Virginia S. Anderson's Blog, page 36
January 30, 2016
Why I Quit Reading Your Book
I just abandoned another indie book.
It always breaks my heart to do this (fortunately, I’ve only done it a very few times). The act sets me to thinking: Was I just being a persnickety grouch, or do I have legitimate things to say about what makes a book work? This question is particularly cogent when I bought this book—two by this author, in fact—on the strength of a glowing review.
Obviously, my reaction isn’t the only one that matters. So is there anything of worth in trying to lay out what went wrong for me?
I think so. After all, I’ve raised the question of whether we really serve each other if we don’t at least try to explain why a particular element of a book led not to a mild critique but to abandonment, even if we can do so only in generic terms lest we embarrass a fellow writer. And my thoughts here are not idiosyncratic; practicing writers have heard versions of them before.
So. . . .
It took three strikes to force me to turn off my Kindle this time around. Looking at these three strikes, I realize that I would have probably let two of them slide if the third had been in place.
The first of the two strikes I might have forgiven was a plot twist I didn’t buy into. But I’ve persevered, even if grumpily, past what seemed to me far-fetched plot devices before.
The other strike involved some bizarre inaccuracies in the author’s depiction of the setting, which I happen to know intimately. But I’ve hung in through (and enjoyed!) stories that present that setting in ways that don’t completely jibe with my experience.
In both cases, I could have been seduced into accepting or ignoring these slips. It was the seduction that wasn’t there.
Because the writer lacked voice.
In other words, had this book had voice, the pleasure of voice could have overridden my complaints.
But what in the world do I mean by “voice”?
Writing teachers talk about voice all the time. They know it when they see it. But ask them to give you a formula for acquiring it? They try. Oh, do they try.
Like most people, whether you know it or not, you already have many voices. You know how to sound different when writing a Facebook post and an office memo. No one has to teach you that.
But “literary voice” is a little different. You learn the voice of an office memo by writing the way people write office memos. Literary voice, on the other hand, isn’t something you copy outright. There’s learning involved, what rhetoricians call imitatio. But from this learning, it’s something you create.
Here, I’m offering three dimensions of what was missing in the book I abandoned. These do not constitute the ultimate definition of voice. They’re just my attempts to put into “voice” a few of the qualities that make prose come alive for me enough to carry me past plot glitches and other slips. 
Voice is what says you have moved beyond “the rules.”
In the book I’m discussing, I could see the author conscientiously and visibly filling in the various checklists for what a writer ought to do. BUT: The essence of voice is riding those rules down the road where you want to go.
In this book, the rule that ruled the writer was a common one: Bring readers into the scene! Lots of sensory details! Make it come alive! Think of creative ways to say what you want readers to know!
But in this book, too many details, piled up on top of each other, slowed the action to the point that I skimmed ahead in frustration. You don’t want to confuse readers, but you don’t have to race them through every doorway, show them every blow to your hero’s head. Choose the most necessary, the most telling details. Don’t just pile up information because the rules seem to say you should.
Voice serves the story, not the writer.
In the books I’ve abandoned, writers often convolute their prose as if they must sound original—be a unique SOMEBODY—at all costs. But these choices may be robbing the English language of the power of its basic formula: Subject-verb-object. Someone doing something to someone. A basic sentence can have a modifying clause before it or an absolute phrase behind it, but English narrative dodges all sorts of pitfalls when it follows this basic pattern. For an excellent discussion of why this pattern works, try Joseph Williams’s classic Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Let people do things. Some of the most powerful prose in the world aspires to no more than this.
Still, voice means surprising the reader—just enough.
Your characters, your settings, your scenes, stand in a line-up with the characters, settings, and scenes from every other book ever written in your genre. When what you’ve put in your book could just as easily pop up in somebody else’s book, you probably lack voice. In the book(s) I’ve abandoned, I felt that I could predict every move, every sentence. I was looking at what we used to call “stock”—characters, settings, and prose off the shelf.
How can you move beyond stock?
What do you know about your character that no one would expect from a generic description of his age, ethnicity, occupation, etc.? What do you see in your setting that tells a whole story but that everyone else would overlook?
To create such vision, try these two steps: 1) Brainstorm. 2) Cull.
Exercises abound in books, workshops, blog posts, to help us generate details we might or might not actually use in our books. Here’s the place to go for the crazy stretch. Don’t censor. Outlandish is okay!
Then cull. Set aside your exercises as long as you can. Come back to them to see which ones jump off the page. Pick one. Maybe two. Be strict! Only the best. Only the ones that nail something readers really need to know but would never suspect.
And if you can, work toward honoring that famous dictum from Mark Twain (here tweaked because my version sounds better): The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Prose that captures lightning. not in every line but in carefully chosen moments of flash, has voice.
And I’ll forgive a lot if you give me voice.
What have I left out? What is voice to you? Send along examples of writers whose voice you admire.
January 29, 2016
‘Dear Lucky Agent’ Contest
Do you write women’s fiction? Check out this contest!
Reblogged on WordPress.com
Source: ‘Dear Lucky Agent’ Contest
January 28, 2016
8 Words to Seek & Destroy in Your Writing
A great reminder post1 So important to double-check these words to make sure they actually do work in our sentences before letting them stand. I echo Orwell’s advice, though, especially about the various forms of the verb “to be” (was, is, am, are, etc.). I always ask myself whether I can find a strong action verb rather than a being verb when I’m tempted to fall back on one. Yet I’ve also seen sentences where writers twisted themselves into knots trying to avoid “to be.” Once in a while, the shortest distance between two points is a nice little linking verb!
This is a piece previously posted by Robbie Blair that contains useful information that I want to share with you. Since I’m in the process of doing my final edit on Princess Adele’s Dragon I found this article helped me. Maybe it can help you also. Have a blessed week. Shirley
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Creating powerful prose requires killing off the words, phrases, and sentences that gum up your text. While a critical eye and good judgment are key in this process, some terms almost always get in the way. Here are eight words or phrases that should be hunted down in your story and deleted with extreme prejudice.
“Suddenly”
“Sudden” means quickly and without warning, but using the word “suddenly” both slows down the action and warns your reader. Do you know what’s more effective for creating the sense of the sudden? Just saying what happens.
I pay attention to every…
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January 26, 2016
Something you need to know on your road to self-publishing
I’m researching the POD process right now, so this first-hand advice is incredibly helpful. Quite simply, it had never occurred to me to publish with both! This helps me decide to go first with Ingram. No point in hanging back now! Thanks, Jean!
Should you use both CreateSpace and IngramSpark?
Maybe. That’s the short answer.
However, it does depend on what you hope to accomplish with your book.
Will it be an ebook only? Like Kindle?
Do you want to see your book in print?
Do you want it available in libraries and bookstores?
Me? I think printing with both distributors is the way to go.
But please for the love of God, I hope you can avoid some of my mistakes. Although, I didn’t crash and burn, I did bang up my poor little book a bit along the road to self-publishing. This was not a happy trip.
Sheesh, I’m a slow learner sometimes. Hopefully, you will benefit from my mistakes.
First, let’s start with what the two distributors do or don’t offer.
CreateSpace
Easy to use.
CreateSpace provides an easy to use MS Word template for you to set up your book.
Free.
CreateSpace provides a free ISBN number for both your print…
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January 24, 2016
Update on Amazon’s new Editing policy roll-out
This meme sent me to rereading my uploaded books. So far I did one typo, but not the kind Amazon will tackle, based on Kawanee’s points here. I wonder whether having previously undergone Smashwords’ “auto-vetter” process makes a difference? It is designed to catch formatting mistakes, I think; not sure how it handles typos. I do know that when I posted my auto-vetted texts to Amazon, they were accepted without question. Does anybody know whether going through auto-vetter first will make a difference?
http://johndopp.com/writers/amazon-kindle-spelling-mistakes/
No, Amazon Will Not Penalize Your Book for a Typo
BY JOHN DOPPLERJANUARY 21, 2016NEWS, SPOTLIGHT
Here we go again…
There’s a change coming at Amazon. You know what that means.
Panic! Share the first poorly-researched blog post you can find! Scream! Rage at Amazon’s cruelty until your fury is spent and you’re left crying into your ice-cold coffee.
And now that we’ve gotten that out of our systems, let’s breathe calmly into our paper bags while we examine the facts.
This week, the Good E-Reader blog announced that “Kindle e-Books will have a warning message if they have spelling mistakes.”
Some authors have taken that headline at face value and assumed the worst: that Amazon will brand any books deemed to have typographic errors — no matter how minor — with a sinister warning label.
The reality is far less dramatic.
The Facts
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January 23, 2016
How To Become A Successful Blogger: Part 2 – How To Create A Pingback
Wow, I’ve been doing this all along, not realizing I was officially creating pingbacks. Such simple, useful information. And now I’ll create a correctly administered pingback to Chris the Story Reading Ape, from whom I get so much good stuff!
Reblogged on WordPress.com
Source: How To Become A Successful Blogger: Part 2 – How To Create A Pingback
January 21, 2016
A WordPress Victory! Anchors!
Wizards of the HTML universe will snicker when they read this, but this experience was an accomplishment for me! So there.
I’d really shied away from messing with the HTML behind a WordPress page. Glances at my customizable sites left me remembering a student who’d once said that the very sight of Dreamweaver made him “want to vomit.” Okay, so my reaction wasn’t quite that extreme. Still. . . .
But then I wanted to set up my new “Book Reviews for Horse Lovers” page in such a way that readers could click on a title and jump straight to the individual review.
I was pretty sure that bloggers who were self-hosting could manage such edits. But when I called up a chat session, it took me quite a while just to clarify to the “Happiness Engineer” what I was talking about.
As I’ve commented on other blogs, I’ve generally been pleased with the support in WordPress—notwithstanding the recent flap over the new, unnecessarily unhelpful edit screen. And I’m pretty good at figuring out how to do what I want to do, within the limits of my general technological skills, which are just below adequate. But I was surprised when the Engineer had to go off and research how to do what I wanted. She came back with a URL about “links and anchors.”
Cue “duh.” I once knew how to do that on a web page. So what could be hard about doing it on my new WordPress page?
Well, for one thing, the support document she provided left out what I most needed: a complete visual example to help with placement of the necessary HTML elements. Where did I put the anchors and then the links? (I’ve linked to it in case you find it clearer than my instructions—you never know.)
Out came my old HTML primer. Voila. I report, with glee, that it’s done.
Just in case there are some just-below-adequate users out there who don’t automatically know how to set anchors for links, I’m going to point you in the basic direction. Like all efforts at instruction, this post will probably skip steps you need. If so, comment and I’ll revise. Maybe you even know an easier way to explain.
Note that I’m working on a “page” that is NOT my “Posts” page. You can set up as many pages as you like and then designate which page will display posts. I see no point in working with anchors on the posts page, since there are widgets to help readers navigate among posts.
You do need very basic HTML concepts. You need to know how to open a tag and close it. My guess is that most people likely to read this do know that. The other concept you need is to understand the principle of nesting tags: the first tag you open is the last one you close, the second is the second-to-last you close, etc. If by any chance you’re not familiar with this principle, the screen shots below should clarify it.
Finally, of course, you realize that any tiny slip will screw the whole thing up. If it doesn’t work, it’s because you’ve forgotten something or put something in the wrong place. Catching such slips can take patient proofing skills.
To get to the place to enter the code I’m going to show you, click on “HTML” at the top of your edit screen (which by default seems to be set to “Visual”).
Here’s what my anchor HTML looks like.
For the two of you out there for whom this looks scary (and it did to me until I examined it), I’ll walk you through it. The first tag opens the header (h3) tag, which I had chosen rather than the standard “paragraph” style. Note that this is also the last tag to close. Then comes the tag for the font color; this is here because in the Pilcrow theme, for some reason, the default header color is light gray, and I had modified it to “black,” which is designated by the numbers “#000000.” Note that the span style closes inside (before) the header closing tag (it’s nested inside it).
Next, TA-DA, comes the anchor-name code, opening and closing with the “a” tag. An important element, one I actually missed on first try, was the little > before the closing tag.
The name can be anything you decide, ideally something that’s easy to remember. After opening and closing the tag, this “name” is the vital part of this code.
Then comes the actual text of my heading, with the “em” tags indicating that I italicized the book title.
I discovered that you can place the anchor name pretty much where you want inside your anchor text as long as you close it before moving to the next element. In other cases, I placed it inside the “em” tags.
Once this anchor is “set” inside this header, which is where you want your reader to be able to jump to, you go back to the top and set the link. Here what that looks like:
Again, there’s a header tag and a color tag for black font. This time, I placed the code related to the link/anchor process inside the “em” tags. Seems to work fine. The “a href” tag is the standard tag any time you insert a hyperlink in an HTML document; nothing new there. However, the quotes and hashtag identify the “anchor” you created below. This has to match exactly, as I learned. If your link doesn’t work when you view the post, check this component.
This time, as well, you must include the little > and a portion of the text from the header you want to jump to before closing the “a” code.
The “Back to top” links just reverse this process. The anchor is created with the “a name=” code at the top and the links are placed wherever you want readers to see “Back to top.”
An important lesson for me from this project has been the realization that WordPress pages are just regular HTML pages. True, their overall appearance is controlled by the “style sheets” created by the theme designer, and I haven’t progressed to tinkering with those styles (though I was told you can always revert to the defaults should you miserably screw things up). But within the text of your page, you can turn to basic HTML to manipulate various features. Nice!
Let me know if you have additions or clarifications to add!
January 20, 2016
Almost Everything You Need to Know about ISBNs
Found this on Chris the Story Reading Ape and commented,
Pressed this to Just Can’t Help Writing. I read a post where an expert on indie publishing told readers it would cost more than $300 to get an ISBN. Having gotten mine from Smashwords, I couldn’t help wondering what he was talking about. This article helps clear that up. Thanks for sharing it!
To read this article, click on the link or photo of Author Laurie Boris below: almost-everything-you-need-to-know-about-isbns/
Source: Almost Everything You Need to Know about ISBNs
January 18, 2016
New! “Book Reviews for Horse Lovers” Page!
Check out these reviews. I’ve found some gems!
I plan to keep adding to the list as I continue reading others’ stories of the world of horses.
Paddy has opinions, too.
January 17, 2016
6 qualities of Bad Writing via Marcy Kennedy
Found on Chris The Story Reading Ape this morning: What do you think? Are these YOUR fatal flaws? Which ones have you recently forgiven, and which ones have caused you to stop reading?
Reblogged on WordPress.com
Source: 6 qualities of Bad Writing via Marcy Kennedy
