A New Year’s toast to you, our authors!

By mcmckit on Jan 1, 2014

Your talent and creativity continued to amaze us in 2013. We worked hard to make your manuscripts the best they could be but our efforts would not have been successful had you not presented us with such strong material. We are in awe of your energy and productivity.

More than anything, 2013 was the year of the historical novel at the Word Process, perhaps reflecting recent interest in this genre in the marketplace. We reviewed stories about:

• Bronte, Sicily in the wake of Garibaldi’s 1860 rebellion;
• a plot to assassinate the pope;
• multi-generational sagas covering the settlements of the upper northwest, great lakes’ region, and Wyoming with a history of Yellowstone National Park;
• a story about a valuable map in 1940s/1950s Appalachia;
• a stalker in 1940’s Nashville;
• spending time with Ben Franklin during the colonies’  fight for independence;
• the FBI and organized crime in California in the 1970s; and
• the AIDs epidemic and the growth of the gay civil rights movement.

Last year was also big year for business books. We edited books on the new rules for competition in today’s digital age, on successful partnerships between investors and professional advisors, on how to be an effective project manager, on protecting the family legacy, and on getting around loopholes in the finance and accounting laws.

We have been inspired by spiritual books on native American drum circles and the code theory that explains the hidden pattern of life.

We have learned from your other non-fiction books about kenpo karate, the importance of multicultural education in the United States today, and how political waves of revolution in the Arab world have impacted women there.

Your “how-tos” have instructed us on the successes that come from letting go of “the little you” and thinking big, relationships between men and women, and losing weight while still eating out at restaurants.

We had fewer memoirs then in past years, again maybe reflecting the saturation of the market. But the ones we had were strong. One centered on LA’s Comedy Store where young comedians like David Letterman and Jay Leno got their starts in the 1970’s. Another was a harrowing depiction of war by an air force physician’s assistant who served in Afghanistan. Others were about growing up Italian in New York in the thirties, suffering sexual abuse in Montana, and dealing with the difficult emotions that come with caring for elderly parents.

In 2013, we worked in every fiction genre–

 Paranormal and fantasy:

• Normal people – a systems analyst, a forest ranger – are pursued by unknown enemies  in a world  of knights and fair princesses
• A newspaper reporter falls in love with a demon
• A  young man gets sent to a mysterious reform school and must battle for his life in the past

Chick Lit:

• Hilarious adventures of a Thai journalist in Washington
• A love triangle that develops when Cinderella marries someone who isn’t Prince Charming

 Suspense:

• A terrorist plot to bomb New York City
• A boat captain’s attempt at a drug heist goes horribly wrong
• A freelance photographer on assignment in Miami gets involved with kidnapping/murder plot

Science fiction:

• A medical plot including everything from prehistoric man to genome theory and inter planetary travel
•  Residents of another planet come to earth to save some of their own

 Young Adult:

• A multicultural urban fantasy in which a 14-year-old Chicagoan must battle a dragon
• The Spider gang encounters ghosts and solves an old mystery
• A lost teenager figures out how to survive in the wild

Mainstream:

• What happens when twin sisters don’t get along

You have had a great publishing year as all the postings on our Facebook page attest. Some of you have found traditional publishers and numerous others have self-published. Others are working with agents or in the process of publishing. It has been exciting to see your books in print and to post your accomplishments as our trophies. J

To all our authors and would-be authors: skip the resolutions and just continue to follow your muses. We can’t wait to see what you produce in 2014.

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

~T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

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Seeding Your Story to Make it Bloom

By mcmckit on Dec 9, 2013

So you are writing your fiction book and you have a great idea that will make it better, maybe a plot twist or a character that does something to advance the plot. You add whatever it is and continue on your merry writing way. But here is the question: Did you lay the groundwork for that character or plot twist to come into the story?

Very often, the answer to that question is no. We are constantly telling clients that they have to go back in the story and establish that character or circumstance so that when it pops up the reader isn’t completely bamboozled and/or feeling had by the author.

Here is an example:

Margo and I ran through the downtown streets until we saw to a battered red VW Rabbit idling at the Oak Street stoplight. We recognized it immediately as Chubby Theodore’s . Throwing ourselves into the back seat, I pulled the door shut and locked it. Theodore looked over his shoulder at us in complete surprise. “Drive,” I begged him. “Just drive.”

Lucky for the narrator of this paragraph that Chubby Theodore just happened to be waiting at the stop light .  But it is not good for the reader unless the reader is told  Chubby Theodore is.  The writer of this story could do it here, but we are in the middle of some kind of chase and taking time out now to explain who Theodore is is sure to slow the action down. But if Chubby Theodore and his VW Rabbit have already been made interesting to the reader, it will make reading this passage more enjoyable.   Let’s say Chubby T works at the Oak Street bookstore and is kind of a slow moving guy, who spends all his free time reading about astrophysics. His Rabbit is not very dependable and has recently lost its muffler. These details open the door to a lot of possibilities in the reader’s mind. How good is a getaway car that roars through downtown and may break down at any second? A slow moving getaway driver is probably not a plus either. But then, maybe Theodore’s knowledge of astrophysics is going to play a role in the story to come.

A reader who is entertaining all those possibilities is into the story. Theodore’s providential appearance at the Oak Street light is not just something mechanical the author did to move the plot along, it is part of the plot, the story.

If this seems obvious on the face of it, as editors, we often encounter characters like this that appear out of the blue. And they are not the only loose ends we come across.  Here are some other examples:

Margery arrived home just in time. Was it established that Margery left home?

George heard footsteps on the floor above. Does the reader know who else lives or doesn’t live in the house?

I looked at all the people in the room and saw lots of support there. This only works if the reader knows who is in the room.

Writers have to continually ask themselves whether they have laid the appropriate groundwork for anything that happens in their stories. It is part of the job of a writer to sow the seeds for what is to follow so the book presents as a constructed story and not a series of ideas that came to the author while plowing through the book.

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When It Comes to Writing Technique, One Size Does Not Fit All

By mcmckit on Nov 25, 2013

We have been caught in a contradiction. A reader has pointed out to us that in November, 2012, we praised author Erik Larson to the skies for the way he used teases in his book, IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS, to create suspense and keep the reader turning the pages. Two weeks ago, we criticized another author for doing the same thing. We said that Scott Anderson jumped ahead in his book, LAWRENCE IN ARABIA, “to tell the reader bits and pieces of what is coming next, like tease lines on a news cast: Coming up, one man’s battle against the system. Stay tuned.”

So okay, we are not a perfect filter, but it is interesting that we loved this technique in one book and were irritated by it in another. Both of these books are historical non-fiction, but the similarity ends there. Larson is really good at creating suspense. He is very smooth, maybe too smooth. When we finish his books, we wonder a little what all the hype was about.

Scott Anderson’s book is more ambitious. He is telling a huge, sweeping story that requires concentration and lots of recourse to the map in the front of the book. When he interrupts the narrative to jump ahead, it has the opposite effect that he intends. We aren’t titillated; we are irritated.

What it all boils down to is this thing called author intrusion. Simply put this is when an author inserts something in a book that doesn’t feel like it fits and makes the reader aware of the writer behind the scenes. We get this all the time from clients, who often step out of the narrative to give their opinions or comment. It is like they are waving their arms and yelling, “Here I am; forget about the book, pay attention to me.” To the reader, this is an interruption and it’s annoying.

Author intrusion can happen in many, many ways. Here are some examples:

Using words or phrases that come from you, the writer, rather than the character or subject from whose point of view you are writing. An obvious example of this is using current slang when your subject or character is historical.

Inserting your opinions, especially if you are taking a strong stand on something.

Putting in too much background. Taking time out to explain say, the history of football when your character or subject just has to make a certain play.

Including knowledge your point-of-view subject/character can’t possibly possess. Or having your POV-subject/character see something or hear something, he/she can’t possibly see or hear.

Making things happen just to fit the story rather than letting them evolve with the story.

Getting ahead of yourself to preview what is going to happen.

Since your writing very much involves you, it can be very difficult to know when you are intruding and when you are telling a good story. This is where an editor or a reader can help.

Thank you, Steven E. Condon for pointing out our contradictions!

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Coming up: Author Intrusions

By mcmckit on Nov 12, 2013

During our recent vacation, we picked out Scott Anderson’s LAWRENCE IN ARABIA for vacation reading. This has been a hugely successful book. It is the story of Thomas Edward Lawrence, the Lawrence of the movie Lawrence of Arabia, who played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the Middle East. The book rollicked along from the points of view of several key characters, all of whom also played major roles in the region before, during and after World War I. We really enjoyed it… except where the author butted in. And he did this a lot.

When you are deep in a good book, there is nothing more irritating than becoming aware of the person pulling the strings. It is like pulling the curtain back on the great Wizard of Oz and revealing a salesman. Author intrusions, as they are called, can get in the way of a good story.

What Anderson does almost routinely at the end of every chapter is jump ahead to tell the reader bits and pieces of what is coming next, like tease lines on a news cast: Coming up, one man’s battle against the system. Stay tuned.

Here are some examples from the book:

It would be some time before he knew it, but William Yale had just had his first encounter with Thomas Edward Lawrence, soon to become better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

Among the first spies Prufer would send into the enemy territory would be his lover Fanny Weizmann.

He would eventually find an answer to that question. It would take the form of a notice soliciting applicants to the “foreign service school” of the Standard Oil Company of New York.

…and what had been an intermittent nibbling at the Ottoman realm by the European powers was to become a feeding frenzy.

…in a few years’ time, he would make blowing up the Hajaz Railway a personal pastime.

Our guess is that Anderson was trying to ratchet up the suspense with these tease lines but his book doesn’t need it. It’s plenty exciting. Instead, we were irritated at always being pulled out of the narrative for a commercial break. And reading a story as complicated as LAWRENCE IN ARABIA, there was the added irritation of being thrust into the future and then pulled back again. If you feel your story needs tease lines, maybe you should look at beefing up the story rather than crafting promos.

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Smile…and it Could Kill You

By mcmckit on Oct 7, 2013

Our clients love to make their characters smile. Maybe they believe as Phyllis Diller said that “a smile is a curve that sets everything straight.” In a book, it can be more of a flat line if a smile is the best the writer can come up with over and over again. In one book we edited, characters smiled more than once on every page.

We recommend our writers branch out by imagining other facial expressions that might express something more nuanced – a smile can be a lot of things – or maybe just find another way to say the character smiled. Failing that, there is the thesaurus.

From multiple sources, synonyms for smile include beam, grin, twinkle, laugh, smirk, simper, be gracious, express friendliness, express tenderness, look amused, look delighted, look happy, look pleased, simper, leer, snicker, and snigger.

All of these alternatives put a different slant on smile.   Repeated words can be more boring and it you use them enough, they become meaningless. Here’s an example in which the word “beautiful” is overused: It was a beautiful day. Clare could not believe how beautiful the flowers were in her garden. In particular, her multi-colored day lilies seemed to capture the beauty of the day. Orange-, yellow- and peach-colored blossoms made a beautiful display against the blue sky.

Here is the same graph employing synonyms: It was a dazzling day. Clare could not believe how beautiful the flowers were in her garden. In particular, her multi-colored day lilies seemed to capture the essence of the morning. Orange-, yellow- and peach-colored blossoms made a brilliant display against the blue sky.

See how the synonyms add to the richness of the prose. Dazzling is a synonym for beautiful, but a dazzling day is different from a beautiful one. Dazzling connotes a freshness or newness, as well as bright sunshine. A beautiful day is merely pleasing to the eye.

It is really worth taking a look at the words you use over and over. Smile may not be your go-to word but what do you use over and over again? How can you get out of your writing rut?

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Book Dialogue is More Than Just Talk

By mcmckit on Sep 24, 2013

If you think that realism is the goal when you are writing book dialogue, think again. How-are-you’s, thank-yous, you’re-welcomes, may-I-introduces should almost never appear in books although these are words most of us say every day. Neither should the word “well.” All these commonplace phrases just drag things down in books and can often be taken for granted so they don’t need to be included. Effective bookspeak is pared down; words are carefully chosen as specific expressions. Many times what is most telling is what isn’t said.

To illustrate, here is a conversation one of us once had with her husband. It is pretty much verbatim except that names have been changed to protect the identity of unwitting house guests:

 She: Sit down. We have to talk about something.

He: What are you doing?

She: Leaving you

He: Oh, that’s great. When are you going to start packing?

She: Just kidding. It just sounded so dramatic asking you to sit down.

He: I thought you were just being your usual demanding self.

She: Listen, I got an e mail from Nell today.

He: Oh?

She: She says they will be leaving Florida a day early so they will be arriving during the afternoon in time for the hockey game.

He: I told you John really wants to see Ovechkin play.

She: Well, maybe we should all go out to dinner.

He: John doesn’t do very well going out to dinner.

She: I see. So you are saying that you will eat at the game?

He: I think that would be the best thing.

She: I will have to figure out something for Nell and me to do.

This is the kind of humdrum discussion that makes up everyday life for most of us. It has a lot of words in it, many of them unnecessary to communication. The conversation is also rambling nature. It’s not going anywhere, not plugged in to a greater whole. Book dialogue should always serve the plot. In the above case, there is no plot, just life.

So, with apologies to Capitals’ Hockey Captain Alex Ovechkin, here is the same conversation edited to be included in a thriller:

 She: We have to talk.                                                                                  

He: When are you going to start packing?

She: I got an e mail.

He: Oh?

She: John is arriving during the afternoon.

He: He wants to see Ovechkin.

She: Maybe we should go out.

He: John doesn’t do well going out.

Reworked to be part of a relationship novel:

She: Sit down. We have to talk.

He: When are you going to start packing?

She: I just asked you to sit down.

He: You are being your usual demanding self.

She: They will be arriving in time for the game.

He: I told you. John wants to see Ovechkin play.

She: Maybe we should go out to dinner.

He: John doesn’t do well at dinner.

She: So, you will eat at the game?

He: That would be best.

 What we suggest is that when you have written dialogue, you review it afterwards with your whole book in mind and a red pencil in one hand. Ask yourself these questions:

Are there a lot of extra words? Writers tend to include words like “well” and “okay” and “you see” because they think they make the conversation realistic. They also drag it down. Pare your dialogue down to just what is necessary.

Does the information being shared in the dialogue belong in the dialogue? If you have already established that the cavalry is coming, you don’t need a character to say, “The cavalry is coming!” Instead, the character should advance the reader’s understanding: “They’re not going to get here in time!”   Characters should not state what you have already made obvious.

 Is this dialogue telling a larger story? Does it show the reader the relationship between the people talking? If the story is scary, how does the dialogue contribute to the scariness? What do the silences say? Alternatively, does this dialogue ramble? Is it off track?

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Writing a book? Okay, it’s Show Time!

By mcmckit on Sep 10, 2013

If you have ever taken a writing course or read a blog about writing, you are familiar with the expression, “show don’t tell.” There is a reason for that. Showing is often the difference between a vivid, lively narrative and a lecture. Yet, almost every critique we write – fiction and nonfiction – includes an admonition to stop telling and start showing. Most writers tend to explain what their stories are about, rather than getting into the story and showing it.

Here is a telling example:  He was determined.  He wasn’t going to let himself be talked out of waiting. He knew he had to make contact and not to do so was unthinkable. He accepted a cup of coffee, but did not say anything when the suggestion was made that he should go back and sleep. He felt impatient but he was careful not to reveal it. He could get back to the checkpoint in twenty minutes if he had to. But he decided to wait. It was getting dark outside.

Compare this to the first graphs of John Le Carre’s THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. Here, he is showing what we just told.

“The American handed Leamus another cup of coffee and said, ‘Why don’t you go back and sleep? We can ring you if he shows up.’

Leamus said nothing, just stared through the window of the checkpoint, along the empty street.

‘You can’t wait forever, sir. Maybe he’ll come some other time. We can have the polizei contact the agency: you can be back here in twenty minutes.’

‘No,’ said Leamus, ‘It’s nearly dark now.’”

Le Carre invites the reader directly into the checkpoint overlooking that empty street. He never tells us readers that Leamus is determined to wait, but we get it and at the same time, we are sucked into the story, wanting to know who he is waiting for and why is he is being so stubborn about it.

So, what did Le Carre do that showed the action, rather than telling it?

1)      He used dialogue. Dialogue brings the reader directly into the scene. You have to be there to know what is being said.

2)      He set the scene. When Leamus looks out of the window at the empty street, you know where he is and almost feel like you are there too.

3)      He used detail. And he used it sparingly. “Another cup of coffee” is an interesting tidbit. Leamus has been drinking a lot of coffee. So you wonder, is he buzzed or bored or very determined to stay awake and at the top of his game? It is only “nearly dark” so not very late at night. Has Leamus been up for a long time? That cup of coffee is a detail that draws readers in but doesn’t drown us with so much information we have nothing left to wonder about. Le Carre has been specific but used a light touch.

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Leaving Out What Readers Skip: Elmore Leonard

By mcmckit on Aug 27, 2013

Crime writer Elmore Leonard, who died last week, had such a strong writing voice that you can watch one of his movies or the current television show based on his work – Justified – and hear him loud and clear. Here is an excerpt from his 2012 book, Raylan, which shows his acute eye for character, snappy dialogue, and ironic humor:

 The girl on the cow-feed sacks kept looking up at Raylan like she was wondering about him, thinking hard of something to say, until she found a sweet voice to ask him, “Sir, would you think I’m bold to inguire what you do as your job?”

Raylan smiled. “Which one is the question, what I think or what I do?”

Pervis Crowe, called “Speed” in the magazine, said “Loretta, don’t you know Drug Enforcement, you would see a man wearing a suit of clothes? The come arouns sniffin the air.”

“You got me wrong,” Raylan said, “I’m marshals service. We go around smelling the flowers, till we get turned on to wanted felons.”

 So we were excited we discovered that Leonard had a list of ten rules for writers. The rules were first published in the New York Times in 2001 and then later made into a short book. Leonard says his rules “help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story.”

We think that Leonard was anything but invisible in his stories since his voice was so distinctive, but he sure could show what was taking place as the above excerpt demonstrates. And we recommend his rules that can be seen here, but with some caveats.

When Leonard says never open a book with the weather, he does not mean leave the weather out entirely which is what many of our clients tend to do. Weather is important to how readers picture a scene, particularly if it is outdoors. He begins Raylan with dialogue between characters in an SUV but he notes the “early morning sun showing behind them.”  This not only tells what the weather is, it also gives the time of day.

Similarly, when Leonard says to avoid detailed descriptions of characters and lengthy descriptions of places and things, he doesn’t mean skip them completely. As we have said before a word or two can go a long way when it comes to description. In the passage above, can’t you just see the girl lounging on the cow-feed sacks trying to formulate a question. That is a description even though it may not read like one.

Leonard’s most salient rule may be the one where he advises that writers leave out the parts that readers tend to skip. Read over what you have written with that in mind. Are there parts that ought to go?

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The Successful Query Promotes the Book, not the Author

By mcmckit on Aug 12, 2013

One of the services we provide for our editing clients is to write query letters for them if they are interested in pursuing traditional publishing. As a result we have written a lot of queries. We have also reviewed a lot of drafts of queries and have seen the pitfalls that writers fall into.

Agents are bombarded with query letters. You don’t want to give them any excuse to toss yours in the trashcan while making them curious enough about your book to ask to read it. Here are eight conclusions we have reached about writing successful queries:

1) A query should titillate agents, rather than leave them sated. Give them just enough to provoke interest and make them hungry to learn more.

2) Unless the book is non fiction and steeped in some knowledge you and only you have, the query letter should be about the book, not the author.  Who you are doesn’t matter.  What you do in your day job, what you studied in college, and how many children you have do not matter. The book is what you are selling, and the query should focus on it.

3) Have a reason for contacting this agent (so the agent doesn’t think you’ve sent query letters to every agent in the book). For example: “Because you represented XXXXX (a book like yours) I thought this might be your kind of novel.”

4) If you are querying by snail mail, always include a SASE or you’ll never hear back. If the agent accepts e mail, query that way because you will get a response more quickly.

5) It doesn’t hurt to compare your book to books that have sold well:  (eg: “XXXX is a character-driven thriller in the tradition of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal and, more recently, Daniel Silva’s The Mark of the Assassin.”)

6) It should be somewhat cocky.  Tell them what you’ve got and end with an expectation rather than begging. (“I look forward to hearing from you.”)

7) But also use your nice-guy voice. While you are selling the book and not yourself, you do not want to come across as someone an agent would not want to deal with.

8) A query should never be longer than one page.

The website, Galleycat, which focuses on the publishing industry, provides examples of successful query letters for a number of genres. To read them click here.

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Writing’s Empty Calories; Put your Narrative on a Diet

By mcmckit on Jul 15, 2013

One of George Orwell’s rules for effective writing is “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” He had six rules which appeared in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.”  As editors, we like this rule. We keep a close eye out for wordiness and In particular, we pounce on empty calorie words and phrases that swell the word count and slow down the story.

We think that writers include these empty calorie phrases to make either themselves or the reader feel comfortable, but that is not the effect they have.  Including them is like dropping a  sugary doughnut into the middle of the action of your narrative. The reader has to climb over them or go around them or in some way shoulder them aside in order to stay with the story.  If you include a lot of them in your narrative, you are simply asking the reader to give up on it.

They are easy to spot because you can cut them out of the sentence they are in and find that the sentence is just fine, better even, without them. Here are some examples:

As fate would have it: Fate always has it. There seems little point in telling the reader about it. The exception to this is when things turn differently from hopes or expectations as: I prayed for sunshine that day, but as fate would have it, it poured.

 Really: The use of this word is usually redundant. How is I really thought he did a good job different from I thought he did a good job?

As a matter of fact or In fact: Unless, you, the writer are in the habit of lying to your reader, isn’t everything you write a matter of fact, at least as far as you know it? Even if you write fiction, you usually are making an honest attempt to convey something to the reader.

 Let’s start at the beginning:  Where else would you start?

That said: If it was just said, you don’t need to point to it. The reader has read it.

In order to:  This is just pompous, three words when the simple preposition “to” will do.

I put on my boots in order to go out.

I put on my boots to go out.

 He/she knew: If you are writing from a character’s point of view, than whatever piece of knowledge being shared can be presumed to be known by that character.

So and So Said: The word “said” gets used too much. Suppose you have a scene like this: Mother rolled up her sleeves and picked up the rolling pin. She said, “This how you roll out the biscuit dough.”  You don’t need “she said.” The reader knows you are talking about Mother and assumes she is the one doing the talking.

Well:  In our sixth-grade class, whenever a student was called on and started to answer with, “Well,” the teacher snapped, “Don’t dig any wells.” This word is also a hole in a manuscript.

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