Turning Whine into Gold By Kathryn Craft,@KCraftWriter
Last year, Janice Gable Bashman and I co-wrote an article for Writer’s Digest Magazine, The 7 Deadly Sins of Self-Editing, that turned out to be quite popular. Apparently sinning resonated with writers (go figure!) who recognized that greed, lust, gluttony, pride, sloth, envy, and wrath might be waiting to trip up their creative souls.
But recognizing pitfalls is only half the battle when seeking a fruitful career and a meaningful life. We know what to avoid—but what should we be reaching for?
It’s a little book with a big message. Embracing its wisdom improved all aspects of my life. Today, however, I want to look at what the first tenet has to offer us as writers.
Be impeccable with your word.
Editors love authors who meet their deadlines. (Think about the implied threat here: cross the line and your story is dead.) Doing so shows you are respectful and focused and humble enough to see that publishing is a business concern much larger than your story alone.
Editors, however, will not be the only people to whom you will make commitments. As you take your rightful place within the time-honored lineage of artists who have passed on their knowledge to those who need it, the conferences, community groups, and other writers to whom you’ve made promises will also laud you for honoring your commitments. That said, everyone misjudges from time to time. If you can’t meet an obligation, renegotiate it as soon as possible to preserve your relationships.
Above all else you must act with integrity toward yourself.
Only by keeping your word to yourself can you can be the person you want to be. If you want to be an author, that means showing up at your chosen job so you can pursue your writing goals.
Is this important? We’re creatives after all—if we aren’t in the mood to write today, can’t we switch it up and watch TV instead?
Not if you told yourself you would write. Keeping your word with yourself is the only road to inner peace.
Interestingly, it is also the only road to achievement.
As someone who witnessed her husband’s self-destruction, I know a little something about the stakes here. To ignore this agreement is to introduce dangerous psychic dissonance into your life, which is the result of believing one thing, and doing another.
If you cannot hold yourself to your word and meet your writing goals, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of inner failure.
Think ten years down the road. Who will you be?
a) a family joke
b) an imposter
c) a failure
d) a dreamer
e) a working writer
f) a recorder of truth
g) a go-getter
h) an inspiration
I’ll take “e” through “h,” thank you.
To succeed in writing you must show up and do the work you’ve identified as your life’s mission. Or renegotiate the terms of your commitment, and find a life that you can live with greater integrity.
It’s okay to say that you will journal and learn and doodle for another year or two while your kids are little. It’s okay to say you’re going to work for one hour each day instead of pretending you can churn out an unrealistic word count.
I know for a fact that this sounds a lot simpler than it is. Writing is hard. Finding time to do it is hard. But whining doesn’t get you published. If you are ready to ramp up your career, you will have to raise your expectations, then meet your obligations to self.
I’ll explore the other agreements in future posts. For now, feel free to use the comment section as an opportunity to shout your personal truth to the universe.
What are your current writing and career goals, and how do you intend to keep your word to yourself?
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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT ** Writers In The Storm is getting a makeover! ** We're moving to our new digs June 2nd. Stay tuned for party news (and giveaways)...
About Kathryn
Kathryn Craft is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks: The Art of Falling, and a second novel due Spring 2015. Her work as a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft, follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she now serves as book club liaison for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads workshops, and speaks often about writing. She lives with her husband in Bucks County, PA. Although a member of The Liars Club, she swears that everything in this bio is true.
I’ve been around since the fairly early days of self publishing. My first ebook went live in early 2010. Since then, the market has exploded and a thousand things have changed. Something that’s true this month may not be true the next.
But two things have remained more or less constant:
Ebook formatting, while it has evolved, is still essentially as it was when I started.
People keep perpetuating the myth that it’s hard.
If you happen to have seen me around since the early days, chances are you heard me railing against the latter. I have bullied (insulted?) more than one author into taking the plunge and educating themselves. I’m here today to tell you why you should, too, even if you opt to hire someone.
1. It is not hard.
Y’all, it’s really not. Formatting ebooks can be many things—a gigantic pain in the butt (depending on how many egregious formatting mistakes you commit in drafting), tedious, headache-inducing—but not hard. If you can read instructions, you can learn to format ebooks.
2. It does not take knowledge of CSS or other coding.
This comes under the heading of formatting being not hard. I can’t count the number of folks I’ve talked to who were under the impression that they needed to be able to do complicated code in order to format ebooks. While you can do it that way, you don’t have to (and, dear God, why would you want to?).
3. Self publishing does not come without expense. Formatting doesn’t have to be one of them.
There’s this saying in publishing that the money always flows to the author. This has changed somewhat with the advent of self publishing, and there are people out there who say you can’t self-publish without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars. I say bollocks to that (because, really, I don’t have enough opportunity to say “bollocks” in real life).
I published my first ebook with only $50 out of pocket (for cover art) and every single publishing expense I’ve had since then came from profits. If you’re on a limited publishing budget, your money needs to go to the important things you can’t do yourself, like cover art and editing.
4. You will want to be able to make changes and shouldn’t have to hire out to do that.
Part of self publishing means that you should be updating your books. Fixing those inadvertent typos that slip through your editor or beta readers. Or, at the very least, you’ll want to update booklists, be able to adapt back matter, add in affiliate sales links per sales channel, etc. These are small, simple changes, but if you don’t have any knowledge of formatting, you’ll have to pay somebody to do it, and this goes back to point 3.
5. You maintain control of the final product.
This just may be the gold standard for why so many of us choose to self publish in the first place. We’re control freaks. Formatting is just another one of those aspects you don’t have to trust to anybody else. Keep that hold on your precious!
6. You need to know what you’re looking at.
If you do choose to hire out because you prefer not to take the time or effort, it’s important that you understand what you’re looking at when you get the product back. You need to know whether the person you’ve hired has truly done a good job. If you know nothing about formatting, chances are you can’t adequately judge this.
7. It only takes a handful of programs.
My system doesn’t take any expensive, specialized software. Just Microsoft Word (which most of us have) or OpenOffice (free), MobiPocket Creator (free), Sigil (free), and Calibre (free).
8. If you train yourself out of bad formatting habits, it doesn’t take long.
Okay, this is possibly one of the biggest points. Authors have all kinds of horrible formatting habits. This is what has led to the idea that formatting takes forever and is the grandest pain in the fanny known to self publishing.
But guess what? If you train yourself out of those bad habits and set up your word processing program not to screw stuff up (Word likes to think it knows what’s best—it doesn’t), then you don’t have to waste scads of time undoing your formatting mistakes. That is, by far, the most time consuming part of the process.
For my own work, I can take a full-length novel and produce the EPUB, Kindle, and Smashwords formats in approximately half an hour from start to finish—for all of them. Because I write a cleanly formatted draft.
9. The people who can’t do it will think you’re a bad ass.
Due to that whole “OMG, it’s haaaaard” perception, if you know how to do it, you can buff your nails and be nonchalant while they goggle at you for your expert knowledge.
10. Knowledge is power (and time is money—save BOTH).
I think this speaks for itself.
And just so I’m not up here doing nothing but giving you a sales pitch, I’m here to share with you the two most common formatting mistakes (a tiny sampling of the stuff that’s taught in my formatting class). Both of these have to do with indents in your manuscript.
The Freebie Lesson
How many of you use either the Tab key or spacebar to make your paragraph indents? Show of hands? It’s most of you, I wager. Well guess what? You’ve just made yourself a lot of extra work. This is not the correct way to indent your paragraphs. The right way to do indents is through Paragraph Styles. But don’t worry. I have a nice little cheat that will get rid of all those unnecessary keystrokes.
Okay, see that little backwards P looking thing up in your toolbar? That’s the pilcrow. In Word they call this the Show/Hide button. It reveals your hidden formatting. In OpenOffice, this reveals what they call non-printing characters. Consider this the blacklight that’s going to reveal all the scary, bad formatting stuff in your manuscript. Brace yourselves and go click it while inside one of your manuscripts.
If You’re A Tabber
See all those right pointing arrows? Those are your tab marks. This is probably THE MOST COMMON bad formatting habit people have. It’s a quick and easy way to insert an indent at the start of a paragraph. And it’s BAD. WRONG. DON’T DO IT.
Open up your Find and Replace box (To do that press CTRL+H). In the “Find what” line enter ^t. The caret t is the symbol for tab. On the Replace With line, don’t put anything. You’re going to leave it blank. Then click Replace All.
If You’re A Spacer
So what if you aren’t a tabber? What if you’re a spacer instead? See that trail of dots in the middle of the line at the start of that paragraph? Same idea applies. Hit CTRL+H to get your Find and Replace box. Then, in the find what box, you’ll hit the space bar however many times you tend to do that for an indent, leave the Replace with box empty, and click Replace all.
Now, after you do that, you may find that in some places you still have one or two space bar spaces before the first lines of your paragraphs. If that happens to be the case, you can’t use the same process to zap all your single or double spaces because that’ll cause you to delete the spaces separating sentences. So the answer is to do a Find and replace on ^p space space, and then replace with ^p only.
This ^p is the symbol for a paragraph return (which looks like a pilcrow in the text), so basically you’re telling Word to replace all instances of two space bar spaces that immediately follow a paragraph return. This way, you isolate the space bar spaces that precede the start of a new paragraph. After THAT repeat it with a find and replace on ^p space, then replace with a ^p by itself.
The Right Way To Indent
Now, in Word you have these things called PARAGRAPH STYLES. These allow you to globally control the styling of your ebook. You’ll apply a different style to different elements of your book, and then to change the styling, you’ll just change the style ONCE and the change will take effect all through the whole book.
Paragraph styles control everything from font to spacing to indents. You’ll use it in the main body of the text, on your chapter headings, on the front matter, title page, etc.
You’re going to start by selecting your entire manuscript (CTRL+A) and setting it to what Word calls the “Normal” style. The default settings for the “Normal” style probably aren’t right either, but don’t worry, we’ll fix that in a bit. Why do we start with normal everywhere? Because the vast majority of your book will be the body—the words and paragraphs that comprise the main narrative. Then later, we’ll change the styles of certain areas, like chapter headings, front or back matter, etc.
Okay, now you’re going to modify the Normal style to actually be what you need it to be. In order to do this you need to click on that little expansion arrow in the bottom right corner of the Styles Box.
That will give you this menu that lists all the various styles Word has. If you hover over the pilcrow beside Normal, it will give you a drop down arrow. Click on the arrow and you’ll get a submenu. (In my class I have slides with screenshots from each point in this process). From there, select Modify.
That’s going to take you to the Modify Style box. In the bottom right corner, click on Format. That will give you another menu from which you need to select Paragraph. That’s going to give you this box.
Now, particularly in newer iterations of Word, there will be all kinds of stuff to fix here. See under Spacing it’s got 10pt in the “After” box and has line spacing set at Multiple 1.15? Yeah, that’s all bad.
You NEVER EVER want it set to read EXACTLY or AT LEAST followed by some kind of point size specification in the At box. There should NEVER EVER be any entry in the AT box. You want just basic single spacing. No spacing before or after. And THIS is where you set your indent properly.
For print, the standard is usually half an inch.
With ebooks you often see less, anywhere between .25” and .5”.
I tend to prefer 0.3” for the first line indent. Some people prefer block paragraphs without indents. For fiction, I prefer a standard paragraph indent. Block paragraphs often work better for non-fiction. This is a decision that’s up to you, but pick one or the other, not both. I’ll come back to block spacing in just a minute.
You will keep your alignment set to Left, NOT Justified. Justified does funky stuff in ebooks. Now, when you click on okay in the paragraph window, you come back to the Modify Style page. Click okay again, and look at your manuscript. If you did things right, everywhere you have applied the Normal style, you should have properly indented paragraphs.
Ebook Formatting From A to Z
This is just a small sampling of the detail I go into in my ebook formatting class. Make no mistake—this is a class, not a quick seminar. It’s comprised of four lessons and designed to be done over time.
Each lesson is a streaming video that you can watch on your own time (as many times as you want). Then you’ll have access to interactive classrooms and discussion boards for more in-depth problem solving, as the need arises. At each step you will be expected to upload your manuscript for me to check over and help you correct so that you’re in good shape to move on to the next lesson.
I’m a teacher in real life, so I believe in the power of feedback for proper learning. At the end of my class, you will know how to take your book from a Word doc to all industry standard formats. You will be ready to self publish on any and all major platforms. Click here to register.
Have you formatted your own ebooks already? What were your pitfalls or successes? What questions do you have for Kait?
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT ** Writers In The Storm is getting a makeover! ** We're moving to our new digs June 2nd. Stay tuned for party news (and giveaways)...
About Kait
Kait Nolan is stuck in an office all day, sometimes juggling all three of her jobs at once with the skill of a trained bear—sometimes with a similar temperament. After hours, she uses her powers for good, creating escapist fiction. This Mississippi native has something for everyone, from short and sweet to Southern contemporary romance to action-packed paranormal—all featuring heroes you’d want to sweep you off your feet and rescue you from work-day drudgery. When not working or writing, Kait’s hanging out in her kitchen cooking and wishing life were a Broadway musical.
A passionate believer in helping others, she has founded a writing challenge designed for people who have a life (aka we NaNoWriMo rejects who can’t give everything up for the month of November). Please check out A Round of Words in 80 Days.
There it is. LARGE bold print peering out at me from underneath the Life and Home section….THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLERS LIST, nagging me to grab my Kindle and start downloading fabulous fiction at lightning speed.
Sounds magical, doesn’t it?
Right now I’m talking about that list. You know the one. The list that, if you are on it, says: You are a really-really-GOOD-writer-and-being-on-this-list-makes-you-special!
What makes that writing so darn special?
My mom, Margie Lawson, creator of deep editing, and I have discussed on end why bestselling authors are bestselling authors. Using my background in theatre and hers in psychology, we probed the question.
No… bestselling authors are NOT walking around with fairy dust in their pockets.
Nope… they don’t have magic beans either.
The answer: It’s the words they use, the order they use them in, and how they tell their story.
Sounds easy, right?
Of course there are stylistic differences surrounding how each author of each genre approaches action, movement, and tension.
Some are minimalists when it comes to dialogue cues and body language and visceral.
Others push our senses to the max.
And a select few authors out there have the gift to use every aspect of scene writing to show evolving character relationships.
All are golden tools of scene writing!
While teaching Triple Threat Behind Staging a Scene, I ask the class members to pick out an action/movement, heavy dialogue, or multi-character scene from their favorite author. And to include an explanation on why they thought the scene kept them hooked and kept them reading.
Here are a few of the words and phrases my class used to describe their favorite bestselling scenes:
moves the story forward
natural dialogue, showed relationship and kept pace
understated dialogue punctuated by bits of physical movements
visible tension in the body language
get to know the characters without losing interest or forward momentum.
fluid internalization
seamlessly weaving all the elements of story together
multiple switches in tone
easy to read, no description or info dumps
tight choreography
Similarities: Tension, tight dialogue, show not tell, fluid internalizations, emotive body language, and smooth choreography.
Can you describe your writing with the words and phrases above?
Learning to train our reading brains to see emotional and dramatic patterns can awaken the bestselling writer within all of us.
The question is, HOW?
This is one of the many tools I use to awaken the bestselling authors within my students, so read carefully, this is privileged information :)
What if bestselling authors forgot about tension, tight dialogue, show-not-tell, fluid internalizations, emotive body language, and smooth choreography in their scenes?
What if I stripped their writing down to its birthday suit? Yup. Naked Writing.
What if, indeed…
Grab hold of your seats folks, I have stripped and re-written this scene and it’s not going to move you one inch. This scene is a HUGE turning point in a well known YA fantasy.
The protagonist thinks he is confronting a known serial killer, a man who betrayed his parents -- that betrayal led to their death. He and his two best friends are secluded in a room with this known villain and the protagonist is the only one with a weapon. This is his opportunity to avenge his parents and commit murder.
Black was on the ground at that point and he was out of breath. He watched Harry as Harry walked toward him slowly. Harry’s wand was pointed at Black.
“Are you going to kill me, Harry?” he said.
Harry stopped walking, his wand was still pointing forward. Black’s face showed an ugly bruise and he had a bloody nose.
“You killed my parents, “ Harry said.
Black paused."I don't deny it," he said. "But if you knew the whole story."
"You sold them to Voldemort. That's all I need to know." Harry said.
"You've got to listen to me," Black said quickly, "You'll regret it if you don't."
"I understand a lot better than you think," said Harry.
Hermione’s fat cat jumped onto the front of Black’s coat. "Get off," he said, trying to push Crookshanks off of him.
Crookshanks was an ugly cat with a squashed face and yellow eyes. The ugly cat continued to sit on his chest. Hermione started crying.
Harry guessed he would have to kill the cat too. Harry still held the wand out in front of him towards Black, but he was having a hard time with this decision. Ron’s breathing was loud. He was sitting by the bed next to Hermione.
Harry heard a noise from down the stairs.
Hermione loudly yelled for help.
Black tried to get the cat off of his chest again. He was unsuccessful.
Harry shook his wand. A voice in his head told him to kill Black soon. He could hear footsteps on the stairs. This decision was hard and he didn’t know what to do.
Someone opened the door. It was Professor Lupin and he had his wand out. When he came through the door, he scanned the room. Harry still had his wand pointing at Black who was on the floor in front of him.
Lupin then yelled, “Expelliarmus!”
OH, my goodness….did anyone stop reading after line 4? And you guessed it – that was an altered scene from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. That’s right. This children’s book has adult size muscles packed into its action scenes.
I have to admit, it was kind of fun to strip the magic away…so-to-speak… :)
I WISH I could show you the whole scene, fully clothed. Alas, it is too large of a sample for me to retype without copyright infringements. If you have your own copy (and I know you do) crack it open and read this scene. Not only is this a turning point for the book, but it is a turning point for the entire series. Must read!
Here are the highlights:
Emotive Physicality:
Black was sprawled at the bottom of the wall. His thin chest rose and fell rapidly as he watched.
Active Description:
A livid bruise was rising around Black's left eye and his nose was bleeding.
Underlying Emotion:
"You killed my parents," said Harry, his voice shaking slightly, but his wand hand quite steady.
Quickening Pace:
"You've got to listen to me," Black said, and there was a note of urgency in his voice now. "You'll regret it if you don't... You don't understand..."
Natural Dialogue and Emotive Dialogue Cues:
"I understand a lot better than you think," said Harry, and his voice shook more than ever. "You never heard her, did you? My mum... trying to stop Voldemort killing me... and you did that... you did it..."
Smooth Choreography and Active Description:
But Crookshanks sank his claws into Black's robes and wouldn't shift. He turned his ugly, squashed face to Harry and looked up at him with those great yellow eyes. To his right, Hermione gave a dry sob.
Gripping Cadence and Visible Tension:
Harry raised the wand. Now was the moment to do it. Now was the moment to avenge his mother and father. He was going to kill Black. He had to kill Black. This was his chance...
The seconds lengthened. And still Harry stood frozen there, wand poised, Black staring up at him, Crookshanks on his chest. Ron's ragged breathing came from near the bed; Hermione was quite silent.
And then came a new sound
Fluid Internalizations and Seamless Transitions:
Black made a startled movement that almost dislodged Crookshanks; Harry gripped his wand convulsively -- Do it now! said a voice in his head -- but the footsteps were thundering up the stairs and Harry still hadn't done it.
Active Descriptions and Smooth Choreography and Emotive Physicality:
The door of the room burst open in a shower of red sparks and Harry wheeled around as Professor Lupin came hurtling into the room, his face bloodless, his wand raised and ready. His eyes flicked over Ron, lying on the floor, Hermione, cowering next to the door, to Harry, standing there with his wand covering Black, and then to Black himself, crumpled and bleeding at Harry's feet.
"Expelliarmus!" Lupin shouted.
By stripping away the Rowling bestseller qualities we are able to see what is missing.And by putting them back, we can see the quality and quantity of what she used. Yes, there can be too much of a good thing and readers will put your book down if they can’t see what’s happening.
Look at your own writing with Naked Editor Visionand ask yourself these questions:
Does your writing already look like it’s been stripped?
Is your writing wearing too many layers of clothing? Is it hard to see what is really happening under there?
Have you overdosed the scene with one or two elements and scrimped on the rest?
If you stripped it down, can you still see what is happening? What do you see? Does your scene still have all of its body parts?
Sound like fun?
Comment below and tell us about your favorite scene writing author. How do they do it? Have you ever studied their writing? What did it tell you?
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Tiffany Lawson Inman
Tiffany Lawson Inman claimed a higher education at Columbia College Chicago. There, she learned to use body and mind together for action scenes, character emotion, and dramatic story development. Tiffany's background in theatre provides her with a unique approach to the craft of writing, and her clients and students greatly benefit.
She teaches Action and Fighting, Choreography, Active Setting, Emotional Impact, Scene Writing, and Dialogue for Lawson Writer’s Academy online, presents hands-on-action workshops, and will be offering webinars in late 2014.
As a freelance editor, she provides deep story analysis, content editing, line by line, and dramatic fiction editing services. Stay tuned to Twitter @NakedEditor for Tiffany’s upcoming guest blogs around the internet, classes, contests, and lecture packets.
