Organizing Your Book: How I Learned to Love Scrivener

Books become unwieldy fast.  Unlike a poem, essay, or short story, a book may generate thousands of pages by the time it's revised down to three hundred and fifty.  Most writers don't realize or remember this when starting a new book.  But after a few revisions, there's just too much to keep track of.

I get this question in most of my classes:  how do you organize your book-in-process? 

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Layers of Time in Fiction and Memoir: How Does a Writer Weave Past, Present, and Future into Scenes without Creating Too Much Exposition?

Your scenes have voltage, electric current, for readers.  But in most novels and memoirs, there are layers of electricity, because there are layers of time.  We move between past, present, and future in our real lives all the time, even more so on the page.  One of those times will have the most electricity, and it's good to know that.  But how do you bring in the less-alive times and make sure the reader knows enough about them, without delivering too much exposition?

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Dialogue Engages--But What If Your Memoir Characters Just Don't Talk Much?

Candace is writing a memoir.  Her characters are the opposite of talkative.  She took my online dialogue class earlier this year and learned that dialogue in any books brings more reader engagement.  But she was confused about how to bring her particular characters to life and still stay true to their silent natures.

I read other writers to answer these kinds of questions.  Kent Haruf wrote six novels set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.  All of them have quiet characters, but each is unique and fascinating.

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Are Your Characters Too Nice, Controlled, Predictable? Here's How to Bring Out the Tension and Make Them Vivid (But Still Not Serial Killers)

Annie, one of my readers, got surprising feedback from her writer's group.  One of her novel's characters, an abused woman trying to escape from controlling relationships (with parents and boyfriend) was unbelievable.  Her sadness and desperation to escape wasn't enough to make her vivid, memorable, engaging to readers.  Where was her strength, her resolution?

Problem is, Annie says, an abused person often lacks this kind of drive.  So what could she do to create more tension around this character, making her vivid and believable in her search to become her own person?

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Lessons from Margaret Renkl: How One Memoir-Writer Circled Round Family, Nature, and Loss

How does a memoir writer weave family stories into a larger whole?  This is the perennial challenge.  Unless you already have a fan following, most readers won't follow your trials and tribulations just because you write about them.  You need to hook them into a universal truth, learning, or other bigger element. Something they can relate to their own lives. 

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When a Writer Describes an Emotion You've Had (Without Quite Realizing It)--Power of a Book's Effect on Its Readers

Think your writing doesn't matter?  This week's writing exercise is to educate yourself (and inspire yourself) on the effect our words have on readers.  Click here for the podcast from writer Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project, The Four Tendencies) talking about her experience reading Isaac Mizrahi's memoir. If the link doesn't work: www.gretchenrubin.com (search for Isaac Mizrahi in her podcasts).

Breakdowns and Breakthroughs--The Sine Wave of Book Writing

One of my coaching clients, a very skilled writer, wrote me a few weeks ago about the temper tantrum she was having with her book.  It's in revision stage, a novel, and a good one--I've read parts of it and I was hooked on the characters, plot, and premise.  But she's been working on it for five years and she's tired.  "I'm going to toss it," she said, and I half-believed her, so I sent her a plea to wait.  Set the thing aside for a day, two, a week if she could.  Do something else.  Something completely unconnected to her book.  Then decide if it was ready to be scrapped.

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When Your Book Wants to Be Something More: The Persistence Required as Your Book Reveals Its Real Story

One of my long-time students, Linda Zlotnick, recently published her memoir, Star Sisters. The core story is about the death of her twin sister from ovarian cancer.  It was a many year journey to allow herself to process the loss on the page, then begin to watch the memoir take on other topics, unexpected ones.

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Great Resources for Studying Up: On How to Submit Your Manuscript to Agent or Publishers

One of my blog readers from Europe is preparing to submit her first book to agents and publishers.  She has plans to attend the International Book Fair in Germany in October, but she wanted to study up before then.  She asked for my best bets in books, blogs, and other resources.

I'm always delighted to share my favorites.  I have to credit friends, colleagues, students, and other writers in the trenches of submission for most of these resources.  Anyone who's been through it knows how challenging the whole infuriating, wonderful, discouraging, illuminating process can be.  It helps so much to study up beforehand.  Be not surprised or unprepared--you'll kick yourself and you'll probably lose any future chances with that particular agent.

So here's the best I've found, thanks to many helpers over the years.  I've used all of these myself.  

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How Do You Create Section Breaks--the White Space Pause--in Your Chapters or the Whole Book?

A great question, simple but important, this came my way from a former student who is working on the first draft of her memoir.  When you construct chapters, when you look at the book as a whole, you do have the option to give the reader small moments of pause, usually created with a few paragraph returns and white space (in chapters) or a couple of blank pages (in the larger book).  

What are the rules around doing this?  How often, and why?

Let's talk chapter breaks first.  

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