Two thousand twelve has been a banner year at the Word Process – and we owe it all to you, our authors. We have been privileged to work on some wonderful books this year. We have traveled from a small village in Togo to the horrific civil war in Liberia to the wilds of Patagonia […]
Two and a half weeks ago, we attended a memorial service for a dear friend. Our friend was very close to a young poet named Jennifer Bates, and Jennifer wrote the eulogy, a glorious prose poem that evoked the essence of our departed friend and for that moment, brought her back to hold in our […]
When we pointed out to a recent client that parts of his story were confusing, he said that was just what he intended. Readers were supposed to be confused, and the muddle would all be cleared up later in the book. Confusion? Really? Here is the Miriam Webster definition that popped up for confusion: 1. […]
One of our readers wrote to us after the last blog to say that he was trying the foreshadowing techniques that we had described and wasn’t sure they were working so well for him. We wrote about how Erik Larson created suspense in his book, IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS, (posted 11/14) by hinting at […]
The book club has just discussed IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS by Erik Larson, an account of the American ambassador to Germany and his daughter during the rise of Hitler. All agreed that the true story of William and Martha Dodd was a compelling and suspenseful read. The gathering storm in Berlin and the degree […]
Sometimes we think that our authors are trying to build a firewall of words around whatever they are trying to say. That is because they use a lot of expletives. These expletives, which have nothing to do with profanity, put empty words between the reader and the content. We are talking about what are known […]
Our non-fiction authors make wonderful use of metaphor, which – as you probably know – is a comparison. Using a metaphor, a writer will write about a storm (right?) to express what he/she wants to say about life. This can be a very useful tool. Storms have defining characteristics that can be applied to the […]
A famous author once told us that she reads books by other people when she is in a writing phase. But she has plenty of author friends who don’t because they get infected by the styles of the writers they are reading, and these voices creep into their own writing. For beginning writers, this can […]
We are currently doing a third edit on a client’s book and we are so excited we can hardly stand it. The book has gotten so good! This author has worked long and hard to get here; the book has been in the works for decades. We are full of admiration for this author’s determination […]
Last winter, the British news organization, the Telegraph, did a series of stories called My Favorite Charles Dickens Character. There were 27 installments of this series each written by a different Telegraph staffer. Twenty-seven! That’s a lot of favorite characters by one author, yet really, it only scratches the surface of great Dickens characters. He […]