help increase its sales.
DB
Don't bury what should be at the surface“Bastian, you buried your lede again.”
That’s what Max Crittenden, the chief copyeditor of the Catholic Register, sometimes told me when editing my first news articles for that paper, way back in the late 1970s.
Max, an Australian who had made his name as an editor on Fleet Street in London and on the major dailies in Toronto, was decent enough to bark the statement at full volume. That way everyone else in the newsroom could enjoy my discomfort. Then he would then walk across the room and hurl the article – which I had typed on my manual typewriter on soft yellow newsprint paper and which he had marked up with his Veriblack pencil – on my desk.
I soon learned that “lede” was journalistic jargon for the all-important, interest-catching first sentence or sentences of a news story.
The editor of the paper, Larry Henderson of CBC TV fame, reinforced Max’s lesson, though fortunately for me during a private meeting in his office.
“What were you doing before you started working here?” he asked.
“I was getting my master’s degree in philosophy at Saint Louis University,” I said proudly. (It also took me awhile to learn that journalists regarded academic achievement with suspicion.)
“And who was reading your writing?”
“My professors.”
“And why were they reading it?”
“Because it was their job.”
“Exactly! It was their job to read your philosophy papers. But it’s no one’s job to read your articles. People won’t read them if you don’t grab their interest first and then fill in the background.”
Max and Larry’s lessons helped me when I went on to become a book editor several years later. I soon discovered that many good non-fiction books are basically expanded news articles. They begin with a lede – it may be a paragraph or it may be a whole prologue, introduction, or chapter. Then, chapter by chapter, they answer the questions that intelligent readers will have about the subject.
Much of my work since then has been to help writers construct their book’s opening “premise and promise,” (click here for more on that) in order to grab readers’ interest. I assure them that their readers will happily take the time to read the rest of the information awaiting them once they are drawn in with an opening that establishes the beating heart of the book.
Consider the first paragraphs of several books randomly pulled from my shelves (where they are randomly shelved).
Bill Bryson begins his wonderful Notes from a Small Island with a prologue that starts off thus: “My first sight of England was on a foggy March night in 1973 when I arrived on the midnight ferry from Calais. For twenty minutes, the terminal area was aswarm with activity as cars and lorries poured forth, customs people did their duties, and everyone made for the London road. Then abruptly all was silence and I wandered through sleeping, low-lit streets threaded with fog, just like in a Bulldog Drummond movie. It was rather wonderful having an English town all to myself.”
Selina Hastings opens her biography Evelyn Waugh with this paragraph: “The reputation of Evelyn Waugh rests on two premises: that he was one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century, and that as a man he was a monster. To judge the first, one has only to read his books; to judge the second one must turn to the life.” And, of course, the life is what readers are holding in their hands.
The famous New York book editor Michael Korda, scion of a famous movie-directing and producing family, deftly telegraphs to the reader that his book will fill them in on what he thought he would become and what he actually became. “I was twenty-three before it occurred to me that my future might not lie in the movie business.” Note how well this sentence supports the title of his memoir: Another Life.
If you’re writing a non-fiction book, dive deep into your material to figure out what will be most significant about it to your readers. Compose the opening of your book to signal what that is. Then organize the rest of your book to clearly and simply deliver on what you have just promised.
DB