WEbook Blog: A Writer's Resource

Quiet on the Set: A Book Crew

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Editing in Film and Fiction
We've decided to shake things up a bit with the Guest Author series and make a Guest Editorial Assistant entry! Welcome Sarah Jae-Jones (@sjaejones), Editorial Assistant at St. Martin's press, who shares her thoughts on the publication process.

When it comes to getting a book published, I find it helpful to think of the book as a movie. Growing up in Los Angeles, you can’t put help get a sense of the inner workings of movie production. My high school was a location for no less than 25 films (the most famous being Jurassic Park and Legally Blonde), so the language and medium of film is something with which I’m pretty familiar.

They say it takes a village to raise a kid. If it takes a crew to bring a film from script to screen, then it also takes a team to bring a manuscript from the writer’s head onto bookshelves across America and it’s more like Hollywood than you might think.

The publisher is the producer: the one who funds the film, who distributes the reels to theaters across the country, and who provides resources for marketing and publicity. A publishing house is like a studio, and they work on getting the public to consume the book, both as a product and an art.

But what about the writer, the novelist? The obvious analogous role seems to be the screenwriter, but in fact, the writer is actually the director. The director is responsible for the creative direction of the movie, the story it tells, what themes it explores, and how it executes them. The director’s tools are images and sound while the writer’s tools are words, but their concerns are the same: how do you best tell the story? How do you get your characters to act in real, convincing, and moving ways? How do you effectively convey the narrative with all the resources you have?

Where does the editor fall into this process? Film editing is an art into itself, but a book editor doesn’t receive the same recognition, even though the role is the same. A film editor takes raw footage and shapes a movie from it, finding the right gesture, the right take to draw the maximum effect from a scene. Then he or she cuts the film together, trimming the excess, excising the parts that drag, tightening the movie into a finished product that is paced just right.

A book editor does much the same, working in tandem with the writer/director to shape raw material into a work that lingers or zips when it needs to. Your editor should help you draw the right emotions from your characters and the scene, as well as help shape the overall arc (plot, character, etc.). Should you always listen to your editor? In the end, that’s the director’s call—it is your book after all. But there are reasons film directors employ film editors, just as there are reasons book editors exist in publishing: to work the final product into something that makes the audience/readership feel something.

After all, it takes a village to publish a book.

Sarah Jae-Jones (who prefers to be called JJ) was born and raised in sunny southern California but has since transplanted herself to New York City. She cannot possibly tell you why she gave up gorgeous weather, serene beaches, and the smell of night-blooming jasmine for soul-sucking winters, unforgiving concrete, and all-night Ukranian diners, but she blames it all on Sesame Street. When she’s not ruthlessly editing books at St. Martin's Press, she can be found jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.

Connecting To Your Inner Magpie

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As part of our ongoing guest author series, WEbook welcomes Jenny White, professor of anthropology at Boston University and author of three historical-fiction novels. Here’s some background about Jenny’s upcoming novel, The Winter Thief:

January 1888. Vera Arti carries The Communist Manifesto in Armenian through the streets of Istanbul, hoping to get it published, naively unaware of the men following her. When the police discover a shipload of illegal firearms and the Imperial Ottoman Bank is blown up, suspicion falls on a socialist commune Vera’s husband organized in the eastern mountains. Investigating, Special Prosecutor Kamil Pasha encounters his most ruthless adversary to date: Vahid, head of the secret police, who has convinced the sultan that the commune is leading a secessionist movement and should be destroyed—along with all of the surrounding Armenian villages. 

And now, Jenny’s thoughts on writing…

For me, one of the oddest things about writing fiction is becoming the mouthpiece for characters who do things that—prior to that moment—I never imagined doing, feel things I’ve never experienced, and speak in idioms and cadences that I’ve never heard. This practice of writing like a human Ouija board goes against the familiar adage, “write what you know,” and can confuse readers who assume that the novel gives some insight into the novelist. My first novel, The Sultan’s Seal, contains a physical relationship between women. After its publication, to my surprise, people asked me, “Are you a lesbian?” I mean, there are murders in the book too, but so far no one has asked if I’m a murderer. The rough, wisecracking police chief Omar appears in all three Kamil Pasha books, but I don’t know anyone like Omar. At least, not that I can remember.

Writing is like dreaming—your subconscious is a magpie that picks up and makes a nest out of any glittery bits of experience and fleeting impressions—the way a couple's eyes fail to meet; a boy shielding his food—things you missed, but your sharp-eyed subconscious saved. Remember as a child when a picture on a page could envelop you, infused with life by your imagination?

Here’s my point: The setting should be something you know, or have researched—as I do Istanbul in the 1880s. The characters have to be set up like real people with family, friends, a childhood, skills, a job, likes and dislikes, quirks. But once you can visualize the scene and the characters, it’s time to let go. Some authors write elaborate plot outlines to light the way, but they too have to allow their characters liberty to forge ahead. In writing each of my three novels, I learned a bit more about the best way to let go. Plot outlines didn’t work for me. I never liked chemistry either—a formula won’t speak to me, no matter how long I stare at it.

In writing The Winter Thief, I followed my editor’s advice to let the interaction of the characters drive the plot, rather than the plot drive the characters. That worked like hellfire. The characters at times moved the plot along faster than I could write! I was inspired to take this approach by Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, a novel that takes place almost entirely in one room and follows the heart-breaking relationships that develop between high-society guests at a reception and the terrorists holding them hostage for several months. The dramatic tension of the novel is driven almost exclusively by character interaction.

Writing has a fine-tuned tempo of control and letting go, unique to each writer. But crucial to all is gaining access to your inner magpie.

--Jenny

Go here to pre-order The Winter Thief, set for release in March 2010. You can also read a similar post about finding the theme of your book, by Sanjay Bahadur. 

Author Laura Bynum - Pare Down Ruthlessly

WEbook welcomes Laura Bynum, author of the recently released Veracity as a guest WEblogger! A little bit of background about Laura and her new book:

Laura grew up in Springfield, Illinois and earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Communications. She has since worked as a filmmaker and a marketing consultant.

Veracity takes place in a future dystopia where an act of viral terrorism has wiped out one-half of the country’s population. Out of the ashes a new government has risen, the Confederation of the Willing, dedicated to maintaining order at any cost. But there are those who resist. Guided by the fabled Book of Noah, they are determined to shake the people from their apathy and ignorance, and are prepared to start a war in the name of freedom.

Take it away, Laura...

I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but before following that dream, I went the more conventional route. I got a couple of degrees and a corporate job. Got married. Had kids. It wasn’t until a story, a really good one, burrowed itself into the middle of my orderly world that I decided it was time to step up and give it a go. I wrote a rough but promising early version of Veracity, then did my research on how to get it noticed and found every finger pointing in the same direction. Go to a conference. Go to the one in Maui where you’ll meet the biggest and the best. Go all out or don’t go at all. I signed up.

Before the event, participants were given access to a web forum where we could upload the first five pages of our manuscripts and the agents and editors who’d be attending could take a look. They would say,Yes, I want to meet you! Or the largely silent, No thanks. I only received one response from a kind editor named Dan Conaway who left me his thoughts, if not his interest—three words that bridged the gap between my novel as it was, and my novel as it could be: Pare down ruthlessly. I applied this wisdom immediately.

Knowing, as Shakespeare puts it, that ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, I understood implicitly what Dan was saying. I dove into Veracity with no ego, operating as if I was simply an editor, once removed. I took out instances of over-explanation—places where metaphoric action or a bit of speech could do the job, often more eloquently than the belabored section in question. I scratched out the superfluous, nixed the redundant, and eradicated that which might be a beautiful turn of language, but progressed neither the story nor any character development. It was brutal. It was liberating.

Having ruthlessly pared down my prose, I entered Veracity into the conference’s writing contest, which I ended up winning. As a result, I signed with Writers House in NYC for agent representation and, via serendipitous curves in both our paths, was assigned to a gentleman named Dan Conaway. The same man who’d given me those three precious words that so changed my life.

I used to think the Holy Grail of writerdom was getting an agent, getting a publisher, and getting published. I realize now, that was the quest. The real Holy Grail is having the guts to be my own best critic and becoming the kind of writer I love to read. It’s paring down with an eye toward what’s best for the whole and thinking of eloquence as that magic that occurs maybe between the words, or after the words, or not necessarily within them.

—Laura

Go here to buy Laura's new book on Amazon. If you want more tips on paring down your writing, check out a previous post about cutting unnecessary description from your writing.

Finding a Theme (Or Letting the Theme Find You)

Sanjay Bahadur, author of The Sound of Water, guest blogs about finding a theme for a novel -- or letting the theme find you. A bit of background about the book, and about Sanjay's process, which included getting feedback via the internet! 

The Sound of Water provides an account of an Indian mining disaster as seen from three perspectives: an old miner struggling to save himself and his coworkers hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth; the company and government officials charged with managing the rescue efforts; and the miners' families anxiously awaiting word of survival or death.

While writing the book, the internet proved to be an effective resource for Sanjay. Not only did it strengthen his research but it enabled him to connect with some discerning readers whose suggestions improved the readability of the book. He also received technical guidance from mining engineers promptly through emails, including diagrams or process descriptions. Sanjay writes: “Writing can be a lonely process but internet ensured that I never lacked support or advice.”

As a first time author, the question posed to me most often is: So how did you choose the theme of The Sound of Water? To be frank, I think themes of novels are like taxmen. You don’t find them – they find you.

You may think I am debunking the art of writing and the ability of a writer to craft a good story. Well, I’m not. When a raw theme presents itself to a writer, she (or he – to retain the old world charm) still has to hammer, carve and chisel all her lumps of thoughts to fit that theme and make it presentable.

Imagine if the following “theme” were to strike me: A confused adolescent boy of 17-20 -- perhaps also prone to hallucinating -- gets it into his head that his father had been murdered. He sees ghosts, rants and raves about injustice in this world, takes out his anger on his hapless girlfriend, freaks out his close friends and hatches a wacko plot to take revenge. The plot hinges on performance of a weird play named, say, “The Murder of Gonzago” performed by some traveling drama company! It all ends in plenty of dead bodies, some killed by mistake, some deliberately and some in utter despair.

I don’t know about you, friend -- but I would probably make a mess of it. Or Hong Kong would have produced a B Grade karate flick called “Fist of Blood” or something. But it made “ye olde bard”, Shakespeare create Hamlet. See my point? The skill and presentation always matters. A theme grows like a kernel in the fertile soil of the writer’s imagination. It is how much love, care and attention it gets that makes it a sapling and eventually a flowering tree. All it takes is the courage to plant it -- on paper. Like babies, all themes are potentially great.

If that doesn’t sound convincing, let’s try out an open experiment here. Let any aspiring writer put down a theme that has grabbed her or his mind. Let it be just 10 sentences – or a single line. Plant it here, in this public space just so you know you have sowed your kernel in front of witnesses. If you really want to write a book, it will grow. In all probability, you would be the proud owner of a finished manuscript within the next 2-3 years.

Are there any disbelievers out there?

 

Sanjay Bahadur has a Masters degree in Economics from the University of Mumbai and a MBA from the University of Birmingham, UK.  He joined the Indian Revenue Service in 1989. During 2000-04 he worked as a Director in the Indian Ministry of Coal, which gave him the opportunity to observe mining operations and lives of miners at close quarters.