If a writer friend has asked you to read and critique their work, they are giving you an enormous and honored responsibility. It is YOUR JOB as a reader to respond honestly…and compassionately….but also to help the writer envision what could happen.

Here are my reading guidelines:

After reading the novel, I tell the reader THREE THINGS that are really working in the draft. I try to be as specific as I can.

Then I get into the nitty gritty!

First impressions:

Title: does it make you want to read the book? What do you think the book is about?

First line/first page: are you hooked? Would you keep reading? Think about the inciting incident. (placement, effectiveness, ability to propel the plot forward) Was there a point where you got very excited about what might happen next?

Point of view character: Can you identify the main character? How quickly did you find the main character interesting? Why? How did the author pull you into the character’s head/story? Be specific, if you can. Do you know what that character wants and why? Are you excited to turn the page? Why?

Character work:

Is the main character likeable? Talk about places where you took the character’s side…or you questioned the motivation of the main character.

Does the main character change during the story? How? Look at the places in the novel where that change begins. Describe the effectiveness of the important scenes. Does the main character cause the action in the story? Were there moments when the secondary characters took over the story?

Dialogue: Think about the sound of dialogue. Did it sound real? Appropriate use of tag lines? Beats? Does it push the story forward?

When do the secondary characters enter the story? Comment on the connectivity between the main characters at the beginning of the book. Were there characters you did not believe or want to know more about? What about their motivations??????

Is the antagonist worthy of your protagonist?

STYLE…….

Narrative voice: How was it unique? Be specific.

Show versus telling? Tell the writer what scenes REALLY worked and why.

PLOT: Think about the rising action of the whole novel. Indicate shining plot points. Was the ending inevitable and surprising? Think about how the beginning and ending are connected.

Hot spots:

Pick 1-2 memorable scenes in the novel. Why did they work? How many scenes could you describe without looking at the manuscript? If you were asked to convince another reader to buy this book, could you sell it?

Think about the characters that were present during the most important scenes. Were any characters missing from these scenes?

Was there a scene that could have been more exciting? Please be specific.

Was there a scene that confused you or seemed out of place?

Was there a scene that you skimmed? A place where you lost interest?

Did you guess/know the ending? Did this facilitate your enjoyment? Or hurt it?

Pacing: Look specifically at  chapter endings and beginnings. How did the author handle the passage of time?

Description: Find moments where description enhanced a scene or mood.

Appropriate length? Places where the writer could have done more? Places that could be cut?

MOST IMPORTANT:

I learn SO MUCH from reading WIPs. I always share this with the writer. In the process of writing, we all learn from one another. I always THANK the writers who give me the opportunity to learn from them.

HAPPY READING!!!!!

If I had to title the month of May, I would call it “Feedback Frenzy.”

I am reading manuscripts for my upcoming Whole Novel Class for writers.com. I have also begun to receive manuscripts for Highlights’ Whole Novel Workshop!

Tami Lewis Brown just read my newest WIP and gave me GREAT feedback!

(I’m also anticipating my first editorial letter on my upcoming YA novel, BELIEVE, and already have a notebook full of ideas!)

FEEDBACK is an essential part of the process. But getting it can feel like showing up for a blind date naked. It can make us feel VERY vulnerable. And giving it…well….for me, this is about trust. When I read someone else’s book, I treat it like a baby! Reading is a HUGE responsibility.

Today, let’s talk about it!

First of all….I would bet we all have bad feedback nightmares.

My worst experience was this: a reader friend said to me, “There is NOTHING I like in this submission.” No laughter. No comment after that.

Not a good day.

And yet, in the beginning…..

I thought feedback was about figuring out what was going wrong. That was the kind of feedback I found most useful. “How do I fix this?” was my main question. “What is missing?” I thought the “positive feedback” was just my readers’ way of preparing me for the “real” comments.

Back then, I didn’t understand what it meant to “re-imagine” my stories. I thought that the structure was set in stone the first time. (hahahaha) I thought that my job was to write the first story better.

Now that I am often the commenter, I couldn’t disagree with myself more. Yes, what isn’t working is STILL part of my responsibility as a reader….but it probably ranks as #3 on the scale of importance. AND it means: how can we re-envision these relationships? These scenes? This story?

Now, I’ve come to realize that feedback is much, much more.

For today, here are my first BIG questions:

***WHAT IS WORKING? WHAT DO I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE ABOUT THE BOOK?

When a writer knows what is working (POV? VOICE? CONFLICT?), they can build on that. They can learn from their strengths. They will feel better about what ISN’T working….knowing what IS working gives a writer confidence and knowledge.

***WHAT ARE THE POSSIBILITIES?

When I read, I look for SEEDS….places in the book that need tending and nurturing, places that need more attention. I look for possibilities and places that seem out of order with the rest of the book. I look for places where I say, “YES!!!” and “HUH??” I look for moments where the character is ACTIVE…where they REACT….and where they don’t. I examine the flow of tension in the book.

***WHEN IS THE DREAM BROKEN?

I acknowledge that I am one reader. But I want my students and friends to know where I put down the book…where I became too aware of the writer’s hand. I also want them to know where I couldn’t stop turning the pages.

Last,

***HOW MANY TISSUES?

(I cry at the end of almost EVERY book I read.)

The responsibility of reading is a sacred one. When you get great feedback, you see the possibilities…you form ideas. You make connections in your manuscript that deepen the story.

Tomorrow, I will post my “questions for discussion,” questions that help us understand what is working…and not working…in a manuscript.

In the meantime, let’s talk about feedback. Got any good stories? Anything to get off your chest?

Photo by Cal Werry

It’s a treat to have Cheryl Klein visit the Tollbooth today. She joins us to discuss what was involved in publishing her book, Second Sight: An Editor’s Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults.

Cheryl Klein is an Executive Editor at Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic, and is the author of Second Sight. Her website is filled with information and resources for writers.

[Sarah] How did you prepare your book, Second Sight, for publication? What extra steps did you need to take because you published it yourself?

[Cheryl] I write my talks in outline form to keep them and me loose as I speak, so first I had to revise them for print — which involved a lot of revising altogether; I think I more or less rewrote my speech on voice completely. After that, I sent it to a freelance book designer I’d hired, and she came up with a sample interior design, which I approved. She and I then went through two rounds of proofs (which sometimes involved me rewriting more than I should) before finalizing the interiors. It was all very much like the standard editorial process we use at Scholastic.

The designer and I also collaborated on the cover, with both of us generating ideas, settling on a concept, and then tweaking the details until we had something I liked — something I love, actually. My personal style — in everything from the clothes I wear to the art I love to how I edit my books — emphasizes very classical, clean structures and lines combined with bright colors and textures and patterns, and this book cover is a wonderful example of that.

Finally, I registered for an ISBN so the book could be included in various online systems, and a bar code so it could be scanned and sold in stores. And I researched book printers and distributors online, and reached out to a number of services for quotes.

[Sarah] Who else was involved in the publication process?

[Cheryl] My designer was named Whitney Lyle — she’s now a full-time book designer for Scholastic. The books themselves were printed by McNaughton & Gunn in Michigan. Several of my editorial friends consulted on the copyediting and flap copy.

[Sarah] What are the advantages of publishing your book in print form? What were the biggest challenges you faced?

[Cheryl] I never considered publishing it solely in e-form — in part because I grew up on real, physical books, and I love them madly, and I wanted to have one of my very own. So one great advantage was just to be able to hold a book I’d written in my hands. . . . It was really satisfying, if that doesn’t sound too egotistical. On a practical level, the biggest advantages are probably having something physical to sell at my speaking appearances, as I do a fair number of those, and that the book can reach an audience beyond people who own e-readers (as that’s still just a limited subset of readers, and will probably remain so for quite some time to come).

The biggest challenge was trying to figure out the proper distribution for the books — how many books should go where, and which were the right services to use that would answer the particular needs I had.

[Sarah] You used Kickstarter as a way to raise money to print your book. Why did you choose Kickstarter?

[Cheryl] At the time I did it (July of 2009), Kickstarter had just opened for business earlier that year, and it was the only crowdsourced-fundraising website for artistic activities that I knew of.

[Sarah] You started your own small press: Asterisk Books. Could you talk about how this was helpful in publishing Second Sight? Also, how have you distributed your book?

[Cheryl] Well, I have to confess that Asterisk came into existence basically because of Second Sight — I wanted to have a proper imprint name to put on the spine and title page! I chose “Asterisk” because I love stars and punctuation, and because I love the additions and amendments and digressions the mark represents.

Second Sight is available online through Amazon.com’s Advantage consignment program and through Mybookorders.com, an independent distributor out of Minneapolis. Working with Mybookorders was really important and useful to me early on because (a) I wanted a non-Amazon option for people who are concerned about the company and (b) I needed a distributor that could handle discounts at various levels, so the people who sponsored me on Kickstarter could receive the proper credit for their sponsorship (for instance, a $10 sponsorship = $10 off the book), and Amazon doesn’t offer such an option. The book has also been for sale at my local independent bookstore near work, the wonderful McNally Jackson Booksellers, and I’ve been selling it at my various appearances since it’s come out.

I owe my mother a HUGE thanks here, as she and my dad are not only storing over a thousand books (at present) in their garage, she’s also been shipping books to Amazon and to my appearances as necessary. (They know her really well at the local FedEx.) Thanks, Mom!

[Sarah] The Asterisk graphic and name “Asterisk Books” do add a nice touch to the spine and title page! One last question: Second Sight is a popular book and is now in it’s second printing. Do you plan to release it as an e-book?

[Cheryl] At present, I do not have plans to release it as an e-book.

[Sarah] Thank you, Cheryl, for joining me in the Tollbooth today.

Be sure to visit Cheryl at her useful website (that includes many of her craft talks) and her wonderful blog. Cheryl is also on twitter. (There is important info on her website about the various option of placing orders for her book, Second Sight. Her book is an excellent resource for writers, one I highly recommend.)

~Sarah Blake Johnson

It’s a pleasure to have Debi Faulkner join me in the Tollbooth today. Originally from Detroit, she has lived in Europe for over ten years.

Debi is a poet and the author of four novels, including the chapter book, Lilypad Princess, and the you Himng adult novel, Summoning. Her middle grade novel, Year of the WereCurse: WereWhat?, was recently released in its print version.

[Sarah] Publishing a book is always a team effort. Who did you choose to help prepare your books and what did they do?

[Debi] While I’ve always relied on my wonderful and talented critique partners and writing buddies to help me prepare my manuscripts in the initial stages, going past that into the indie-publishing field has been a real learning experience.

My first novel, Summoning, went through several rounds of revisions with my own writing circle, then several more based on advice from agents who’d suggested changes. Though none of those agents ultimately took on the book, I believed that it was a story that deserved a chance.

My husband was the one who convinced me to publish the book myself, and when I discovered that it was possible to publish electronically, I tried to learn everything I could about the process. Having a small (extremely small) bit of experience with digital photography and art, I made the original cover myself. Formatting was a bit trickier, because each of the venues available to create and sell an ebook has its own methods and its own formatting rules. For this book, I took on the (sometimes very frustrating) task myself.

I pushed the “publish” buttons on the various sites, and viola! a book was born!

It didn’t take long for me to learn that my cover was amateurish and that some of the paragraphs on the Kindle edition did not format correctly.

It was time for help.

A fellow indie author on the Kindle Board’s Writer’s Cafe, Thea Atkinson, created the current cover and various other members helped me correct the formatting errors.

But I’d learned my lesson, and I’d found a wealth of resources including Editor Extraordinaire, Lynn O’Dell, and Cover Artist to the Stars, Glendon Haddix.

[Sarah] You chose an experienced and well-known editor to edit your books. What was it like working with her?

[Debi] One of the main criticisms of indie-books is that they are poorly edited. Unfortunately, that statement can be all too true. It’s possible to write a horrible first draft, decide it’s pure gold and hit that publish button before a book is ready.

But writing is my career. My reputation is on the line every time someone samples or downloads my books. I wanted them to be the very best. I wanted them to be professional. As every serious writer knows, professional editing is a must in producing a professional book. And getting the right editor is important.

That’s where Lynn O’Dell of Red Adept Publishing Services came in. This woman is amazing. Not only does she have a copyeditor’s eye for all things grammatical, but her ability to analyze story arc, characterization, pacing, plot holes – everything a good editor needs to help an author fine-tune a manuscript – is spot on.

I hired her to work with me on Year of the WereCurse: WereWhat?, and it was definitely my best decision in this entire journey so far. She is tough, and she knows how to motivate a writer to work harder, dig deeper and find a story’s underlying “truth.”

Because she is so good, and because she is extremely popular with indie-authors, I booked a place on her schedule for my next book before I’d even started writing it!

[Sarah] How involved were you in choosing the covers for your books?

[Debi] As I described above, Summoning‘s original cover was my own. While it no longer has my cover, I did learn quite a bit creating it and through the criticism of it. On my second book, LilyPad Princess, I took the lessons I’d learned and designed the cover myself.

One of the biggest issues with ebooks is making the cover completely legible in a thumbnail format – that’s the size prospective buyers see, so making any part of the title or author name too small, or adding too much clutter that is not easily distinguishable at a small size, is counter productive. What works well for a print cover doesn’t necessarily work for an ebook.

For WereWhat?, I chose to hire a professional cover designer for two reasons: the story did not really lend itself to a photo-centric cover, and the genre/age-range (mid-grade paranormal aimed at boys) seemed to scream for something hand drawn. That’s when I found Glendon Haddix with Streetlight Graphics. Glendon and his wife, Tabitha, were extremely accommodating, but it’s Glendon’s vision of Jack Henry’s world that is on the cover of the book. He took my suggestions, my concerns and the main themes of the story and worked them into a fun, attractive cover. When something didn’t quite match my vision, he revised it. For me, it was an amazing process to watch – and have input on – my characters coming to life visually.

When I chose to add a print version of WereWhat?, Glendon expanded the cover to include the spine and back, too.

Streetlight Graphics also did all of the formatting for WereWhat?, both in all ebook and print versions. Glendon also included the lobsterclaw from the cover at the beginning of each chapter, which I absolutely love.

[Sarah] Which e-books formats did you choose? Why? [Did you need a company to help with publication and distribution?]

[Debi] This is another one of the ever-changing aspects of indie-publishing. When I began with Summoning, in October of 2010, there were three main venues: Smashwords (which distributes to various outlets such as Apple, Sony and Kobo, among others), Amazon for the Kindle and Barnes and Noble for Nook users. There seem to be more options now, though to be honest, I’m not as versed in them as I should be.

One of the areas of flux for this particular issue has been the addition of Kindle Select through Amazon. An indie-author can achieve higher rankings and visibility by choosing to include a book in the Select program, which is a plus, but in order to participate, the book cannot be offered in ebook format on any other site for the duration of the commitment (which is 90-days at a time).

The arguments both for and against this practice are lengthy, and I won’t go into them. I will say, though, that I am currently experimenting with Select, and both Summoning and WereWhat? are signed up in the project. For the time being.

[Sarah] What advantages do you see with e-books?

[Debi] For me, there are two major advantages and one really nice “perk” ebooks have over a printed book. First is the ease of reading and storing entire novels. My Kindle is much easier to hold than a 500-page hard cover, and it fits easily into my purse, so I almost always have it with me. Of course, I no longer have to beg to buy more book shelves, either. I have to admit to loving the feel of a new, hard-bound book in my hands and smelling that new-paper smell, but when it comes to really diving into and living in an imaginary world with well-written characters, I can do that just fine electronically!

The second major advantage for me is the ease of purchasing books. Believe me, that’s a big one, too. I live in a non-English speaking country, and while I can find English books in the local store, they’re not usually the ones I’d like to read and the variety is very small. Ordering books and paying for the overseas delivery is also very cost prohibitive. Even ordering books through the local bookstore has proven out of my price range, because the stores must charge me all the additional costs they incur in getting the book. With my Kindle, I can go online, choose a book and start reading it within seconds.

That same ease of purchasing is one that I hope translates to buyers of my own books. Anyone can go online, find one of my books and be reading it without ever leaving the couch. Of course, getting the visibility for my books has proven to be the challenge.

The “perk” is that the cost of most ebooks is less than the print versions. It means I can buy more books!

[Sarah] Your book, Year of the WereCurse: WereWhat? was first released as an e-book. Recently it became available in a print version. What did you need to do to prepare it for print publication? Why did you choose to take time and effort so it would also be available as a paper book?

[Debi] You’ve hit on one of the pitfalls of ereaders for me – not many kids have them yet. Sure, as parents upgrade to the newer versions, kids will get the hand-me-downs, but right now there are just too few kids, 9-12 years old, who have their own Kindles. Or their own Kindle accounts.

I decided to add the print option to WereWhat? mostly due to the age range. I want to make it more available to my target audience. This is a new venture for me, but the print books are available on Amazon and can be ordered through bookstores, which should make it more available to the kids who may want to read it.

As of this moment, I have not begun the process for my other books, but if WereWhat? does well, I would definitely consider adding print versions of them all.

[Sarah] What are your plans for future books?

[Debi] In the long run, I would like to pursue both indie and traditional publishing. They each have their strengths, and I believe pursuing both is the best strategy for authors at this point.

Of course, one of the biggest things about traditional publishing that holds appeal for me may be an emotional one: validation. Having someone read your work and believe in it enough to want to invest time and money into putting it out there into the big, wide world…well, I’m sure there’s no feeling like it.

But I also know that I have other options. I don’t have to place all of my worth as an author on what a particular imprint is looking for at any particular moment or whether or not my manuscript is commercial enough or too commercial or if it can be easily categorized. If I truly believe in a story, and if I can work with a team of professionals to put out a professional product, then I have that choice and the freedom, knowledge and resources to do it.

Whether a book is indie or traditionally published, it still comes down to story – whether the book will attract and engage readers. If it’s a good story well told, I believe people will want to read it.

[Sarah] Thank you, Debi, for joining me in the Tollbooth today.

You can find out more about Debi and her books by visiting her website.

~Sarah Blake Johnson

It’s a delight to visit with Margaret J Anderson today. I discovered her books when I was in middle school, and I loved reading them over and over again. Her historical fiction books swept me away on adventures to foreign lands and earlier times. I particularly loved her fantasy time travel books.

Margaret J Anderson has been writing for publication for over thirty-five years and has published 12 novels. Her nonfiction books include biographies and science books. Her most recent books are Carl Linnaeus: Father of Classification and Bugged-Out Insects (2011).

Her out-of-print novel, In the Keep of Time, was recently released as an e-book.

[Sarah] Did your rights revert back to you or did you work with your publisher to regain your rights to your books?

[Margaret] Years ago, after my early fiction books had been out of print for a while, I asked my publisher (Knopf) for the rights back. I had the idea of getting a regional press interested in publishing some of them as paperbacks that I could sell when I was giving school presentations, but I was too involved with new projects to follow through. This was before the era of Nooks and Kindles, so I had no thought of issuing electronic versions of the books – and neither did Knopf. I’ve heard that publishers aren’t so quick to relinquish rights these days.

[Sarah] Could you explain the process you went through as you prepared In the Keep of Time to be published as an e-book?

[Margaret] Six years ago, I wrote a historical novel called Olla Piska about the botanist David Douglas (of the Douglas fir). A couple of months after it was published by the Oregon Historical Society, they went out of the publishing business, leaving Olla-Piska as an orphan child. They returned all the rights, so with the help of Ellen Beier, who had done the cover, I began to look into publishing it as an e-book. We learned the names of companies like Smashwords and BookBaby, but the big question of how you let people know the book is out there hung over us. In the end, I decided to get my feet wet by publishing a book that already had potential readers. I get quite a number of e-mails from people who read In the Keep of Time and my other early books as children and are sad that they can’t find copies to read to their children.

When I decided to start with In the Keep of Time, I was faced with a problem. The book was published in 1977 before I owned a computer, so I had no digital version. I would have to retype the entire book into Microsoft Word. Somewhere I’d read that scanning the pages could introduce mistakes that are hard to fix. Besides, I’d have to tear one of my few copies apart to scan it and I wasn’t sure my scanner was up to the task. On the upside, retyping meant I could avoid the five most common formatting mistakes cited in the Smashwords style guide. (Don’t use the tab key to indent a new paragraph, etc.) By the time I was finished, I had a new admiration for my younger self – hammering out all those long-ago books on a typewriter and correcting mistakes with whiteout!

[Sarah] Which e-books formats did you choose? Why?

[Margaret] I chose to go with BookBaby, though I can’t claim this was the result of extensive research. It was mostly based on their response to an email I sent them asking (among other things) what was the advantage of using BookBaby rather than one of the other companies out there. Someone named Meghan wrote back saying, “I believe that the best part about using BookBaby is that if you need help, you can pick up the phone and dial us and a real live human being will answer you!”  That’s very reassuring when you’re dealing with all this uncanny stuff like an entire book arriving on your Kindle with the click of a mouse! I’ve already talked to Meghan a couple of times. Also, BookBaby is located in Portland, so it feels local. As well as formatting the manuscript for all the popular reading devices: Kindle, i-Pad, Nook, Kobo, etc., they handle the financial dealings, collecting royalties and sending them on to the author.

[Sarah] Why did you choose to release In the Keep of Time first?

[Margaret] As I mentioned earlier, In the Keep of Time has loyal followers—if  I can find a way to reach them. Although the book was written years ago I think it will connect with today’s children.  It is a time-slip adventure in which the key to Smailholm Tower unlocks the past, taking four children back to 15th century Scotland, where border raiding was a common practice. The next time they use the key, the children find themselves in the 22nd century in a post climate-change world—a world without technology. Today’s kids are aware of climate change, but it wasn’t on many people’s radar back when the book was published 35 years ago.

[Sarah] You chose a photograph you took of the tower for your new cover. Where did you take the photo? Did the photo require any editing or photoshopping?

[Margaret] The photograph on the cover is of Smailholm Tower, a Scottish border keep near Kelso where my parents lived after I’d emigrated to Oregon. It’s the setting that inspired my story, and I worked in some legends associated with the tower. We always visited the tower when we went back to see my parents, and I’ve taken dozens of pictures over the years. Laszlo Kubinyi, who did the original cover, based his artwork on a photo I sent him. I couldn’t use his cover for the e-book edition because of copyright restrictions, but I did choose a similar view of the tower.

Ellen Beier helped me design the cover.  Yes, we did do some photoshopping. The first step was to straighten the tower. Ellen pointed out that my photo had a slight leaning-tower-of-Pisa slant to it that I hadn’t noticed! Then we changed the background colors to give the picture a more interesting science-fiction look. Finally we picked the font for the title, which was hard because there are so many choices.  I’m excited about what finally emerged.

[Sarah] What other books do you plan to release as e-books? When?

[Margaret] That depends on how long my enthusiasm for typing lasts! And also how the current project fares. I feel as if I’m climbing a fairly steep learning curve! But I’m already more than halfway  through typing In the Circle of Time, a sequel to In the Keep of Time, which focuses on the future people.  There’s a third book, The Mists of Time, but before I do that one I want to do my earliest novel, To Nowhere and Back. It has also generated a lot of letters and was a New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year in 1975.  After that, I may do Journey of the Shadow Bairns, which is based on my husband’s family history in northern Saskatchewan. Next in line is Searching for Shona, a World War II story that draws heavily on my own background.  And somewhere in between I’ll do Olla-Piska.

[Sarah] What advantages do you see with using e-books?

[Margaret] It will be interesting to see how this technology evolves, but I do think it’s a great way to make books that might have a limited audience available to readers. It’s hard for publishers to justify the production and storage costs for a physical book that isn’t going to jump off the shelves. E-books don’t take up space in warehouses or on bookshelves. They can also be sold at a much lower price. I’ll receive a 70% royalty for In the Keep of  Time from most reading devices, so I can price it as low as $2.99, which will give me $2.00 per book, the equivalent of a 10% royalty on a $20 book. The buyer benefits from the cheaper price as well.

Like most authors, I’ve always been in love with books and have a whole wall of them behind me as I write. But when I look at my grandchildren I see the writing on that wall! They like their electronic devices!  It used to be that the paperback edition was the poor relative of the hardbound book. Then readers wanted the lighter, cheaper paperbacks. Pretty soon they’ll all be turning pages on their Nooks and Kindles with their busy thumbs.  Personally, I still love the look and feel of a book, but I do like being able to adjust the font size on my Kindle!

[Sarah] Do any of the e-book formats allow a reader to order a print copy of the book? In other words, is there a way for a reader to buy a paper copy of the book?

[Margaret] There are ways to publish your book in a format that allows the reader to buy a print copy, but I didn’t go that route, partly because there still are a few physical copies of my early books out there through Amazon etc. Though the prices can be crazy! I just checked Amazon and a used hardback edition of To Nowhere and Back sells for anywhere from $39-$319! In 1975 it sold for $5.50.

[Sarah] When you were retyping the story, did you ever have the urge to change anything?

[Margaret] I have found myself doing some tweaking and editing! I’ve had 35 years of writing experience since I wrote In the Keep of Time.  I was a bit too fond of run-on sentences in those days, so I have eliminated some “ands.” I’m making a few bigger changes while re-typing In the Circle of Time, where Robert and Jennifer find themselves two hundred years in the future. The present time in the book is around 1979, the year I wrote the book, and I haven’t changed that. There is, however, mention of something that happened in 2010, which must have seemed quite far into the future back then. Seeing it didn’t happen in 2010, I’m jumping the event forward to 2050!

[Sarah] How does it feel to work with this book again?

[Margaret] Re-reading a book I wrote all those years ago is a bit like a time-slip adventure! It takes me back! Some of the incidents in the story were triggered by real events. One evening, when we went into the tower with our four young children, a black bird fluttered down from somewhere up near the roof and fell dead at our feet. I used this incident in the opening chapter of In the Keep of Time. The characters in the book weren’t based on my own children, but they do bring back happy memories of those visits to Scotland. And the book also brings back memories of children’s eager questions in response to the many slideshow presentations I’ve given over the years.

I really am enjoying re-visiting these old books. It’s a dark day when you get word from your publisher that your precious book is going out of print. I started this project thinking that turning my books into e-books would confer some sort of immortality on them! It turns out that isn’t the case. I have to pay BookBaby $20 per year to keep a book alive!  And the real truth is that a book is only alive when someone reads it. So I hope my old titles will spring to life again when today’s kids reach for their Sony or iPad, their Copia, Kobo, Nook or Kindle.  I love those names!

[Sarah] Thank you, Margaret, for visiting with me today. Now I have a great reason to buy an e-reader.

You can find out more about Margaret and her book on her website.

In the Keep of Time is available on Kobo, Kindle, Nook and other ebook formats.

~Sarah Blake Johnson

Last week I re-learned the most important rule of novel writing. Maybe that sounds a bit over-dramatic, and, in truth, it’s a lesson I’ve known for a good long time. But I’m not sure I fully appreciated it until last week when I read a novel that failed miserably.

A novel is a promise made and KEPT.

In the first chapter of a good novel- sometimes in the very first line- the story makes an agreement with a reader. It tells us “this book is about x, y and/or z.”

Sometimes that promise is overt. (spoiler alert)

“My name is India Opal Buloni and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog.” Because of Winn-Dixie p. 1

In the next page, India Opal rescues the smiling, dirty dog in need, claiming him as her own. It doesn’t take a genius to conclude the India Opal is also in need and that this book will be about how both India Opal and the dog are ultimately rescued.We don’t know the details yet- that India Opal’s mother abandoned her, or she’s just moved to a new town filled with lonely outcasts. We don’t know Winn-Dixie is afraid of thunder or that her father the preacher is emotionally frozen. These (and plenty of other rich character revelations) are surprises we learn along the way. But we do know this is a novel of salvation.

If it turned out to be a novel about survival after a martian attack or a romance between India Opals father and the hot-stuff divorcee down the road … the reader would be surprised- in a bad way. We want to find out how India herself is saved and Kate DiCamillo delivers. A satisfying ending is a promise KEPT. Because of Winn-Dixie ends with Opal, the preacher and Winn-Dixie sure of each other’s love. All their problems aren’t solved, all their emotional wounds aren’t healed. But they’ve come to greater understanding and happiness. Each major character has been rescued.

Easy, right? Obvious, huh? Ha.

Last week I read an advance copy of a adult novel that will be released this summer. Publishers and bookstores are already pushing it. Here’s another spoiler. It stinks.

But it took this bad book- a failure- to make me truly understand why making and keeping a novel’s promise is crucial.

I’m not about writing bad book reviews so let’s call this book “That Crummy Novel That Breaks Its Promise.” In the first chapter we meet a grieving father who has vivid dreams of his dead son. “(E)ven though Mark was awake he could still hear them? He couldn’t make her (his cold new fiance)- anyone- understand a thing like that.” By the second chapter he’s been stalked by a creepy woman who says his son’s ghost is haunting her house. And we learn that his ex-wife, the boy’s mother, has always believed she could make beyond-the-grave contact with her dead son.

So this is a ghost story, right? That’s what the cover, the early reviews, and the first pages promise.

Nope.

Fast forward to about a quarter of the way from the end. We haven’t actually come close to a ghost yet but there’s been a lot of talk about them. The crummy protagonist is back with his ex-wife and they’ve hired spiritualists to summon their son’s spirit to put it to rest. The characters are nervous and excited.  The reader is flipping pages with eager anticipation.

Then the writer slams on the brakes.

In a nutshell Mark, the crummy protagonist, says “I must have been drunk when I agreed to do this.” He turns his back on his wife (again) and kicks the mediums out of the house. Smack. Crack. Promise broken. That’s it. The end.

Ending with “I was drunk and there’s no such thing as ghosts” is worse than Bobby Ewing walking out of the shower and saying “it was all a dream.”

That Dallas ending was so spectacularly silly, over the top, and (for many people) disappointing that it became a campy national joke. It’s not so funny in an (allegedly) serious novel.

I felt cheated by the crummy novel’s non-ending. I was cheated. I’m not saying ghosts needed to start circling the house to satisfy me. A good ending must also be a surprise. But it’s an inevitable surprise. You may not always get the ending you “want” but a good ending satisfies the promise made, even when doesn’t tie up every problem with a shiny red bow or turn out the way you expect. Saying Oops I was drunk and I’m not going through with this doesn’t cut it (unless I guess it’s a novel about alcoholism.)

Katherine Paterson knew something about inevitable, surprising but ambiguous endings when she wrote The Great Gilly Hopkins. In chapter one Gilly wants to leave foster care and be reunited with her mother.

(Spoiler alert)

Things don’t go as Gilly plans. Yes, she leaves foster care. Yes, her mother comes back. But it turns out that her mother stinks and Gilly loves the wonderful wacky woman who fostered her. This isn’t the ending protective readers “wish” for Gilly but it’s the brave, honest ending this no-holds-barred book deserves. If Mr. Crummy Novelist wrote this there would have been a busy signal or a wrong number when Gilly makes her spectacular, heart-wrenching last phone call. But Paterson promised us Gilly would learn to open her heart and accept love, even when love leads to heartbreak. Promise made and promise (spectacularly) kept. That’s what I call a good lesson and a happy ending.

The End

~tami lewis brown

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So far this week, we’ve been talking about how to create empathy in narrative non-fiction through well chosen sensory details. But there’s more to the story. In non-fiction, just as in fiction, you have to find a through line. Through line comes from the frame you set for the character’s story, is augmented by the balance of summary and event, and builds on hope and disappointment toward the character’s goal.  

Framing Your Narrative

I was lucky enough this January to be in the audience at Vermont College of Fine Arts, when author Shelley Tanaka unveiled photos from her book A Day that Changed America, Earthquake! With each photo came a heart wrenching tale about the individuals whose lives were turned upside down that April day. And it reminded me that a well crafted non-fiction book can make true story as gripping as any piece of fiction.

Like the sinking of the Titanic, this historical event especially captures our imaginations. And while there might be many reasons, including what was happening historically, socially and culturally at the time, the bottom line is, it’s the humanness of the tragedy that lingers. We all yearn to be safe, to have our dreams fulfilled. And it’s the dashing of these dreams and the struggle to reclaim them, which creates great narrative.

As Robert Owen Butler writes in From Where You Dream, “We are the yearning creatures of this planet.” Find what your character yearns for, even in non-fiction, and you have your story. To bring the idea of empathy back in, yearning ties us empathically to others, as author Jeremy Rifkin finds in The Empathic Civilization, because our human capacity to empathize is not only emotional, but an ability that is hard wired into our neurological pathways. You might say we feel empathy (and thus yearning) in our very bones.

The writer’s task, then, is to tap into this yearning to frame his story. In books such as Tanaka’s, and those mentioned earlier by Levinson and Barton, the author’s stories, and thus the through line, were framed by events, the events offering a beginning, middle and end to the human journey set within its borders. But if you’re writing a book larger in scope, such as a biography, the challenge is to unearth a through line that creates its own frame. And that’s a matter of carefully sluicing through, and summarizing, your research, then balancing your findings with your character’s emotions.  

Research Rollercoaster

It’s tempting when you research non-fiction to want to use every bit. You may end up with fabulous first hand interviews, letters, diaries, other biographies, newspaper articles, and historical accounts of the times. But you have to then carve away at your findings to reveal those points that relate to the story happening to your character.

Emotional Though Line

When I was writing the Scholastic biography Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia I had my story when I found this through line. Catherine was born Sophie in a small German principality. She wanted to please her mother, who raised her to marry well. Marrying well, which meant marrying into a ruling class, became her own goal (her yearning) as she grew.

But Sophie’s hopes were dashed early in life when she was disfigured by a long illness. What future husband would want a disfigured woman? Worse, her panicked mother summoned the executioner, the only one who could fashion Sophie a body cast to help straighten her crooked spine. The active girl had to wear this disabling cast for months, if not years. But it was during this time that she studied and read, and built the intellect that would later help her rule Russia.

And so it went. When, at age 15, a now straight-backed Sophie was summoned to Russia as a possible bride for heir to the throne, her cousin Peter, she made sure she pleased Empress Elizabeth and the Russian people. Sophie’s plain looks were a downfall, but her intelligence a plus. Later, after she’d pleased the Empress, been christened Catherine, and married Peter, her two children—born from liaisons with other men—nearly did her in. (Catherine’s internal struggle also played a huge role in her story since, as she struggled to understand herself, she could be her own worst enemy.)

The list of ups and downs grew. Catherine was locked away after childbirth and feared imprisonment. She seized the throne from her husband and perhaps arranged for his murder. Later, as Empress, she gave up a desire to be an enlightened ruler when a peasant uprising threatened her power. So, while her short term goals changed, Sophie, now Catherine the Great, never lost sight of her yearning to rule. And each of these elements was important to the overall thread of her story goal. In writing her biography, what didn’t fit in moving her to this goal, had to be left out.

High Tide

Find what your character yearns for in your non-fiction narrative. Frame you story through events or by using your character’s emotional through line. Imagine your through line as an incoming tide, each wave cresting and falling like your character’s inner waves of hope and disappointment, hope and disappointment. These waves—in ever increasing intensity—will create your story. Until finally, at high tide, your character faces her crisis moment. Crisis leading, as we know, to resolution, and the smooth sand as the tide pulls back.

                                          –zu vincent                                          

Gretchen’s March 28 Tollbooth post on the way we respond to words, metaphor and experience struck me as particularly appropriate to what’s on my mind this week, creating voice in narrative non-fiction. Voice depends on reader empathy in non-fiction as much as it does in fiction. It’s one of the first things editors look for, and just as with fiction, it’s crafted through story and sensory detail.

Consider the following, is it fiction, or non-fiction?

“Your name is Solomon Perel. You’re a short, skinny, sixteen-year-old Jew, and you’ve just been captured by the Nazis. It’s all you can do not to piss on yourself.

They’ve nabbed you and a bunch of other refugees, just a few days into Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Now they’ve lined you all up in a field as they decide what do with each of you.

Most of you are Jewish—that’s why you were on the run in the first place—so the Nazis don’t have to think too hard about it. They take groups of refugees ahead of you off into the woods. From the forest come the sounds of shovels and machine guns, shovels and machine guns.”   

How about this?

“Polio came down on a lot of kids that summer. It shriveled the leg of one girl in our congregation and deformed the arm of a little boy. The doctor knew what it was a soon as he saw Delphine. He sent her to St. Jude Hospital and put her in an iron lung to help her breathe. She couldn’t move. All she could do was whisper through her breath, that’s what my momma said. I used to go in the car with them to visit, but Mom and Q.P. made me wait outside the hospital. They didn’t want me to get sick, too, and they didn’t want me to see Delphine like that. Once I tried to slip inside to see my sister, but a nurse caught me and led me back out screaming. I never saw Delphine alive again after the day she left our house to go see the doctor. The next time I saw her she was dead.”

Or this?

“On Thursday morning, May 2, 1963, nine-year-old Audrey Faye Hendricks woke up with freedom on her mind. But, before she could be free, there was something important she had to do.

‘I want to go to jail,’ Audrey told her mother.

Since Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks thought that was a good idea, they helped her get ready. Her father had even bought her a new game she’d been eyeing. Audrey imagined that it would entertain her if she got bored during her week on a cell block.”

Each of the above passages are from non-fiction narratives.

The first quote is from a vignette in Chris Barton’s new nonfiction book for young people, Can I See Your ID? about people who made their mark, for whatever reason, by misleading folks.

The second, from Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin, Twice Toward Justice, is a story about a little known civil rights figure who stood up for herself by refusing to give up her seat on a bus before Rosa Parks made her mark, and thus affected the course of American history. 

And finally, the last quote from We’ve Got a Job To Do, the 1963 Birmingham Children’s March by Cynthia Levinson, is the story of how Birmingham’s black youth answered Dr. Martin Luther King’s call to “fill the jails: of their city,” as the book notes. “And in doing so, how they drew national attention to the cause and helped bring about the repeal of segregation laws.”

What these narratives have in common is a particular voice crafted by story and sensory detail. That’s easy to spot as a reader because you know it when you see it. But how do you get it in your writing? For Barton and Levinson, it was finding the right approach to their research.

 Can I See Your ID?

Chris Barton wrote Can I See Your ID? entirely in second person. After researching risk taking characters through history who posed as someone they weren’t, he “had stacks of research… but not a single word written down. I hadn’t yet come up with a voice.” At first, he merely played around with second person to experience what his characters were experiencing. He liked the effects. “But ‘you’?” he thought. “A whole book addressed to ‘you’?” Yet once he caught that voice, he couldn’t let it go.

Writing in second person though, made it especially challenging to create distinct voices that let readers experience events through an individual character’s eyes. Much of getting it right had to do with sensory detail and scene setting.

“I collected a lot of information about these people’s lives,” he notes, “And about the times and places where these scenes occur. Sometimes, I just got extremely lucky, such as finding a book that provided the daily temperatures during the Civil War for the particular place I needed… to make the scene seem real.”

It worked. Reading Barton’s blend of action, character conflict, and historical detail you can’t imagine this book any other way, because the technique puts you masterfully, smack dab in each character’s shoes.

We’ve Got a Job To Do

In contrast, the voice in Cynthia Levinson’s We’ve Got a Job To Do, the 1963 Birmingham Children’s March is, as agent Erin Murphy puts it, “Notable for its invisibility. For the most part, what Cynthia Levinson achieves is putting the viewpoints of her four profiled participants at the forefront, letting them and their experiences speak for themselves.” And it’s these experiences that give young readers a unique window into the Civil Rights Movement.

To achieve this, Levinson relied on her own brand of sensory details such as “listening to music and sermons. I wrote Chapter Five,” she says, “which is on the role of mass meetings and religion in the civil rights movement, while listening to gospel, movement songs, and early-60s black rock music.”

She also unearthed recordings of sermons given at mass meetings by Reverend Ralph Abernathy and by Dr. King (including one in which he rehearsed what became the “I have a dream,” speech he delivered four months later at the March on Washington).

“I continued listening to them while revising that chapter,” Levinson adds. “My interviews and other primary sources, such as reports by white policemen who spied on the meetings were also essential. But, it was by being infused with the hallelujah fervor of the songs and sermons that I could write scenes such as the following:

A mass meeting rolled worship services, social visits, teen hangouts, choir concerts, sing-alongs, fish fries, strategy sessions, political debates, news reports, educational assemblies, fundraisers, crowd-rousers, and calls for volunteers all into one spiritual and spirited extravaganza.”

Next: the 1906 earthquake, Catherine the Great, and a storyteller’s guide to writing your own narrative non-fiction story.     –zv

I love what scientists are learning about our brains from fMRIs (functional magnetic imaging machines). A recent “New York Times” article entitled “Your Brain on Fiction” is all about what fMRI research has shown about reading fiction. The author, Annie Murphy Paul, tells us how and why the worlds of stories can feel truly alive. “Words like ‘lavender,’ ‘cinnamon’ and ‘soap, for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.”

I remember being taught at Vermont College to consider including actions or sensations pertaining to each of the five senses in my stories. Include a smell, include a taste, include a sound. And don’t forget the other two if you can help it.

Now scientists are proving my advisors right.

Scientists are also researching the neural power of metaphors. As any creative writer knows, many figures of speech have become so common as to have lost any metaphorical richness. Instead, they survive as mere terms. On the other hand, according to Murphy, an explicitly textural (and surprising) metaphor, such as “‘He had leathery hands’ roused the sensory cortex.”

Again, I feel my advisors smiling.

Further, descriptions of the motor activity of fictional characters stimulates the motor cortex of a reader’s brain.

Most interesting of all to me, and surely also obvious to any reader of fiction, is that the brain seems not to distinguish much between reading about an experience and experiencing it in real life. According to Murphy, “In each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.” One researcher contends that this is because “reading produces a vivid simulation of reality.” Fiction, perhaps because its explicit aim is to create such a simulation, offers “an especially rich replica” by comparison to other reading genres.

In fact, fiction can go further than real life, allowing us to become other people or to travel to places we’ll never go, including the past and the future and places that simply don’t exist. Nevertheless, it can all feel absolutely believable and true.

Other research suggests that the same parts of the brain that are involved in trying to understand stories are also enlisted in making sense of interactions with real people. Stories can “‘help us understand the complexities of social life,’” offers one researcher. Children who are read to a lot as pre-schoolers have a keener sense of others’ intentions than children who are not.

All this research can help writers understand their audiences (as well as understand themselves as readers). But scientists are also using fMRIs and other new technologies to understand the creative process, including writing. Jonah Lehrer has just published a book on the subject called “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” which I recommend to anyone who makes art of any kind. He reports on what scientists have learned about the role of struggle in the creative process, on the necessity of being stumped before moving on to a solution, on why sometimes careful and laborious analysis fails – and then an answer comes out of nowhere.

For me, “Imagine” is a relief. It’s a relief to learn from scientific research that I’m a normal creative person. It’s normal never to be satisfied with my writing or my art – at least not until long after others think the problem has been solved. It’s normal to fail over and over until you wonder if you’re any good at all. It’s normal for a creative person to choose a life of making art even though it’s sometimes depressing, and it’s normal for depression to be a part of your toolkit because, oddly, depression can actually keep you from giving up.

And it’s normal to be willing to deal with all of those things if they’re the price of creating for readers (and, in my case, also viewers) experiences that rival real life. That, for me, makes everything worth it.

The “New York Times” article is “Your Brain on Fiction.”
Jonah Lehrer’s book is “Imagine: How Creativity Works.”

This week I’ve been talking about how Haywire character Mallory Kane has a problem connecting with her audience. We’re impressed by her cage-fighting skills, her determination, and her smarts, but don’t really like her or want to see her in a sequel.

Going back to what Hemley said in my first post, for us to connect with Mallory we need to understand what motivates her.

So how would I revise her character?

I don’t think Mallory needs a huge makeover for her to connect to her viewer. She’s the star of an action film and the focus needs to be on how she’s going to survive.

In Tuesday’s post, I quoted James Gandolfini talking about how Tony Soprano’s on screen therapy sessions allowed the viewer to see Tony’s concerns, his desires, and his disappointments. While I’m not advocating putting Mallory on the therapist’s couch, we need to get inside her head a bit more.

We don’t know why Mallory chose to become a hired gun. We know she was in the military, but we’re not sure if she chose her profession because she loves the adrenaline rush, or has a profound sense of justice, or couldn’t find another job. In my Mallory Makeover, I’d give the viewer a hint of what’s driving her.

And I’d peel away a corner of Mallory’s emotional armor. Early on, when she has post-rescue assignment sex with her colleague, I’d show the moment of attraction: he shoves her out of the line of fire. Their eyes connect. They’re momentarily trapped together, the adrenaline pumping. A shared piece of black humor. She’s still the hero, but I’d give a glimpse of what ignites her.

Mallory could use a dash of humor. She’s got this poor kid trapped in the getaway car with her. Either I’d have her tease him to make him relax or have her make wry observations about her plight. What characters joke about and the manner in which they joke reveal who they are inside.

Early in the film, I might have her grab a present for her dad in the Barcelona airport. Soderbergh shows Mallory opening a gift from her father, a signed copy of his recent book. His inscription shows he cares about her–but if Mallory selected a present for him, it would reveal her feelings for her father, and help the viewer see inside her psyche.

When the deer comes crashing through the car window, I’d have Mallory react. Only a robot killing machine treats an innocent animal as if it’s nothing. Mallory could scream, cry, throw up, thoughtfully put the deer out of its misery. Her response would train a light on her character.

I would definitely keep the magnificent fight scenes, but I’d stop short of having Mallory break a man’s back while he’s down. It’s one thing to fire back at someone firing at you, quite another to kill in cold blood when you’ve already overcome the opponent.

Part of the brilliance of  Hunger Games is that Suzanne Collins managed to keep Katniss sympathetic while forcing her to kill. Collins knew the boundaries and she knew she had to balance force with compassion to keep the reader on Katniss’ side.

We don’t have to do a complete rewrite on our difficult characters as long as we give the audience a flicker of insight into who they are and provide a moment in which we see that they are not so very different from ourselves.