In their book, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Renni Browne and Dave King tell the story of interviewing different editors in the publishing industry. They mostly wanted to know what editors looked at first, when reviewing a manuscript?
Answer: Editors scan the pages for a section of dialogue. They read it. If it's good, they read more.
If it's not good, the manuscript is rejected.
Friday, July 31, 2020
Friday, July 24, 2020
Emotions: Bringing Them to the Page through Gestures, Movement, Facial Expressions, and More
A client in California emailed me a few weeks ago about film she watched that helped her write emotions more vividly into her memoir.
"As you know all too well," she said, "I don't write emotion--I just can't get the hang of it. Yesterday I had the best lesson I could imagine when I watched the 2008 animated movie Wall-E. In the first half of the movie only two words are spoken--the names of the two little robots who fall in love and have adventures. Yet the story is highly emotional.
"As you know all too well," she said, "I don't write emotion--I just can't get the hang of it. Yesterday I had the best lesson I could imagine when I watched the 2008 animated movie Wall-E. In the first half of the movie only two words are spoken--the names of the two little robots who fall in love and have adventures. Yet the story is highly emotional.
Friday, July 17, 2020
What's the Primary Environment of Your Book--Physically, Emotionally, Intellectually, Spiritually? And Why Does It Matter?
A new author wrote me this week. She'd read my writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, and it helped her realize which book project she needed to focus on first: a self-help/memoir hybrid. But she was confused by my chapter on finding the primary environment of your story. How did this apply to her book?
Every book has an environment that it lives in. I think of it like a lab where the experiment lives in a beaker or container.
Everything happens within that container.
Every book has an environment that it lives in. I think of it like a lab where the experiment lives in a beaker or container.
Everything happens within that container.
Friday, July 10, 2020
Strictly Accurate Memoir? True-Life Novel? How Close to the Line Do You Ride?
Camilla was a writer in my New York classes many years ago. She completed a memoir about her family in Italy during World War II. I remember it as a rich and interesting tale, full of great descriptions and intriguing characters. I also remember the dilemma she faced when she began sending it out into the world.
She wrote me, "I have been struggling with pinning down the genre, as memoirs are rarely taken if the person isn't famous. Although calling it a novel seems untruthful. In truth it is a bit of a hybrid, with scenes and dialogue created around facts, and my part of the story is 99 percent factual. I spoke with a published author who was very lovely and suggested I call it historical fiction. Yet is it remote enough in time, being about World War II?
Friday, July 3, 2020
Memoir's Primary Argument--How to Make Sure Your Memoir Has Universal Meaning
Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, once said, "The most powerful strand in memoir is not expressing your originality. It's tapping in to your universality."
A.M. Homes said, "Memoir is about more than you."
My aunt, who is in her 100th year, wrote her memoires. It was fun to read them, and I learned things about my father's family that I never knew. This style of memoir follows the Anglo-French definition: an "account of someone's life." A wonderful gift to pass on to those who know you and who want to hear your past.
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