Tag Archives: Books

There’s Editing…And Then There’s Editing

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By Amy K. Nichols

This week at The Parking Lot Confessional we’re taking on that hot potato topic. You know the one.

Self-publishing.

(Dun-dun-Duhhhhhhhhhn)

Like the rest of you, I’ve been trying to keep up with all of the changes in the publishing industry. It’s enough to make you dizzy: ebooks and indies and models and pricing and markets and Big Six and Lulu and on and on and on.

If there’s one thing I’m holding onto in the midst of it all, it’s this:

People want to read good books.

Therefore…

Writers need to write good books.

I know, it’s not rocket science. But this is where things get sticky.

We writers love what we write. We coddle our novels and purr over them and think they’re oh-so-precious. We show them off to our writers groups, confident they’ll see our brilliance; but always ready with an explanation if they say that one part doesn’t quite work or a justification if they object to our using that worn-out stereotype.

If we’re really gutsy, we’ve found a couple of trusted readers who will be brutal with our work. Readers who will tell us our babies are ugly. Readers who will point out that our darling has three mouths and a foot growing out of the top of its head and that dressing it up in a pink tutu isn’t helping.

Regardless if we send our precious off to be traditionally published, or if we get accepted by an independent press or if we create our own publishing company and print our own book, one thing remains true:

Our work must be edited.

Must. As in, not optional.

What a lot of people don’t understand is there are (at least) two kinds of editing:

  • Line editing
  • Content editing

Line editing looks like this:

Wendy ran into the lake until the water reached her waste waist.

Content editing looks something like this:

Wendy watched him pull out of the driveway, still feeling his kiss on her lips. She let the sensation linger, knowing she’d never feel his kiss again. She went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. [Why did she let him leave? She made a cup of tea? That's it? This is completely out of her character and not believable.]

Most people know how to line edit. Not everyone knows how to edit content.

Enter the professional editor.

When you work with a professional, she’ll not only catch your word mishaps (waste vs. waist), she’ll also catch your content mishaps. The holes in your plot. The wobble in your pacing. The inconsistencies in your narrative voice.

You need an experienced and impartial third-party to punch holes in your book and see if it still floats. Again, not optional…unless you want your book to sink (stink?).

Back to self-publishing.

Every self-published book I’ve read — with the exception of one — lacked good content editing. I’m not talking typos here. I’m talking confusing jumps in the narrative, unbelievable plot contrivances, inconsistent narrative voice, flat characters. Things that should have been weeded out in rewrites.

Why would anyone publish a book with such obvious mistakes? My guess is authors A) think they can edit their own work, B) don’t want to pay editing fees, or C) both.

If I have one thing to say about self-publishing, it’s this:

If you want your book to be good, don’t edit it yourself.

We love our babies. We don’t see their flaws. We know our stories too well and we fill in gaps without realizing it.

Hire a professional editor.

Not a member of your writing group. Not your cousin (unless he’s a seasoned pro). Hire a professional who is unfamiliar with your work and will read it with objective eyes.

OK, I take it back. I have two things to say about self-publishing. The second is this:

Trust your editor.

I once edited a book for a self-publishing author. The book was nowhere near ready for publication when I started editing it. The author and I had worked through three drafts when she announced the book was to be published the following Tuesday. Zoinks?! This was news to me. The work still wasn’t ready and I told her so. She said we were done editing and sent it off to be printed.

She should have listened to me. It wasn’t ready.

People want to read good books. If your book is confusing or wobbly or inconsistent or just poorly written, your readers are going to notice. They’re going to put your book down and read something else.

Why squander your work? Hire an editor. If she says the book isn’t ready, the book isn’t ready. Keep working on it. Make it the best book it can be.

There is only goodness to be gained from patient and thorough editing.

To Be Blunt

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Gearing up to write. (There's a pen in my other hand, I swear)

By: Michael James Greenwald

“You can’t put a value on sweat equity.”

–Jonathan Sehring, President of IFC Entertainment

Hello, PLC peeps. I’m back after my vacation/business trip and to be truthful, I’m feeling more ornery that usual. I don’t know if this has to do with the sabbatical or the fact that Sarah Palin’s high-pitched (I mean, really, someone please kick her in the nads), dumb-ass, Tea Party voice is coming through my radio, but, regardless, brace yourself…

This week we are talking about goal setting.  I believe my three counterparts said about as much as can be said about goal setting.  I find it my goal (see, it’s everywhere) to hammer it home.

Screw goal setting.

Uhhhhhh????????????

Yeah, I said it.  I’ll say it again.

SCREW GOAL SETTING.

Great Goal: Specific Aim and Strategy to Reach It

Listen.  Let me be real with you here.  I know people who wake up every morning and write numbers 1 through 5 in a pocket notebook next to their bed and list Daily Goals (“Organize those taxes!”, “Take Fido Baggins to dog park!”, “30 Minutes on the Eliptical!”, “Buy Acne Cream!”), then check a bulletin board behind their desk where they’ve tacked Monthly Goals, color-coded by category (Work: “Create Your Monster Job Profile!”;  Family: “Get Little Mikey to Poo-Poo in the Potty!”;  School: “Finish Those MFA Apps!”; Religion: “Get to Church Every Sunday!”; Personal: “Book That Cruise for Louise’s Birthday!”…), and into their bathroom to wash their face and there, by God, are Yearly Goals taped to the mirror (“Find the Love of Your Life!”, “Get that 10% pay raise!”, “Pick out your dream house on a lake in Michigan!”), and into the kitchen where they open the fridge to get milk for their coffee and find a sticky note on the milk carton (“CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY!” :) ).

Is there anything wrong with this approach to life?

In my opinion?  No.

Come out, Come out, Wherever You Are!!

But, as writers, you and me (unless you haven’t “come out” of the literary closet, and if you haven’t I urge you to add that to your Daily Goal List), we need to keep our eye on the damn ball.  Making lists of goals takes time, time that some other writer in the world is using to write, and say what you want about writing being a congenial community of artists, reaching out hands to each other to lift each other up, help each other out, motivate one another, THE PROFESSION OF WRITING IS A COMPETITION.

That is worth repeating.

THE PROFESSION OF WRITING IS A COMPETITION.

While you are sleeping, while you are eating, while you are watching “Dancing With the [MF-ing] Stars”, while you are stooped, (bio-degradable) poopie bag stretched over your hand, picking up Fido Baggins’s dog crap; another writer is writing.

And trust me when I tell you that this wielder of the pen will take your publishing deal.

Because, as much as you think your, romantic comedy centered around a formerly-unknown troll sect, convenience store Shakespearean allegory, homo-erotic detective noire/ghost story, dying coal town triopic, is a unique concept, there’s a twenty-three-year-old writer on a farm in what had been Prussia sneaking out to the donkey enclosure in his parent’s barn to scribble, on parchment in his own blood, his romantic comedy centered around a formerly-unknown troll sect.  And he’s out there every damn morning, while you’re sitting at your desk writing “I’LL DO WII FIT AEROBICS FOR TWENTY MINUTES EVERYDAY” on a pink sticky note.

Where All Boris's Magic Happens (Oh, don't be an a@#).

Boris Stensky will take what had been your publishing deal at Harper Collins.

And on January 1, 2011, you’ll write on the bulletin board displaying your yearly goals: “FINISH MY NEXT MANUSCRIPT (a fable about a sequined-tutu wearing spider who only wants to qualify to be a dancer on ‘Dancing With the [MF-ing] Stars’!”

So, my point this morning (besides letting off some steam…thank you very much) is to remind you how many writers there are in the world, and writing down goals are all well and good, following all the steps to excellent goal creation laid out by my Confessional Compatriots is super-fab, but remember, the idea is to keep your damn butt in the chair (or in Boris’s case, his stomach on the donkey stall hay) and DO YOUR WORK.

Ready? Go!

You best believe I will.  I’m sitting at my desk right now.  And (“FINISH THE REWRITE ON ‘THE RAINBOW CHILD’”) is number 1 on the list of SUMMER GOALS tacked to my bulletin board.

Catch me if you can.

–MJG

Michael James Greenwald works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

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By Hook or By Crook, How A Reader Chooses A Book

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Looks like I am tardy to the party. My apologies! I have had one of those days where you drink a bracing cup of English Breakfast tea in an attempt to stay coherent enough to write your nearly overdue blog post and fall asleep with the mug still clutched in your hand. So this will be a short one, since I need to crawl back to bed. I want to write about In His Majesty’s Service, but not as a review, exactly. Rather, I want to talk about why I chose to spend $20 on an author I’d never read before.

The last time I was at the bookstore, I decided to pick up the relatively new omnibus of Naomi Novik’s first three Temeraire novels.

This was a little bit of a gamble since I had not read any of her work previous to the purchase. However I had consistently heard good things about Novik, and the last time I picked up an omnibus apropos of nothing, I was very happy with the contents.

Let’s break down the thought process that got me from the SF/F aisle to the cash register.

I initially picked up the book because I liked the cover art.

It gave me an idea of the contents without being embarrassing. Let’s face it, the speculative fiction genre as a whole is pretty notorious for having terrible book covers.

In fact, I can still remember the first book I didn’t buy because of the cover, Crisis on Doona.

*cringe*

Urrrrmmmmmm…. NO.

So, purchase factor #4, a decent cover.  In His Majesty’s Service was shelved face-out, so that’s what caught me first. As a writer, that’s frustrating, since it’s out of your hands unless you’re Neil Gaiman or somebody. But I think that publishers are starting to realize that robed cat-men are kinda passé. So let’s move on to…

Purchase factor #3, good word of mouth. I had heard very good things about Novik for the last few years, enough good things that I felt I was missing out by not reading her books. How does someone get that good word of mouth? By honing her craft. Novik received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer,  and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. That is nothing to sneeze at.  I know aspiring writers hear a lot about platforming, networking, audience building, but you know what? I honestly think it really doesn’t matter if the writing itself is good. You don’t win awards, especially Campbells and Locus Awards, by turning out sloppy prose.  I think writers overall should direct more energy into their prose and less into marketing. Yes, writers should blog, and tweet, and what have you, but don’t put the cart before the horse. Most of us aren’t really people-persons anyway. That’s why we’re writers, for God’s sake.

Purchase factor #2, personal interest. I was curious about the Temeraire novels for other reasons, too. I knew they were alternate histories, the main premise being Dragons in the Napoleonic Wars. I love dragons. I love alternate histories.  And I also had a professional interest, since I have war dragons in my WIP and wanted to see how someone else had successfully handled the issue. This purchase factor was kind of a no-brainer- if I weren’t into dragons I probably would not have been standing in the SF/F aisle in the first place.

Purchase factor # 1, THE FIRST SENTENCE. I almost never buy a book without reading the first page. The exception to the rule is when I am buying a book online, and if I am buying a book online, it’s because I am familiar with the author and already know I want it. Here is the first sentence of the book.

The deck of the French ship was slippery with blood, heaving in the choppy sea; a stroke might as easily bring down the man making it as the intended target.

It is a little wordy. I mean, look, there’s even a semicolon up in there. A properly used semicolon, indicating that the writer knew what she was doing, but nonetheless. But you know what? I never made it to that semicolon. I read, The deck of the French ship was slippery with blood -HOOKED AND SOLD. Closed the book and took it to the cash register. Those first words were not fooling around. They not only promised action, they said, hey, shit’s already going down! You’re tardy to the party, friend!

It’s a perfect example of the in medias res hook, something I mentioned I am working on in my very first PLC post, The Evolution of a Fantasist. Still working on it, for those of you keeping tabs. Because my own purchasing tendencies have illustrated how crucial that first sentence is. Without a good hook, I would have plunked In His Majesty’s Service back on the shelf. Granted, I usually give a book at least one page before rejecting it, but IHMS didn’t need it.

So, those are my four purchase factors. A decent cover, word of mouth, personal interest and THE FIRST SENTENCE. What about you? How do you decide what book to buy when you’re just browsing the stacks?

How The Name of the Wind Took Away My Guts, And How A Blog Post Put Them Back

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It’s already time for another progress report. Since the last one, I’ve written 3 1/2 chapters of my new POV character and done some revising of older material. It feels like more, but maybe that’s because I’m heading towards the climax of this subarc while weaving in plot threads from my other two arcs. Or, maybe it’s because I’ve been learning about a hidden subculture I previously knew nothing about. Learning it and creating it at the same time. Discovering it would probably be the best way to put it.

Honestly folks, I almost forgot to write a post today, as I just emerged hours ago from The Name of the Wind.

A really good book, I devour. A great book devours me. This is a great book, an Ouroboros of a book. It is a crafted book, a fantasy where the time taken in tending to all the details shines forth from each page. Languages, measurements, lore, cultures, countries, all the bricks of a built world were solid and true, but at no time was I inundated with pages of mind-numbing exposition that science fiction and fantasy writers are prone to, desperate to show off their backbreaking work. No, it was seamless.

The magic system is a logical extension of sympathetic magic, a system I am quite familiar with as it appears everywhere from Mass (one bread, one body) to The Lord of the Rings (destroy Sauron’s ring and you destroy him), but the way in which it was extrapolated was extremely clever.

The tension was maintained throughout. Maintained. What a mealymouthed little word, when what I mean to say is I read the first 600 pages without even thinking of stopping. Qvothe as a boy is so daring, so foolish, so ambitious, so intelligent, and so capable of evil as well as good, that I never really knew what was going to happen next. Each page was a surprise. That in itself is an achievement, but I haven’t even told you that the story has a frame structure (one of my own favorite devices) and it is the adult Qvothe who is relating his past to us. And yet, I was constantly in doubt. And, joy of joys, the writing itself is excellent.

After I finished it I was humbled and discouraged in a way I usually am not. The book in my hands was like a bright light shining down on my own writing, throwing all the flaws into stark relief. What the hell am I doing? I thought, sitting in a lawn chair, watching my son lark about in our mud pit of a backyard. I’ll never write anything as good as this. Never. When my boy went down for his nap, I tiptoed over to the computer, popped open Google and keyed in Patrick Rothfuss.

I wanted to know if the next book was out. If it was, we were going to the bookstore post haste. But even more than that, I wanted to know HOW? HOW DID HE DO THAT?

On Rothfuss’s website there are links to a treasure trove of interviews, nuts I haven’t had time to crack yet. I bookmarked and moved on, to a post called Concerning Release of Book Two, and scrolled down past some cute cartoons to a GRRMish post of Rothfuss explaining why the book ain’t done yet. And his reasons filled me with reason. He’s not magic, he’s meticulous. He’s obsessive. The wrong word nags him until he thinks of the right word, in the middle of the grocery store. He inserts 60,000 extra words into his already-projected 300,000 WIP  because “it needed more action, more tension, more detail. It needed to be re-worked, expanded and generally betterized.”

In sum, Patrick Rothfuss is what every speculative fiction writer who wants to write a book as good as The Name of the Wind should be. He’s practically crazy.

I can’t tell you how this chirked me up. I’m practically crazy, I thought, and I’m not afraid to work. And then I remembered PLC and the post I still had to write, and I dashed off into the Dashboard.

The Name of the Wind. A book for me to study.

And frankly, Rothfuss can take as long as he likes with the second book. I am content to wait.

Inspiring the next generation of readers

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This week at the PLC our topic is reading.

I’m a big fan of reading.

One of the reasons we bought our current house was because it had enough room to build shelves for our many books.

I’m the easiest person ever to shop for. Books, books, more books, gift cards and money to buy books.

And if you’re expecting a gift from me, three guesses what I’ll be getting you. Yep, that’s right.

I love books. I love reading. I recently wrote about why in this post at Amy writes.

When I was a kid, I always had my nose in a book. I went through book phases: kitten books, horse books, Boxcar Children books, Ramona books, Nancy Drew books, Judy Blume books… I’m shocked there are pictures of me as a kid that actually show my face, seeing as it usually was concealed behind a book.

As soon as my children were born, I couldn’t wait for them to read. I even tried to inspire them in utero, reading aloud to them each night. Poetry mostly. Shakespeare, Browning, Eliot. I just knew my reading would encourage their developing brains to appreciate words and meter and rhyme.

I believe some of this work has already paid off: both of my kids are natural storytellers. My daughter even constructs her narratives with a classic story arc, ratcheting up tension with each new, “…And then…” or “…Little did she know…”

Imagine my elation when she learned how to read. Each night we worked our way up from board books to early readers, until now, finally, we’re getting into chapter books. Huzzah! Hello, Little Women! Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle! Hello, Ramona the Brave! Mama is happy.

Except…

There are so many other things she’d rather be doing. She’s a busy girl, with things to see and do and explore. And as much as she loves reading with me at bedtime, getting her to sit still to read during the day is next to impossible.

Even today, sick with an earache, I set her up on the couch with her pillow, her blanket and the many books she got for Christmas.

What could be better? I thought of the days I’d spent sick on the couch, enjoying that time to do nothing but read.

But my daughter groaned. She didn’t want to read. She wanted to be up and about. Couldn’t she sit over on the floor and play with her dolls and still get better that way?

I admit, I was disappointed.

She hasn’t yet caught the reading bug. I can sense she’s *almost* there. Now she takes books with us in the car to read along the way. Now she shows interest when the Highlights magazine comes in the mail. But still, she’d rather sit and listen to me read to her than put in the effort herself.

*sigh*

Part of me worries she won’t catch the bug. That she’ll grow up to be a non-reader. Odds are, she won’t. But still… I shudder at the thought.

So, aside from making books available to her, reading with her at bedtime, and setting an example for her by reading books myself, I’m a bit at a loss what to do. How do I inspire her to read, short of standing on my soapbox and proclaiming the mysteries of the written word to her?

And not just my daughter, my children, but what about society as a whole? Increasingly, we read less and less. Book sales continue to decline. As does the reading competency of our average citizen. As an aspiring Young Adult novelist, this casts a gloomy pallor on my target audience.

So I’m hoping to hear from you. How should we, as writers and parents and teachers and citizens, inspire the next generation of readers? How have you inspired those in your life to read? What has worked? What hasn’t worked?

I’m looking forward to your comments. In the meantime, I’ll just be over here finishing up this book I’m reading…