Tag Archives: writing

Learning to Love your Book-alikes

When my very first book Heart of a Shepherd came out back in 2009 I met Suzanne Morgan Williams from the Class of 2K9 marketing group whose book Bull Rider was astonishingly similar to mine. It was all the more surprising because they were western stories about ranching families with family members deployed to the Middle East. Not exactly the most crowded genre. It was very tempting to think of this as a disaster, a head to head competition, a diminishment of what I had worked so hard on. But my husband pointed out that selling a book is not like selling a car. It’s not like a person buys a book and then doesn’t need another for 5 to 10 years. A very helpful perspective. The beauty of the book business is that the more people read good books the more they want new good books.

And the really terrific thing was getting to know Suzanne and working together to promote our books because we’ve found that if a reader likes one of our stories, they will probably like the other. They aren’t identical books after all. The main character in Suzanne’s story is a little bit older. Heart of a Shepherd is about the experience of having a deployed parent. Bull Rider is about the experience of having a brother return from war with a traumatic brain injury. We’ve done joint book store appearances, spoken together on panels and in workshops at writers conferences, and even sold our books together at the Reno Rodeo. And much to our mutual delight these books have flourished side by side.

But I’ve also known people who’ve worked for months, years even, and seen a book published which is very similar to their own manuscript, and then decided to drop their own project completely. It’s such a shame because there is often plenty of room for multiple

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books on a topic. I think of them as “book-alikes” and in some ways they can be an asset to your own work. If somebody has written a book similar to mine then it’s a great strategy to encourage my book to be grouped in with a similar book. Often teachers are looking for several books from a historical era so that there will be something to suit every reading level in her class. Many bookstores prefer to host multi-author events. The picture to the right is myself and Elizabeth Rusch (dressed as Nannerl Mozart) and Virginia Euwer Wolff. We are doing an event which drew dozens of vocal and instrumental performers and lots of families to a community center to celebrate our three music-themed books: Virginia’s Mozart Season, an absolute classic YA story of a girl preparing for a music competition, Liz’s picture book biography For the Love of Music about Mozart’s big sister, and my middle grade novel Second Fiddle.

I’ve learned to love my Book-Alikes over the years and have become good friends of people whose books are similar to mine. And in celebration of that here are four books who like my story Written in Stone are set in America in the early part of the 20th century. They are Crossing Stones by Helen Frost, A Whistle in the Dark by Sue Hill Long, Born of Illusion by Teri Brown and In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters.

The Retrospective Outline

To outline or not to outline

If you are looking to start a quarrel (or at least a passionate debate) in an MFA creative writing program, the topic of outlining is a winner every time. Having never taken an creative writing class or alas, even majored in English, I came to the debate late in the game and without a horse in the race. I believe that in the end each writer finds her own way, and no one system works for every writer. That said I think I have finally hit upon an outlining strategy that works well for me. I think of it as the Retrospective Outline. I’ve always intuitively resisted the initial outline as stifling but I know that sooner or later the structure of story needs attention, so I’ve taken to doing the outline after a full first draft is finished.

I finished a draft right before Christmas. It’s a story I’ve been working on for a while. Like a lot of writers I’ve heard from over the years, I’m better at beginnings and endings than middles. It’s very easy to lose focus in the middle and either write more scenes than you really need or not quite enough leaving gaps in the narrative. A friend recommended the screenwriting book Save the Cat and since I hope to write a screenplay in the next few months I thought I’d give it a try. Screenwriter Blake Snyder is a big advocate of laying out an entire movie in scenes, a note card for each scene. The scenes are put on a cork board, a row of cards for each of three acts, and rearranged or discarded as necessary. I was a bit skeptical at first but my studio has a lovely long empty wall painted in my favorite shade of red, so I gave it a try using post-it notes.

Drama in 3 Acts!

When I first laid out my scenes it became immediately obvious that the second half of the second act was where the trouble resided. All the other sections had 7 to 10 scenes and the second half of the the second act had 16 scenes. Aha!

Then once I had an idea of where to look I went through each scene with an eye to which ones had strong conflict, and propelled the main character forward. It became pretty obvious which scenes were just there to convey information, had no inherent conflict, and took the focus off my main character and his journey.

But wait there was vital information in those scenes–not so much drama but stuff you have to know! That’s the hard part of of trimming your work, not letting go of a perfectly good scene that doesn’t serve the plot, but figuring out what to do about the bits of information. I ended up putting the info on a smaller post-it and finding a different scene where I could weave it in. The best part about the process was learning that really in the 5 scenes I cut, I only had 4 vital pieces of story information that eventually found a home early in the second act.

Integrating the Visual elements of a story

This particular book has a visual element–completely new ground for me. I added smaller blue post-its for the scenes that have an illustration. In an earlier draft the first illustration didn’t come until mid-way through the second act. (Pink is act 1, green is the two halves of act 2, and purple is the 3rd act.) It was clear in looking at the book as a whole that the 12th scene was too long to wait for a visual so I found a way to put one in the 3rd scene of the story. But then as I was working a really strong idea came along for a final image at the very end of the story, so I decided to look for a way to put an echoing image in the first scene. The result (I hope) is a much more balanced story.

So there you have it! One method for outlining a story. Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea but it helped me trim about 6,000 words that were not doing my story any good.

If your new year’s resolutions happen to include writing a novel for kids or teens, I’ve got a class starting up at the Loft Literary center. My Vampire-Free Fiction class starts the 20th of this month. You can get lots more information here

Revision from the orchard tenders point of view

I have the wonderful luck to live in a historic home in Portland, Oregon. It’s the best preserved example of a gothic farmhouse in the area, and it has big yard which contains historic fruit trees. We have cherries, walnuts, apples, peaches, plums, and pears. I love working with trees that are probably more than 100 years old and I love having fresh fruit for pies and jams for my family. But to be honest, fruit trees are a lot of work.

When I’m taking a writing break in the summer I’ll often climb down from my treehouse and get out the old orchard ladder and spend some time on my back yard orchard. Because I don’t spray the fruit, I lose a substantial amount of the harvest to insect or disease damage. The sooner I get those blighted or undersized fruits off the tree the better. And then comes the harder task. I need to pick perfectly good fruit before it’s ripe and throw it away.

I know. My inner skin-flint cringes at the waste. But the truth is a tree will put out more fruit than it can ripen in a season. So I will go along the branches looking for clusters of 3 or more peaches, pears or apples and remove one or two from the cluster so that the remaining fruits get enough light and water and energy from the tree to ripen fully. I hate to do it but when I’ve neglected this task I’ve come away with a crop of apples or pears that never fully ripens and the entire harvest is worthless.

This year I learned an even harder lesson. I only have 2 peach trees. It’s a challenge to grow peaches in Oregon’s cool climate, so some years I get no peaches at all or less than a dozen. But for some reason this year I got a bumper crop. I love peach pie. Lavender peach jam is a big favorite with my whole family. So I didn’t thin the peaches as aggressively as I should and my peach tree broke under the weight of the crop. The whole tree fell over–a complete loss.

And what does this have to do with writing? I’ve learned the hard way that just because a section of my story is good and fun and beautiful doesn’t mean it belongs in the book. My first pass in revising is of course like the first pass in orchard tending–get rid of the rotten. Cut what’s not working. I might need the help of my critique group or editor to recognize what’s not working, but once located it’s not hard to ditch spoiled fruit or lackluster prose. The tricky part is cutting what is beautiful and without fault in the service of the larger story.

Here’s an example from a story I’m still working on. It had two characters who were too strong to be in the same book. Both characters had and interesting arc and strong emotional pull. The voice of my main character at several points was overwhelmed by this second character. The result was that the book as a whole didn’t work. It was a fallen tree of a story and I didn’t know how to fix it. I pouted about this for a while. But I came to see that there was no way both of those characters would ripen on the same tree. And here is where writing books is better than tending an orchard. I wrote two books–started over with different settings and adjusted premises. I let each character develop without having to compete for reader loyalty in the same book. I’m still in the thick of working out these two stories but with a little luck and a lot of hard work, I hope to have two viable fully-ripened stories instead of one.

The Death of Copyediting

I’ve heard about the death of copy editing many times, both from authors and librarians, lamenting the lack of time for copy edits and the multiplicity of errors in books. I can only speak from my own books at Random House, but in my experience copy editing is alive and well—distressingly so.

This might not be everyone’s experience. Perhaps it’s just my own manuscripts that go out emblazoned with the words Not Written By An English Major upon their foreheads. My most recent manuscript was copy edited by no less than three people—each with her own color of pencil. As I read through it was clear to me that Violet and Indigo did not like each other very much, but Green, obviously the middle child of the group, was there to say, “Come on, girls. Can’t we get along? It’s just a hyphen!”

I was left with my highly-embarrassed Scarlet pencil to follow after my much wiser sisters of syntax who marked no less than a dozen items on every single page of a manuscript that ran longer than 160 pages. It’s nearly 2,000 copy edit marks!

My job for and entire week was to think about every single one of those marks and make a decision. Often it was the fairly easy. “Duh, of course the comma goes there. Why didn’t I notice that ages ago?”

Although to be honest, sometimes it’s more like, “Fine, what ever you say! Who cares if concertmaster is one word or two?”

And I confess that from time to time it’s even, “Seriously? There’s a rule about that? Dang! I should have been paying attention in English.” Lucky for me Violet, Indigo, and Green were paying attention. In fact, they were the honors students, I’m sure of it.

Every now and then I have to say, “Now look, I know your suggestion is technically superior in every way but no kid would say or think this. Ever. Not in any century or any other planet. Sorry.” For reasons I do not begin to understand this is abbreviated STET.

I can see why copy edits get neglected. It’s difficult, often tedious work, it requires not just technical excellence from the copy editor, but also artistic sensibility, and it is frequently accomplished on a tight deadline.

And so, dear Violet, Indigo and Green, Thank you for your diligence. Thank you for your depth of knowledge in English, and for this book, German, French, Russian and (no kidding) Estonian. I am completely dazzled that you found a speaker of Estonian! Go Violet! Thank you for your probing questions, your willingness to hunt up accurate maps and even do the math on rates of exchange. I’ll never make fun of an English major again! Most of all thank you for respecting my reader enough to help me make Second Fiddle the best book it can be.