Tag Archives: editing

Perseverance: One Writer’s Journey

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized, Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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I’d like to introduce a client of mine, Alison Mather, who’s recently signed with a prestigious literary agency in the UK. She’s had an interesting journey (to say the least) and has agreed to share it with you. I think you’ll find it inspiring:

Perseverance. It’s a word most commonly used when telling a person’s story of triumph, after they’ve triumphed – which is all well and good and serves as a reminder that your goal can be achieved, but is utterly horrible when you’re actually trying to do it: being perseverant. At least it is to me. I find it very much akin to what I imagine being lost in the wilderness to be like (without the constant threat of sudden death). What direction should I take? How do I know if this step is the right one? What if I’m just going around in circles? Why are the signposts so damned hard to find?

Okay, so that’s where the analogy ends because most people know that the best thing to do if you are physically lost is to stay still and that is absolutely, positively the worst thing you could do if you ever want to be a published author.

During my own journey as a writer I have asked all of these questions every step of the way, and a heck of a lot more. The results can be stultifying and very damaging to your chances if you are the sort to give up easily.

I am one of ‘those’ people who took time off to write. I am very lucky to have an extremely supportive spouse who encouraged me to do so. If you are now thinking that means I’ve had it easy, think again. Six months into writing my first manuscript I was diagnosed with thyroid disease, my husband was retrenched from his job and a 24 foot tree fell on our house during the big Brisbane storms. Add to that, I received nothing but rejection letters to every single query I sent out to publishers and agents. Things were not going to plan and it was very, very hard.

Somehow, though – and here is where the perseverance bit comes in – I managed to write a second, and much better, manuscript and tried again. Now, five years later, I have just signed with a literary agency and am starting work on editing the story – for what feels like the billionth time – in the more real hope of interesting a publisher.

Not the ideal journey to becoming an author, perhaps, but here’s what I’ve learned:

Your writing is key – do everything possible to ensure it is the best it can be, and I don’t mean asking your family. They will always be on your side and that’s not what you need. Join your local Writer’s Centre and find a manuscript assessor. I edited my own work three times and then hired Louise to edit it again. Is it really worth the expense? I sent my work, edited by me, to every publisher in Australia and it was rejected. I paid for professional advice and now I have an agent.

Listen to everything that’s being said to you by the people who know. I was rejected by a tonne of agents earlier this year but one actually took the time to write a personal letter of explanation suggesting that I was aiming at the wrong age group. I was so cut up about the rejection that I almost missed the significance of that particular crumb of advice. And they will be crumbs and you have to fall on them like they’re nuggets of gold, even if all you can hear is the criticism.

Cast a wide net – as in global wide.  My agent is in London. By all means go local to begin but understand that there are a handful of publishers and agents in Australia and a shedload of writers – unless you’ve written that must-have story in which case I’m struggling with my resentment. I smashed the internet doing research and you really have to look. I strongly recommend the following websites: www.literaryrambles.com for agents that rep in your genre, www.writersdigest.com for new agents alerts – you have far more chance with agents who are looking to build their lists, Sarah’s blog at www.greenhouseliterary.com for tips on query writing and many more that I can’t fit in here.

Remember, I was totally green, I knew nothing about the industry that I was hoping to carve a career in, but I dedicated myself to it utterly and I’ve made it this far. You can too.

Alison Mather signing her agency contract

Alison Mather signing her agency contract

Writing success really is one part inspiration and ten parts perspiration. Keep at it, and if you’ve got any tips on how to keep motivation up while persevering, do share them with us below. Cheers! Louise

Getting Published Part 4: Using critique to hone your manuscript

22 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized

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When you’ve finished writing your manuscript and have edited it to the best of your ability, you need to make a judgement call about whether it’s ready to submit to publishers/agents. This is a particular challenge for writers because it’s very difficult to be objective about your own work.  We can all use some critique to give us perspective. Fresh eyes can pick out things we’d easily miss, particularly when we’re so close to the story.

Macleay Island Inspirational Writers critiquing each other’s work

WHO TO ASK: This is important.  Don’t trust just anyone with your manuscript. There are other writers out there who will savage your work so they can feel better about their own, and they don’t even realise what they’re doing.  Make sure you know and trust the writers you give your baby to. Also don’t ask family/friends who have a vested interest in making you happy (or miserable as the case may be). They can’t be objective, and in many cases aren’t even readers of the genre you’re writing in, so their opinions might muddy the water. If you want to impress them, wait till you have a finished product to put in their hands!

Writing support/critique groups can be fabulous (either face to face or online) in developing a support network. Wait a while before you ask for critique – that gives you time to find other members who are writing the same genre as you, and also allows you time to see if they’re going to be able to take their ego out of the equation. Try trusting them with a chapter to critique first, and see if you feel that they’re being objective.

WHAT TO ASK FOR: Being critiqued isn’t a passive exercise. You don’t just hand over your baby and hope for the best. You have to work out what you want to achieve from the process and ask for the sort of feedback that will most suit you at that time. If you’ve just written a rough first draft and aren’t even sure if it’s working, you can ask for generalised comment on the interest level of the plot, whether there were any boring bits, and if there were any characters / situations that weren’t engaging and interesting. It’s also helpful to ask for the critiquer to specify what they loved about the story, so you’ve got something emotional to hang onto while you embark on your edits (“At least I know I got that right!”). You might have a particular area you feel weak in (perhaps dialogue or characterisation), and you might want them to particularly hone in on those areas in their critique. If you’re pretty sure you have the structure right and want line/copy edits (grammar, punctuation etc) perhaps in preparation for submitting to a competition or agent/publisher, be specific about that, giving the critiquer permission to point out ‘every little thing’ that’s a glitch for them.

HOW TO RECEIVE IT: It’s easy to feel defensive when someone is telling you that your baby is ugly! Resist the urge. This isn’t a suggestion. This is a commandment. If you start pointing out why you wrote it that way and why the person critiquing didn’t understand what you meant, you’ve negated the whole point of critiquing. When your book is published you can’t run after each copy and wait until the reader gets to page 94 so you can lean over their shoulder and say “What I was trying to do here was…”. The book must speak for itself. So if a crit buddy didn’t get what you were trying to do, it’s your job to say “Thanks so much for pointing that out” and then when you get home look at how they might have misunderstood what you were doing and how you can fix that. If you’re convinced that 99% of readers would be fine with it, then leave it. But don’t be precious. You asked for crit, so listen and be grateful! Don’t justify yourself, just keep saying “Thanks so much for pointing that out.”

HOW TO GIVE IT: Make sure when it’s your turn to critique someone’s work that you understand exactly what sort of critique they want (see above), and do only that. You might mention in passing that you think the viewpoint needs looking at too, but if they didn’t ask for comment on that, don’t detail it! Also, frame your critique as ‘areas for improvement’ rather than ‘things that are wrong’.  Remember, this is just your opinion, and many books that were rejected by influential editors have gone on to make millions. You are not an expert. You are just another writer trying to be helpful.  Above all, praise what’s working. I can’t reiterate enough how helpful it is to get ‘positive strokes’ when you’re learning your craft. If a particular line of dialogue sparkled or you had an emotion surge through you while you were reading a section, mark that on the manuscript. Let the author know they moved you. They need to find out what’s working beautifully, as well as the areas for improvement.

THE BENEFITS OF CRITIQUING: 1: It’s free! 2: Picking areas for improvement in someone else’s manuscript will hone your editors eye so you can see those problems in your own work. 3: You form emotional support networks with other writers which will help you through the submission / rejection / acceptance process.

THE DOWNSIDE OF CRITIQUING: If your crit buddy doesn’t know any more about the craft of writing than you do, it could end up being ‘the blind leading the blind’.  So if your crit group have done the best they can and you’re still not finaling in competitions or are still receiving form rejection letters from publishers, it might be time to bite the bullet and invest some cash in your writing career with a manuscript assessment or mentoring.

BETA READERS: If you know readers (non-writers) who adore books in the genre you’re writing, ask them if they’ll give you feedback on your manuscript. They notice completely different things to crit buddies and might say things like “This is where I thought he was the killer,” or “I got such a shock here, I didn’t see this coming,” which is really helpful in gauging the success of your plotting.

Well that’s my advice for this week on how to move towards publication. We’ll be back to Workshop Wednesday next week with best-selling crime author and multiple Davitt Award winner Katherine Howell who will be discussing how to create suspense. See you then!

There are more Getting Published blogs to read, and if you’d like to share your experience of being critiqued or critiquing, please drop that in as a comment below!

Workshop Wednesday: How to self publish an ebook

25 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by in The Publishing Industry, Uncategorized, Workshop Wednesday series

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Welcome to this week’s Workshop Wednesday where indie author Patrick O’Duffy is generously sharing his expertise to help you self publish an ebook.  Self publishing is a fabulous option for established authors who can’t sell a particular project, or who want to self-publish their backlist, as they already have a readership who are likely to buy their ebooks.  It’s also a great option for unpublished authors who don’t want to go the tradition route, or who haven’t been able to find a publisher or an agent (although they would need to do more work in marketing to create a readership for themselves).

Firstly, here’s a little about our guest today: Patrick O’Duffy is tall, Australian and a professional editor, although not always in that order. He has written role-playing games, short fiction, a little journalism and freelance non-fiction, and is currently working on a novel, although frankly not working hard enough. He loves off-kilter fiction, Batman comics and his wife, and finds this whole writing-about-yourself-in-the-third-person thing difficult to take seriously.  And the blurb of his novel The Obituarist (which I’ve read and loved!): Kendall Barber is a social media undertaker with a shady past who’s returned to the equally shady city of Port Virtue. Now a new client brings with her a host of dangers, just as Kendall’s past begins to catch up with him. Can he get to the bottom of things before it’s too late, or will he end up as dead as his usual subjects?

I can highly recommend The Obituarist (and I’m not a crime reader!).  It was sharp and funny and had great twists.  Do buy it.  So without further ado I’ll introduce Patrick and let him fill you in on how you can publish your own ebooks.

Patrick O’Duffy: I’m writing this blog post from Nanuya, a Fijian island four hours north of Nadi. The water is crystal blue, the sky limitless, the beer cold and the sand warm.

I’m not saying this to rub it in that I’m having a good time, but to say that even this far from the rest of the world, and armed only with a tiny laptop and a little internet access, I could still self-publish an ebook and put it up online for sale in less than five minutes.

It’s not difficult. You can practically do it while snorkelling. Or at least just beforehand.

Self-publishing (or ‘indie publishing’) in ebook form is rapidly outpacing traditional print publishing. Success stories like Amanda Hocking and EL James have become bestsellers with their independent ebooks, and tens of thousands of other authors have also put their own work straight onto virtual shelves.

How do you do it – and how do you do a good job of it? It’s a process I’ve tackled several times now with my books Hotel Flamingo, Godheads and now The Obituarist, and I’ve learned a couple of things that I hope others will find useful.

Where to do it

The number one source of indie ebooks on the planet is Amazon, via their Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) operation. KDP allows you to create an ebook and list it alongside titles from major publishers in the world’s largest and best-known online bookstore. The drawback, of course, is that Amazon only creates and sells ebooks for the Kindle, with no provision for other file formats – so readers with Nooks, Kobos and other devices need to look elsewhere.

The other major outlet is Smashwords, a site devoted solely to indie publishing. Not only does it create ebooks in all formats, it also acts as a distributor to other major ebook markets. That alone is enough to recommend it; publishing through them takes away 90% of the work of getting your ebook into online stores. On the downside, Smashwords lacks the market presence of Amazon, and the material they publish isn’t always as polished.

So which should you choose? Well, you shouldn’t – publish through both! It doesn’t take much more effort and time, and using both sites will get your work into every major ebook store.

How to do it

Start with your final, fully edited manuscript. Don’t skimp on the editing – the world is full of badly-written, completely unedited ebooks. Be better than that, and don’t be afraid to pay for a professional editor’s services. It’s worth it.

Next, check the formatting of your Word file to make sure that it fits the guidelines of the website. And it should be a Word file, not another file format; the conversion software will either reject a different format or convert it in strange and horrible ways.

You also need a cover, and it’s worth paying a designer to create one for you rather than make it yourself. It should be a high-resolution JPG in a 6 x 9 format, and it should be readable in both colour and e-reader greyscale.

Once you’ve done all that, just create free accounts on the sites of your choice, upload the file and start the conversion. You should have an ebook minutes later!

What to do next

The first thing is to check the ebook for conversion errors, which are almost inevitable. The conversion software may introduce errors like line breaks, font changes and random italics. Fix these up and upload the corrected version, and be prepared to do this a couple of times until it’s right. These errors won’t stop people from buying your book, but they might stop them from buying your next book.

You should also determine a price for your ebook. Most indie ebooks cost between 99 cents and $4.99; look at what books of similar length and genre sell for as a guideline. You don’t want to overcharge for your book, but you also don’t want to undercharge; readers often assume that very cheap books are that price because they’re not worth anything.

Finally comes the hardest part – finding your audience and promoting your ebook to them. There are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of indie ebooks on the market, and you need to let readers know that yours exists and is worth reading. Most authors do this through social media sites such as Facebook, Goodreads and Twitter, all of which are essential tools, as are word-of-mouth, personal blogs and good reviews from satisfied readers. Self-promotion is a never-ending job for an indie author, but the important thing is to avoid boring or annoying readers with repetition or constant calls for attention.

And then it’s time to write another book. And another. Keep improving your craft, keep developing your skills, stay focused on writing the best books you can and putting them out for your audience. Because if you write well, if you try hard and you genuinely engage with your readers, they’ll keep reading your ebooks – ebooks that you’ll find are easy to produce for them.

Go on. Give it a try. Give it your absolute best shot. And see what happens.

Louise: Thanks so much for that Patrick! Invaluable advice.  If anyone has questions for Patrick, or comments on your own experiences as an indie publisher, please post that as a comment below.  We’d love to hear from you.

Other Workshop Wednesday topics: Deep Point of View and Writers working with the Media

Getting Published Part 3: Editing your fiction manuscript

08 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized

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This photo on the left shows what editing used to look like (quite some time ago).  After I’d finished a story in draft and typed The End, I’d drink an embarrassing amount of celebratory alcohol.  Then it would be time to edit.  In a perfect world you would have a good long break away from the story and come back to it with fresh eyes.  Often, however, you just had to find a way to look at the story from a different perspective because time wasn’t on your side.  My way of doing that was to print the manuscript out and look at it in hardcopy.  That always read differently to the screen.  It also allowed me to paperclip chapters together, spread sections across the floor, stick post-it notes on sections then replace them if I changed my mind, and scribble lots of ideas down on butcher paper.  In other words, it allowed me to pull myself away from metaphorically bumping up against bark (writing draft) to rise up and see the shape of the forest.

The first two questions I’d ask myself were: Whose story is this? and What’s their GMC: goal / motivation / conflict?  If the answer to both wasn’t 100% clear by the end of the story, I had a lot of work to do.  For those unfamiliar with GMC, another way to look at it is:

This is a story about………………………………………(CHARACTER)

Who wants…………………………………………………..(GOAL)

Because……………………………………………………….(MOTIVATION)

But………………………………………………………………(CONFLICT)

Each of these elements is vital in it’s own way, and must be crystal clear to the reader.  Structural editing is about making this GMC obvious to the reader, and clearing away anything that’s clung onto it (like barnacles) while you were sailing down plot river.  I’ll talk more about GMC below, but I’d like to clarify that in tightly plotted genre novels everything in the story needs to relate to the GMC – which means every element you’ve introduced should either help or thwart the main character in achieving their goal.  If, by the time you’re at The End, you realise you’ve got a cute subplot that didn’t actually impact on the GMC, this is the time to toss it.  Kill your babies.  Mercilessly.  Your readers will thank you.

But back to GMC, the character’s goal is important because that’s what drives the plot forward.  Once the reader knows what the goal is (to find a missing person, to fall in love, to quest for a magical sword, to be free) they know where the story is heading and you’ve caught their attention.  Don’t spend chapters waffling on with set up.  Let us know what the character wants and why they can’t have it in the opening chapter.  Also vitally important is the character’s motivation for attaining the goal.  As the going gets tough for the character, the reader has to believe that they’ll keep hanging in there (and not give up and go home), so the character’s motivation to achieve a goal must be a strong, believable one.  Make it clear to the reader what’s at stake: what will happen if the character doesn’t achieve the goal.  If the answer is ‘nothing’ then why should the reader care?  Make sure there’s a consequence to not achieving the goal.  Then there’s conflict – either internal (fears, doubts, insecurity) or external (villain, storm, the ‘other woman’, car crash) which stops the character achieving their goal instantly.  You want the character to make some progress, but one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back will keep readers turning pages.

There’s a saying that a lot of writers have on their desks – Make it hard. Then make it harder.  This is talking about conflict.  Make things hard for your character.  Then make it harder.  What’s the one thing your character never wants to have to do?  Make them do it.  Who’s the one person they rely on?  Take that person away.  Readers should always be worried for the character, wondering how they’ll solve their problems and achieve their goal.  There’s no space for ‘downtime’ in modern fiction.  If the reader stops feeling tense their attention drifts, they might skim pages or worse, put the book down.  Make sure there’s something on every page to keep them tense, to keep them intrigued, to keep them reading on.

Check that you haven’t given viewpoint to characters who don’t need to have it – the lion’s share belongs with the main characters, and a strongly held viewpoint is your best tool in developing characterisation.  Readers like to identify with the main character, and editors are always looking for “an interesting story with characters I care about”.  The best way to get an editor to care about a character is to give the character lots of viewpoint, so we’re inside their head a lot.  (Next Wednesday I’m starting a series called Workshop Wednesday which opens with an article on Deep Viewpoint, so look out for that!)  But back to editing: check also that you haven’t summarised information that we need to see shown as scenes.  Remember the writing maxim Show, Don’t Tell.  All the important turning points in the story must be shown, not mentioned in passing.

When you’re confident you have the structure solid, then and only then is it time to do line editing (or copy editing as it’s also called).  Check your grammar, spelling, tenses, clarity of sentence structure and punctuation.  When that’s done, you’re ready for some critique, and that’s the subject of the next section in this GETTING PUBLISHED series.  Happy writing until then!

(Links to Getting Published Part 1: Making the Commitment, and Getting Published Part 2: Doing the Work)


The hidden value of critiquing

11 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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What can you do if your manuscript has a problem you can’t pin down?  Simple.  Critique someone else’s.

The benefit might not seem obvious, especially when you’re busy and it feels like you’re wasting time helping someone else, but trust me, you’re helping yourself.  Writers are notorious for not being able to edit their own work successfully (let’s face it, that’s why publishing houses pay editors to work on our stories).  But what you might not know is that the easiest way to find your own hidden problems is through uncovering the flaws in someone else’s story.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been doing a manuscript assessment for a client and have been typing on their report something along the lines of “There isn’t enough tension in this scene.  The main character should have overheard that conversation so they could be stressing about the danger coming up.  Then they might make mistakes because of their fear and that would make things even worse for them.”

Remember, Rule Number One for plotting is “Make things worse for your characters.”

So at the point that I’m typing something into a report, I’ve often have a light bulb moment and realised that whatever I’m typing is exactly what’s wrong with a section of my own manuscript that doesn’t feel right.  Maybe I’ve got a character who doesn’t realise the danger that’s coming up, and things would be worse for them if they did.   Alongside this revelation I might even get a flash of insight into how I could fix that, but before you start worrying, its never a ‘copy what I’ve just suggested to the client’ fix.  My subconscious has far too many ideas of its own for that to ever happen, and the fix has to be organic to my own story and believable for the characters who inhabit it.  So a copy fix would never work.  But finding the source of the problem.  That’s gold.

‘Mirroring’ is a concept as old as the Vedic scriptures and as new as modern psychology, where you have an emotional reaction to the trait in others that you can’t see in yourself.  It works with editing as well.  I used to think my light bulb moments were the result of The Universe looking after me, attracting manuscripts that had the same problems I needed to address in my own.  But now I think it’s the work of my subconscious mind.  I find lots of ‘areas for improvement’ in manuscripts I assess, and only occasionally have light-bulb moments, so that tells me that my subconscious is filtering, looking for ways to help me, and I like that!  A lot of bad things are said about the subconscious mind, and many people fear their unconscious beliefs and attitudes are influencing their behaviour.

Maybe that’s true, but there’s also a positive side.  For a writer the subconscious is the seat of creativity.  It’s the magical, thrilling swirl of everything you’ve ever seen or heard or smelt or touched or tasted, every crazy fantasy, every naughty impulse, every skin-bursting moment of bliss.  It’s the left hand of the damned and the kiss of a fairy princess.  It’s the pure adoration of a mother who holds her baby for the first time, and the gut-wrenching grief of loved one’s death.  Every moment of your life is witnessed by this amazing storehouse, and for those of us who create story it’s the pantry where we select the ingredients for our banquet, either with a recipe as plotters do, or using intuition if you’re a seat-of-the-pants writer.

Critiquing is another way you can access the intuition/subconscious realm and hone in on your hidden weaknesses.  It works every time for me.  Give it a try.  At the very least you’ve helped someone else.  And remember when critiquing that the rule is to point out two great things for every one ‘area of improvement’, and don’t put on your bossy boots.  It’s just your opinion, after all.  But do remember to have a notebook beside you for jotting down insights about your own work.

You’ll be surprised.

I promise.