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A Writer’s Secret Weapon: Add a Listening Pass to Your Editing Arsenal

Today’s post is by author, editor, and book coach Suzy Vadori.

When you’re reading your own words during an editing pass, your brain works against you in two ways:

Your fears can take hold. When this happens, you might be hard on yourself, worrying that everything you’ve written is garbage. This can lead you to over-edit and tinker with your page until you can’t be sure if you’re making your book better, or worse. ORYour dreams can make you starry eyed. You love your idea for the book so much you see it through rose-colored glasses. You skim over your words, nodding along because your world comes alive in your head as you read. This makes it impossible to recognize if you’ve forgotten to share critical information you meant to share — even though it never made it onto your pages.

What if you could get a fresh perspective on your writing more often—for free—even before showing it to others, so you can put your best foot forward?

This is possible if you set up a listening pass—where you listen to your story read aloud by text-to-speech on your computer or mobile device. This technique has made my writing process so much faster and more fun that I teach it to every writer I work with.

If this sounds like torture—please, hear me out. I felt the same way when a writer told me to read my book out loud to myself. Reading out loud is far too slow to engage my brain, so I ignored this advice for years before deciding maybe I could use technology to do it for me. It’s now my go-to strategy to reflect on my own work. It’s so effective at keeping my brain engaged and finding gaps that I use it at every stage of my writing process, from doing a gut check on my messy first drafts to making sure I’ve crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s on my final copy.

Listening to your work has never been easier. You don’t need any fancy apps or software. You can do it for free using features already on your smartphone.

How to do a listening pass

First, email yourself the document or text that you’d like to have read aloud.

Next, change the settings on your phone. If you have an iPhone, you’ll find the option under Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content. Choose Speak Selection and Speak Screen. On this same screen, activate the Speech Controller (switch to ON).

Then, open the document from your email and download it into any eReader. iBooks is my favorite, because it automatically flips the pages, and keeps going if you navigate away to something else on your screen. You can even turn your screen off, and put your phone in your pocket. Next, activate the text-to-voice command. Voilà, Siri is now reading to you.

Bonus—using this same technology, you can have any ebook read to you!

With an Android phone, you’ll find the options in Settings > Accessibility and select the Text-to-Speech output.

(The instructions may differ slightly depending on your phone and the version of the software you’re using. If you’re having trouble, try Googling instructions for Text-to-Speech for your specific phone.)

The technology isn’t perfect, but it’s getting better every year. In the decade that iPhone’s Siri has been reading to me, her intonation and inflection have improved tenfold. You’ll get used to the quirks (like funny pronunciation of contractions, and reading the page numbers as it flips the pages) and you’ll hardly notice them after a while. Once you tune your ear to listening, you may want to adjust the speed at which the text is read. (I like max speed but choose whatever works for you.)

Ready to get started? Here are three ways to use a listening pass to move your project forward.

1. Review scenes and chapters while writing your first draft 

Often, as a mom of teens, I’m forced to break my writing trance to pick up a kid from the hockey rink or drive someone to the football field. Now, I use these breaks and time in the car to listen to newly drafted scenes.

Give yourself a lot of grace with these scenes. It may not be the immersive experience you envisioned with perfectly crafted sentences—yet. Don’t despair. Use these listening passes to get a feel for what’s working and what’s not.

Some questions you can ask yourself while listening:

Is the scene engaging and moving your story forward?Can you see where a character is on their arc?Are there any info dumps or clunky sections where you lean too heavily on one writing technique—actions, reactions, dialogue, inner thoughts, setting descriptions, etc.?

Once you’re done listening (or if you’re in the car, you’ve made it to your destination), take a few notes about the shape of the scene. Jot down anything that you know needs to be added or fixed. Don’t rely on your memory to write it down later, do it while it’s fresh.

Because I can never find a pen, I like to dictate notes into the Notes app on my phone and email them to myself. Then, when I’m back at my desk, I add the notes to my project’s document, so I know what changes I need to make the next time I’m working on that scene.

2. During revision

Once you have a complete first draft, listening to the entire manuscript helps you experience your story as a reader will. It can help you assess how all the pieces are coming together and spot what might be missing from your pages.

Remember, when revising, you want to start by addressing the overarching, story-level issues before getting into the nitty-gritty of polishing sentences. So, sit back and try to enjoy your book the way you hope a reader will. A listening pass can help highlight these story-level issues and pinpoint anything from an underdeveloped character to plot holes and pacing issues.

3. Proofreading

Your mind can, and will, fill in gaps and skip over errors when you’re too familiar with it. That’s one of the reasons some typos make it all the way through multiple levels of editing and into published books. But your phone won’t make the corrections your brain tries to when it reads your work back. It’ll read it exactly as it’s typed. Using this method of proofreading, you’ll hear the errors more quickly than you may spot them on paper, exponentially increasing your odds of catching any pesky typos.

Note: Word processing programs such as Microsoft Word on your desktop have similar technology available. However, I prefer to use my phone. The phone apps will hold your place if you stop listening and come back later.

Take your writing with you

A full listening pass of a 100,000 word book generally takes 8–10 hours, at 2x reading speed. It’ll take you longer if you listen at the natural 1x pace. The freeing part about using a listening pass is that you do not need to be chained to your desk. Try listening while going for long walks, cleaning the bathroom, cooking dinner, or decluttering a closet. (I’ve done all of the above.) I even bought underwater headphones to listen to a book while swimming (my favorite form of exercise). The change of scenery and movement can help you experience your work in a whole new way.

While taking your writing away from your desk: If you hear something you want to change while listening, just pause the reading and dictate, write, or type a quick note to yourself so you remember what to fix later. (Tip: For these more specific changes, include a portion of the sentence that needs to be fixed so you can use the search function to find it easily later when making corrections.)

Happy listening!

Ready to start listening to your writing today? Get Suzy’s guide on how to set it up (iPhone version) by registering here.

Turn Fact Into Fiction—Without Hurting Someone or Getting Sued

Photo by Antoni Shkraba

Today’s post is by author Caroline Leavitt (@carolineleavitt).

I’m sitting at a table talking to a friend when they tell me this astonishing, deeply compelling story about what happened to them when they were 15 and they had committed a murder, and yes, they did it, and yes, they served time. Early released, desperate to be forgiven, my friend then created a whole new identity and began to live a new life. Until their forties, when they were outed, losing friends and family. They had to start anew and create yet another identity. 

Of course, I’m stunned and shocked by this story, but I’m also deeply sympathetic because I absolutely know this person is a good person and this story is raising all sorts of questions for me. Because I’m a writer, later when I’m alone, I can’t help but think: God, this would make a great novel. Already the idea is spinning in my mind, trailing off into subplots and characters, but then I stop myself cold.

Because what my friend gave me was a private confession. What if my friend doesn’t want me to use the story? What if my friend says yes, except they want to read it first, and then they decide it’s not told the way they see it? I agonize that I am invading my friend’s privacy. I worry that I could lose a friend, that I could even be sued. 

And still, the story haunts me.

Remember the story of the bad friend that was making the rounds, about a writer who took her friend’s idea about donating a kidney for altruistic reasons and used it for a story without asking permission and all hell broke loose? This was hotly debated in the literary community, and in the end, one error was that the author had plagiarized words from an email. But the story itself was up for grabs.

Or was it?

I couldn’t let go of my friend’s story. I loved this person, but I didn’t want to hurt them or invade their closely guarded privacy—which is why I’m not revealing more details about them right here.

I decided that I would totally change the story, keeping only the kernel that had snagged me—the idea of forgiveness, of guilt and innocence, and what they mean. I wanted to write about someone reinventing themselves and then being caught at it.

It took me six months to craft an outline which became my new novel, Days of Wonder. Instead of one person, I now had two fifteen-year-olds living in different parts of a different city, and for the novel it was New York City. They were Romeo and Juliet lovers, a wealthy boy and a girl from a single seamstress mom. Instead of a murder, I changed it to an attempted murder. I changed everyone’s description; every action was different. By the time I finished, I had transformed the initial story so completely that it had, I hoped, a life of its own. My friend has not read the book, but I have given it, with no explanation, to a mutual friend. She liked the characters, liked the story, and when I asked her if she thought the characters were too recognizable, she blinked hard. “To whom?” she said, and then I relaxed.

Of course there are rules. Never ever use real names. Never describe someone in a way that they are recognizable, especially if you are writing about something damaging like drug addiction or crime. Don’t use the same city, or the same time period, if you can help it. Change everything about the person, from their name to their height to the size of their shoes. If they live in a walk-up, make it an elevator building. Brown hair? No, no, it’s now red. Someone works at Mass General Hospital? Make up a name of a hospital. It’s fiction, you can do that.

Should you ask someone before you write about their life?

You can, but be forewarned: that doesn’t always protect you. The author of The Help, about black maids in the 1960s, gave a draft of her book to her childhood maid before it was published. But she wasn’t sued until the book came out, and the case was dismissed because the maid who was suing had had months to read the book and hadn’t.

One time I decided to write a personal essay about a terrifying summer when my then sister-in-law was busy sleeping with her husband’s shrink and my own first marriage was collapsing. “You have to write about it!” my sister-in-law told me. Not only that, but she gave me more details to use. I told her of course I’d change her name, the city, the descriptions. She was happy when the story was published in New York magazine. Happy, too, when I got to go on the Today Show (twice!) to talk about it.

But when I got a film option, suddenly the stakes were high enough for her to want to sue. She threatened me and I had to get an attorney. But again, because she had read the piece and approved it, because she had seen me on the Today Show, she could not win. Still, it took a few years for us to patch up our friendship. But we did.

Of course, you are safest when the person is dead. In Days of Wonder, wonderful stories from my mother began to seep into the narrative. My mother never wanted me to write about her ever, but after her death, I wanted to feel closer to her, so I embellished all her stories about growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home, a world she had loved, up until her father, the local rabbi, died suddenly and she lost her faith. It made me feel closer to her, as if I were honoring the love I had for her.

Amazon • Bookshop

Think about your motive. Are you trying to even a score? That’s always a bad place to write from.

Is the story just too good to let go? Then dissect the elements to find the parts that really engage you. And then change it as much as you can.

I write about what haunts me, what I need to rewrite into fiction in a way that helps me understand not just what happened but why. I keep revising and revising, and if I do the revisions right, the stories I’m telling will sound like they came from the characters I’ve created, and not from the real people at all—and readers will simply be immersed in a great story, rather than a roman a clef. Good and careful writing teaches us that writing about the stories of others is really about writing our own.

Boundaries Are About More Than Simply Carving Out the Time to Write

Photo by Erin Larson on Unsplash

Today’s post is by writer Mirella Stoyanova (@mirellastoyanova).

There are a select few life lessons that I am fated to learn the hard way. As a therapist, a trauma survivor, and a consummate people pleaser (not to mention a woman), setting healthy boundaries is one of them. 

So I should have known that establishing my own boundaries would be an important part of developing my identity as an emerging writer. Yet, what little I had read about boundaries when it came to writing (Protect your time! Don’t compare yourself to others!) and how much I’ve learned since I began the journey, have revealed a lot about the ways I still need to grow to become the writer I want to be. 

Before we dig in, I first want to introduce boundaries as an expression of what you need to sustain yourself in any given endeavor. Boundaries could be limits or standards—I think of them as two sides of the same coin.

Limits refer to what we do not have the capacity for, or what is unsustainable to a particular relationship. Standards refer to various behaviors that sustain a particular relationship that you either accept from others or attempt to embody yourself.

We think most often about boundaries in the context of relationships with others. But I would argue that boundaries are equally important to consider as they relate to the relationship we have with ourselves (the relationship from which all others are based)—and also, how they relate to various other facets of our lives, like our work. A job description, for instance, is a contractual set of boundaries you agree to with an employer based upon the scope of work you are being paid to perform.

Now, as a quick aside, it is both striking and, sadly, unsurprising to me (given how much talk there is of exploitation in the writing world) that more is not said on how new and emerging authors can sustain themselves in the work of writing. Author Courtney Maum wrote an excellent piece about this on her Substack a few months ago. 

But boundaries are important whether you are published or not. And when it comes to building a career as a writer, your boundaries are about more than simply carving out the time to write. 

For aspiring authors in particular, there are two separate but interrelated areas around which a better grasp of boundaries could prove useful, especially for those of us attempting to build a writing career without the benefit of an MFA.

These two areas involve (1) the way we write and shape our own writing identities and (2) the way we consume content and services designed to help us write. One is about the way we negotiate boundaries with ourselves as writers, the other is about the way we negotiate boundaries with others—and the two are inextricably linked.

The way we write is all about making decisions.

At a basic level, if you write an essay or a book or really anything for that matter, you have to decide what to include or omit, what you want to say, and how you want to say it.

These decisions are informed by broader questions that determine your personal set of boundaries as a writer. For instance, what will you write about? What topics are off limits? What opportunities do you pursue and which do you kindly decline? What are the issues so important to you that they come to define how you show up to your writing (otherwise known as the hills you will die on)?

To make these decisions, you first need to know yourself. To make these decisions well, you have to honor what you know. In other words, you have to uphold your boundaries.

As a personal example, I have strong feelings about presenting in a way that is congruent with who I am in real life. So when I write or present myself to the writing world, one standard I strive to maintain is to be open about who I am. Sometimes that means acknowledging my shortcomings with a healthy dose of levity. Other times, that means standing up for what I believe in. 

Here are three more examples of boundaries that could be related to your writing identity:

I will not be a part of a critique group that does not value my feedback or offer me feedback that I value. Instead of pushing to exhaustion when I notice I have nothing left to write, I will stop writing for the day.I will not spend more time consuming than I do creating. 

That last one is a nice segue into the second area in which I think we all could stand to benefit from better boundaries: consuming writing-related content and services. 

Most of us think we are, at least, within reach of making our personal publishing dreams come true. It’s why so many people think they can write a book—and probably why so many of us try (and then quit when the going gets tough). 

For better or worse, an entire industry has been built to profit off of these hopes and dreams.

Thankfully, whistleblowers like Writer Beware exist to call attention to those acting in bad faith, but what about those well-meaning writing professionals who are not a good fit to provide the services we need, who underdeliver, or who act poorly or in ways that leave a lasting negative impression?

Unless you have a strong sense of your own boundaries, it can be hard to have the courage to give feedback or to ask for what you need. And frankly, your own boundaries might get overstepped multiple times before you realize that the problem is actually something you are responsible for—because our boundaries are our own responsibility to protect.

But it’s not just services. It’s opting into the mailings that crowd your inbox each morning. It’s going down the YouTube or TikTok rabbit hole for hours on end. It’s subscribing to more paid Substacks than you could ever hope to read (it’s okay, my eyes are bigger than my stomach, too).

Because as it turns out, much like with writing, boundaries require us to make decisions.

Boundaries call for discernment about the quality of our interactions. And if you’re feeling resentful about the way an interaction went, anxious about something you put out into the world or if you’re feeling frustrated with your own writing productivity or habits, you may actually have a boundary issue on your hands. 

To assess your boundaries in a particular area of your writing life, ask yourself the following questions:

Is something bothering me more than it should? Am I comfortable with this? Does this align with my goals? What is my desired outcome?

Truth be told, I am still figuring out my boundaries with writing because—and this is crucial—I am still figuring out the writer I want to be. The wonderful thing is that the clearer I become on who I am, the better I become at understanding my boundaries—and honoring them. 

Boundaries empower me to take responsibility for my own writing life and the pursuit of my goals as I continue to revise my WIP and establish myself as an emerging writer.

Perhaps boundaries can empower you, too.

Why Your Flashbacks Aren’t Working

Photo by Eduardo Sánchez on Unsplash

Today’s post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin (@FoxPrintEd). Join her for the three-part online class Mastering Backstory for Novelists.

Like a genie in a bottle, flashbacks can be wonderful and terrible things. They can grant you phenomenal power—painting in backstory other characters may not know or may be concealing, offering character motivation, raising stakes, creating deeper reader investment, heightening suspense, and more.

But, like the genie, if you don’t carefully control them, flashbacks can get disastrously out of hand.

If you worry your flashbacks aren’t working effectively, here are the most likely reasons why.

You have too many flashbacks.

Flashbacks are the seasoning that make the stew. Your story is and should be about the main real-time action of the story, not what led up to it. Relying too heavily on flashbacks to tell your story risks confusing readers or diluting the focus of the overall story.

Ask yourself why flashback is the most effective way to relate the info, or if it might be as effectively conveyed through context or memory. These forms of backstory that can be woven in more invisibly, without pulling the reader away from the main story.

If you’re using lots of flashbacks to tell your story effectively, consider whether you may in fact have a multiple-timeline story. (Learn more about multiple timeline stories.)

The flashbacks are in the wrong place.

I’m looking at you, “cheat” flashback prologue. This is a common type of failed flashback, a temptation authors fall into when they know their first chapters don’t have enough action or a strong hook, and hope that plopping in more exciting action into the prologue can make up for a slow start. It can feel like a false promise, as readers may not understand what the actual story is about.

Used well, though, flashback prologues can be effective ways to set up a story and give it more resonance and higher stakes. For instance, in her novel Where We Fall, author Rochelle Weinstein’s brief opening flashback prologue gives the rest of the story context and perspective on the three protagonists’ history and relationships that raises the story’s impact and reader investment, and poses the central story question: What happened to these three characters and the relationship we see in this flashback that’s radically changed in chapter one?

Like all backstory, ask yourself what I call the Watergate question of backstory: What does the reader need to know and when do they need to know it? A flashback plopped in randomly can be jarring and inorganic.

The flashbacks go on too long.

Flashbacks that run for pages and pages can stall momentum. They may also be offering more information and detail than is needed.

Ask yourself: What is the essential narrative purpose of the information in the flashback? Find the central kernel of meaning/illumination decide how much of the scene readers actually need to see to understand the impact on the main story. If readers don’t need to know exactly how something happened but simply that it happened, it may be more effective to add the information using threaded-in context or brief flashes of memory amid the forward movement of the real-time story.

If you do determine that parts of the information or events would be most effective as actual flashback, see if you can weave it in as snippets amid the present-moment scene or story, instead of using a giant chunk of scene, as Toni Morrison does almost invisibly throughout Beloved.

They are clunky and obvious.

The surest way to lose your reader is by hanging a lantern on the fact that you’re about to yank them into a flashback. You know what I’m talking about—those clumsily signaled flashbacks that begin, “He remembered his if it were yesterday, or “The scene played like a movie in her mind,” or “Suddenly she relived the moment when…”

Setting them off with different typefaces or fonts also screams, This is a sidetrack!, and readers may disengage or even skip over them. Calling attention to a flashback makes the reader cognizant of them as a device, which makes them see the author’s hand, which pulls them out of the story.

Try to seduce readers right into your flashback with smoothly integrated transitions, like connective tools (a sound, a sense memory, an event similar to one in the past). Read a full explanation: How to Transition into a Flashback.

 The flashbacks don’t move the story forward.

The holy grail of using flashback is that even as you take readers back to the past, the flashback should always move the story forward. That means whatever information they share should materially and essentially shed light on the character(s) and their arc in the main story, advance the main story with essential information, and/or raise stakes. 

If you can do all three with a flashback it’s even stronger, as Kate Quinn does in The Alice Network with a well-executed three-page flashback that shows why the protagonist is so powerfully motivated to find her missing cousin throughout the story.

The flashbacks aren’t directly relevant to the main story.

Not everything that happened in your world or characters’ lives prior to our “meeting” them matters to what you are presenting in this story. Authors don’t need exhaustive character bibles or biographies of every element of characters’ lives; trying to weave all that detail will clutter the story. Cherry-pick the elements that illuminate your characters’ motivations, goals, obstacles, and so on.

The flashbacks confuse readers.

If flashbacks are too frequent, too long, or it’s not readily apparent how they relate to the main story, readers may give up on trying to piece them together or make sense of them within the story.

Keep flashbacks as tight and efficient as possible, and don’t take readers down a flashback rabbit hole of flashbacks within flashbacks, or overwhelm them by dumping in new characters and storylines for them to keep track of without adequate context or connective tissue.

Final thoughts

The best way to find out how your flashbacks may be serving the story (or not) is with outside eyes: critique partners, beta readers, and editors can help point out where flashbacks may distract from or stall your story. But learning what makes flashbacks effective and how to diagnose how well they’re working in your story can help you spot any rough areas and smoothly incorporate the relevant past while always moving the story forward.

If you want to dig deeper into flashbacks and how to use them effectively in your story, join Tiffany and Jane for our ongoing masterclass, Mastering Backstory. This three-part course focuses this week on flashbacks and the tools and techniques that make them work.

How to Deliver Backstory Without Confusing the Reader

One of the key pitfalls of backstory, especially early in a novel, is either confusing backstory or overly coy and “mysterious” backstory. Here’s what it looks like.

In the enigmatic town of Serenity Falls, nestled deep within the embrace of towering pine forests and shrouded in perpetual mist, secrets were as abundant as the whispers that echoed through the labyrinthine streets. The townspeople moved with an air of quiet reserve, their eyes veiled and their lips sealed, guarding the mysteries that lurked in the shadows of their collective history.

Isabella, a newcomer to Serenity Falls, with a past as elusive as the morning fog, felt an inexplicable pull toward the town’s enigmatic allure, drawn by a sense of curiosity that she could neither explain nor ignore. She found herself embroiled in a web of intrigue and suspense that seemed to emanate from the very soul of the town itself.

Editor Tiffany Yates Martin discusses this terrible passage of backstory (written by AI, in fact) and then shows how to improve it. This is a super-powered lesson in great writing in just three minutes. Want more valuable nuggets like this? Sign up for Tiffany’s three-part class on Mastering Backstory.

How to Gain Traction in Your Career: Q&A with The Thriller Zone’s David Temple

Podcast host, author, and actor David Temple discusses his shift from being in radio to writing novels, how to navigate author interviews from both sides of the desk, what it takes to make your own book-to-film adaptation, and how he got some of the best known names in thriller writing to appear on his podcast, The Thriller Zone (@thethrillerzone).

Having spent his entire career as a broadcast professional, David Temple has hosted top-rated radio shows in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Charlotte, and on both the Westwood One and Armed Forces Radio Networks. Throughout his career, David has been a filmmaker, a news anchor, a television producer, a home-shopping host, and even had a short stint as weatherman. Temple acts occasionally in films and television shows, and has been a career voiceover artist for radio, TV & film commercials and trailers. In his spare time, Temple records audiobooks, and hosts a weekly thriller fiction podcast on Apple, Spotify, AmazonMusic and iHeart Radio. David is currently crafting his tenth novel, and his first nonfiction book on health and longevity, as he battles prostate cancer. David and wife, Tammy, enjoy travel, books, films, and hiking in and around their home in San Diego.

KRISTEN TSETSI: Your foundation as an artist was voice: radio, voiceover work, etc., and you transitioned into doing some screen acting and directing. There’s some cultural overlap in voice and screen acting, so going from one to the other might be relatively smooth. But to make a shift to novel writing is to navigate an entirely different system, a new artistic “clique” (for lack of a better way to say it). What challenges, if any, did you experience when jumping cultures?

DAVID TEMPLE: Now this is a complex question, with all sorts of nuances, so thank you.

First of all, as an “artist”—which I believe we should call ourselves, if indeed we find enjoyment in crafting something extraordinary out of the ordinary—we are called to a higher purpose. That purpose involves entertaining the masses (outwardly), but also entertaining ourselves (inwardly).

While I had always known I had the gift of conversation, my confidence didn’t lie as much in the two-way interaction with family, friends, and neighbors as much as it circled around the imaginative world of the mind. I can recall decades upon decades ago how—even with mundane chores like mowing the yard—I would create conversations between people in particular situations. Some of those situations reflected scenarios I may have seen on television. Or, just things I think would make for an interesting story. (Now, before you call the white jackets to put me in a padded room, allow me to say I have always had an overactive imagination.) So, after spending decades in a profession that was my first love—radio—and after achieving so many of the goals I had fashioned for myself, only to see the “business” of the business shifting from what was once a very creative avenue of expression, I decided to get out.

Referring to your description of my spending time honing skills in voiceover work and acting for the screen, I became frustrated with the lack of control in so many of the competitive environments. Here’s what I mean. I could audition for a television show, or a film, and run up against so many people all doing the same thing, while so many of them looked much like me, yet perhaps with more talent. The real bottom line here is “lack of control.” Turning to the inward muse, and knowing I had the ability to tell a good story, and while working on something I could control, I turned to writing.

I figured it would be hard work, take a lot of time and energy, and would be very competitive; however, I always felt that I had some innate talents, plus a more than healthy drive, not to mention an insatiable tenacity to achieve my goals, so I put my mind into motion, my pen to paper, put in the time required to fail, and with the understanding that even with all the outward competition, my inward competitor would (more than likely) succeed and prevail. Have I yet? Well, I crafted my first nine novels on my own, as I “took myself to school” by learning how the world of self-publishing worked.

I’ve always been a student. Always. If there’s something I’ve wanted to learn to do, I simply started by giving myself a crash course in learning. Wanna write a screenplay? I bought the top five books on the subject and started learning. Then I started writing them. Sure, the first couple were horrible. And long. And just bad. But they got better. Want to learn to act? Read up, take a course, but best of all? Go audition. It’s the single scariest thing in the world to do, but you just do it. And fail. Badly. Then you do it again until you get better. Same with directing a film. Don’t know how? I bought ten books on the profession and/or procedures and/or how to do pretty much anything. Then I started writing shorts. And hiring my friends and family to play along. It helps that I had a circle of friends who made them as well. And we failed, but only until we didn’t. 

Back to books: I had no idea what a Kindle was. Never used one. Didn’t matter. I just found some software on how to format. Then I tried my hand (miserably, at first) at crafting covers—I’m pretty good at Photoshop and Canva Pro—and made covers that sucked. To get better, I practiced and studied the covers of authors who were among the top sellers. After all, it’s about the Benjamins! 

When I realized my own designs weren’t working, I turned to 99designs (not Fiverr). I no longer do my own covers, as I think it’s the wrong move. I can tell you that there are about three factions, in my experience, of book cover designers: (1) Below $600, you’re wasting your time, (2) $600-$1000 is kinda the sweet spot, and (3) $1200-$2000, which is where some of the “bigs” live. 

Now that I’ve spent nearly three years interviewing some of the biggest thriller writers in the world for my podcast The Thriller Zone, I have come to the conclusion that they, like me, are just as nervous about succeeding, and just as scared of failing, all the while feeling neurotic that someone will find them to be a phony. But they pressed on. And so shall I; thus, the reason I’m working on my next psychological thriller novel, and two nonfiction books based on health and cancer, and science and longevity.

What advice would you give someone who’s interested in entering the novel-writing world but is nervous about arriving what they might fear is “late” to the community? 

First of all, I don’t necessarily believe in “being late to the community.” I’m sure scores of writers throughout the years have asked a similar question. If one wants to write, then one should write. If that same person feels they’ve “missed the boat” or is “late to the game,” then perhaps they should consider something else. 

I would encourage anyone who genuinely wants to write to simply write. Not for the money (there may never be any), not for the prestige (I feel much of that is fleeting), and not for the attention (who needs any more of that? I mean, really). Bottom line: write as if your life depends upon it, IF your happiness depends upon it. Otherwise, there are many bigger, better, stronger, richer ways to make a living, feed your happiness, or find a pastime that pleases you.

You adapted Chasing Grace for the screen, accomplishing the fantasy of many a writer to see their work performed. It can seem like an improbable, if not impossible, endeavor without knowing someone in Hollywood, though, or having film school friends. Is it more feasible than we might think to self-produce an adaptation of a novel? If so, what’s the first step?

It’s ALL about connections. Period. Seriously, I’m not sure you could do it alone. Not really. I happened to hang out with a lot of creatives who knew various aspects of filmmaking and we just learned (and failed) together. 

When it came to Chasing Grace, I had made enough shorts (about five) to learn the mechanics. Then when I needed to raise money, I just asked. I always figured, “All they can say is no, and I’ll ask someone else.” So, I did that. Over and over. And over, until someone gave me some money. I went to people I knew who, and this is critical, have enough money to not care if they lose it. Read: rich. Or friends who have rich friends. Yes, you can try GoFundMe, but you have to be willing to pay for the donations, or give to get. If you want to raise money, start with friends and family. Just don’t expect to tap that well repeatedly. Then go to business leaders with dispensable cash. Mainly, seek out people of high net worth. Dentists make excellent investors, as they make a lot of money … and they love toys.

All the while I was raising money, I was also polishing my script to have on standby. Then an old friend wanted to work together and he had a long list of contacts, and since we had worked together on various projects before, we put together a film team. And as they say, the rest became history.

One large caveat is that I have always believed it best to surround yourself with people smarter than you, as they will nearly always make you look smarter than you really are. Another bottom line is one question I would ask: How badly do you want it? For you to see it happen, you have to really, truly, sincerely want it. It’s one of the very biggest boulders you’ll ever push up the very steepest of hills. It nearly killed me getting that damn movie made. I worked nearly 16 hours a day, between raising money, polishing the script, finding the crew, raising more money, scouting the locations, asking friends for favors, raising more money, and kept doing that until we got it done. I was E-X-H-A-U-S-T-E-D, but it was worth it, because I wanted to do it. And I’d do it again tomorrow! 

What have you learned about the nature of building and maintaining professional connections?

Connections should be nurtured over time, handled with care, and always respected. Give first, before you take. Be willing to help others with disregard for yourself, to start. Sow seeds of genuine caring. Build a relationship. Find common ground. Study hard. Listen harder. Be willing to lift someone else’s burden, and trust yours will be lifted too. Not to be corny or crass, but truly give a shit—people can tell when you do. It’s not that hard. Oh, and do your freakin’ homework.

Many writers also have fantasies about starting a podcast on writing, or books, or writing and books. In 2021 you started the author-interview podcast The Thriller Zone. Aside from any equipment needed to ensure professional-level sound, what does it take for someone to have a decent podcast? What skills might someone try to cultivate, or what tips should they keep in mind?

Such a good question, and one that I wish/hope people will heed. If you want to do a podcast about writing/books, I have a simple three step process (aside from the equipment notes you made, and I’m happy to elaborate on that in another session). 

Step one: Learn how to LISTEN. Be more ready to listen first and speak second. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves. I see/hear so many people who think, “Oh, I’ll just grab a microphone and a ring light from Amazon, and I’ll start talking to one of my pals.” Wrong. I hear it all the time and frankly, it’s disgusting. It sounds more like two dudes slurping beers in a garage and just talking trash about nothing. There’s a reason Joe Rogan is top dog right now: he reads a lot, and he listens well. Same with Sam Harris; the guy’s brilliant, extremely educated, and insightful as hell. Plus, he’s an incredible listener. 

Bottom line? Have Something To Say. And take time to Listen First. 

As for the skills to cultivate, read everything you can get your hands on that surrounds the person you’re interviewing, or at the very least, read the very latest thing they’ve written and be able to ask smart questions well aside from the classic, “What inspired you to write this story,” or “Where do you get your ideas?” 

Put in the time. People often ask me how much time I put into a single podcast. You may be surprised to know that I can spend anywhere from 10 to 20 or even 30 hours working on a single podcast—and that doesn’t even include reading the book. Excellent work doesn’t just happen. PUT IN THE TIME! 

Last note: reach inside yourself to ask questions that not everyone else asks, and—perhaps like me—start a conversation that doesn’t have a single thing to do with the damn book; you may be surprised to see the author is pleasantly surprised that you asked about them.

Your guests have ranged from debut authors to Dean Koontz, who is a category unto himself. How does someone relatively new to the fiction world secure interviews with some of the genre’s best-known writers? 

Ask them. 

I researched the people I wanted to speak with, found their publishers or publicists (Publishers Weekly is a good resource), and reached out asking if they’d like to be on my podcast. I did, however, mention my background in radio (25+ years) and markets in which I’d worked (NY, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, etc). I shared my experience and told them some people I’d already had committed to appear. 

If I wanted Stephen King, for example, I’d most likely go to one of his books, see who he has thanked in his acknowledgments, and start there. I’d also reach out to his publisher, his publicist, and his agent. In fact, now that I think about it, perhaps I’ll reach out like this.

You have to have a looooot of patience. As in: I wanted Don Winslow. I loved his books. So I went to one of his book signings. Then another. And another. I think by the third time, and he knew who I was, I said I had a podcast and asked if he’d like to be a guest. He said yes, gave me his number, I called and arranged it, and done! 

Don was one of the very first people I wrote on my list. Dean was in the Top 10. I’m big into visualization and making my dreams known to the Universe. Pardon the woo-woo, but it’s true-true: I’m a big believer in seeing it and attaining it. Plus, I have very little fear about stuff (well, except sharks, crashing waves against rocks, cancer, and crazy people who have nothing to lose. Oh, and big spiders).

One of my mantras—and it’s not original—is The Worst They Can Say Is No. And I’ll Ask Someone Else. Have faith in yourself, and remember this one…very…important…aspect: you’re helping them sell their books, which in turns makes them money.

Can you recommend a particular platform for beginning podcasters? 

This is such an in-depth conversation, but I’ll simply say this: Low budgets with little experience: Buzzsprout. Bigger budgets with more experience and most of the bells/whistles I need (and the one I use): transistor.fm

Buzzsprout is dirt cheap. Transistor is (almost too) expensive. Both sites provide pricing.

I’m on all podcast directories. It’s not hard to get on them. The best? Apple, far and away, for exposure and reach. Spotify is second. 

When you aren’t reaching out to potential guests to talk about their books, authors are probably reaching out to you. What approaches are you more receptive to, and what’s likely to go unanswered or rejected? 

I’ll respond with last first. Don’t “Dear Colleague” me. If you haven’t taken the time to know my name, I will not give you the time to respond—much less even finish reading the first sentence. Nope, you can count on DELETE, just like that. I borrow some of the thinking of agents: use my name and address me correctly, show me that. If you’ve heard the show before, perhaps mention a favorite episode and just be patient knowing that I’m being pitched every single day, just like agents.

You should seem as though you really want this as a career, with at least one or two books already published, either self or trad. That’s the start. 

One of the biggest draws for me, and yes, it’s as old as dirt and as cliché as they come, but it’s absofreaking true: We DO judge a book by its cover. Invest in a good cover? If so, you’re 50% there! Bad cover? It hits my personal slush pile. Oh, and if you’re tenacious and repetitive and nearly obnoxious in your pursuit to be interviewed about this one book but can’t read between the lines of my cordially structured “I’m not interested in this book,” read my earlier statement about listening.

Show that you have the drive, the dream, and the determination. This includes a solid social media presence and a rock-solid website. Invest in a good headshot that best represents you. Invest in book covers that either take your breath away, or at the very least snag my attention and show me something I haven’t seen yet—or if I have seen, perhaps just not that way.

Send me your book, allow me to read it, and if I don’t pick this book, know that I may pick your next book. I can’t tell you how many times people have sent me books only for me to never cover them. Until one day, something clicks. And there’s no explaining WHAT or WHY something clicked, but it did. One such was Terrence McCauley. That guy hit me up near the beginning of my podcast. I didn’t read the books, and I’m not even sure I even thanked him, until one day, he hit me at the right time, with the right book, and we clicked, and I invited him, and he showed up prepared, and it was a solid interview, and we’ve actually become friends since then. His tenacity paid off. Plus, the guy is a prolific writer. He just keeps writing. I’m impressed with that. 

By the way, there are a LOT of PR/Pub people out there pushing books (like mad) because they’re being paid to (by authors willing to dish big bucks for exposure); however, so many of them just aren’t that good. And for so many reasons. Best advice: write the very best book you have the ability to write (while reading some of the very best writers in your genre) and invest in both a good artist for the cover and a superb editor for the insides. Next, build up a tidy nest egg to invest in pub and marketing. Show you have traction. Then hit the bricks. And swing for the fence.

Define traction (in what you look for as “traction,” I mean) and why it’s important to you that they have that versus, say, an endorsement from a trusted, well-known name. Sometimes it’s hard to show traction if you can’t get people to interview you until you have traction.

Traction to me means you’re doing the daily work of trying to gain exposure, recognition, position, etc.

I’ve learned in my near-three years that an endorsement, also known as a blurb, is really quite often people doing one another favors. They’re not even reading the books, at least for the majority, but they are scratching backs because everyone needs it and does it.

I’m happy to say I’ve always been a cheerleader for the underdog. And I still am, in part. However, with more demands on my time—including my own books (both fiction and non), and the needs of my wife and family—it just isn’t sustainable to read, research, interview, edit and post. 

If you want an inside scoop on one of my absolute pet peeves, it’s when I go the distance to do everything I just listed, provide a valuable service, as I do, and then the author does either nothing, or next to nothing to further promote his/her appearance on my podcast. It really chaps the hell outta me, as I spend a LOT of time, effort and money to provide a service; the least you could do is repost/retweet/re-whateverthehellitis … and help a brother out!

When someone wants to be interviewed about their work, the “Yes” from an interviewer can feel like a huge win—but the interview itself is what’s important. In all your years in radio, and now podcasting, you must have experienced those who are, and who are definitely not, good at being interviewed, or who at least either do or don’t do a service to their book or to themselves. What’s an example of how a person might sabotage their own interview, and what makes a good interview subject? Are there ways to practice being a good interviewee?

OMG (sorry for my teen outburst but this one’s so good). Here is how 90% of the people who crash and burn on my podcast do so, and trust me, I work very, very hard at making the process as easy and kind and seamless as is possible, but people still continue to completely disregard just a few simple asks:

First and foremost, care about what you look and sound like. Do you own a razor? When’s the last time you saw a hairbrush? Doesn’t everyone by now have a ring light? Trust me, I’m NOT saying “get a ring light” but I am saying please, for the love of God, if you want to be seen, use ambient lighting like a window and let me see you. 

If you only want to be heard—and these days, who wants only that?—then it’s a different conversation. Drop the dime on a good mic. (I’m *this close* to crafting a How To Be Interviewed on a Podcast video.) Don’t rely on those damned dangling headphones. NO, they do not produce good sound. And unless you like the incessant echo of your voice during a cast, headphones would be a good way for you to hear me talking to you rather than your microphone picking up the feedback. 

Be interesting. To me, being “interesting” is like being good on a first date. In other words, don’t be a doofus. Don’t say stupid things. Don’t be rude. Be willing to talk about anything besides your book. There’s more to life than your freakin’ book, even though that’s the main reason we’re chatting. 

If you’re worried about getting nervous, have a good story or anecdote or quote in your back pocket for those moments you freeze. Think of an author you really like and learn one of their quotes, or have a sample of their skill that impresses you and that you perhaps used in your work. 

Listen. Ask the host a question or two. Even though “it’s all about you,” take 20 seconds and ask your host something about themselves. Remember that a conversation is a two-way street. Trust me, the good hosts (and I hope I’m one of them) are smart enough to not gobble that time up for themselves, but instead keep the spotlight focused on YOU.

Have your book’s elevator pitch down to a freakin’ science. But keep it truly short and sweet. Use phrases that pull me in, that aren’t the same thing every other person uses.

Finally, be comfortable with yourself. If it’s taking off your shoes, do that. For me, it’s standing. I don’t like to sit in interviews. I never sat during my radio shows. Like, almost never. Standing literally “keeps you on your toes” and you breathe better, and you’re sharper. Sitting makes you lazy, and often boring. And if you can’t stand, lean forward.

How to Teach Word a Scrivener Trick

Today’s post is by author Wendy Lyons Sunshine.

Just as mountain climbers need a sturdy harness and strong rope to reach the summit, writers depend on robust digital tools to carry us through to a book deadline.

For my latest book, I wanted tools that would let me efficiently juggle a great deal of content and citations. The first choice for my toolkit was Zotero, a citation manager that lets you grab information with a single click of a browser extension, conveniently links text, notes, and tags to the citations, and outputs formatted citations with a few clicks.

But settling on a word processing choice was trickier.

My wish list

I spent a few years as a technical writer, hammering out data-heavy documents and ushering them through multiple revision and output cycles. When you’re elbow deep in hundreds of pages, continually moving graphics, tables, and chunks of data, the last thing you want is to format, mouse, scroll, or cut and paste more than necessary. The right tool offers shortcuts and flexibility. Our group relied on specialized software called FrameMaker to boost efficiency and maintain quality.

For my own book, I imagined a tool that could likewise weave together varied content: personal narrative, as-told-to stories, case studies, heavily cited exposition, and graphics. At minimum I wanted:

Auto-generated outlinesTo easily jump forward or back among chapters and sectionsTo easily reorganize material in a modular manner, using high-level drag-and-drop (like cut and paste, but on steroids).

Fortunately, the first two capabilities are easy to find. Google Docs and Microsoft Word, for example, both support heading styles and outlining capabilities. My wish for the third capability got me flirting with Scrivener.

Scrivener’s allure

Professional writer colleagues rave about Scrivener’s drag-and-drop flexibility, and I felt compelled to give it a look. After a tutorial, I noodled around with a dummy draft. Scrivener’s “bulletin board” with “notecards” did appear to be a powerful organizational tool, making it easy to focus passages and rearrange content.

What daunted me, however, was how to output a draft and incorporate revisions. From what I could deduce, Scrivener outputs to standard formats, but real editing must be done within Scrivener. That meant any changes that I or someone else marked on a draft (output to Word, for example) had to be input into Scrivener, instead of just accepted into the document. Perhaps I missed something buried in Scrivener’s menus, but I couldn’t see any way to easily and productively collaborate on drafts with my editor.

Stumped, I took a fresh look at Word. Could it be coaxed to approximate Scrivener’s powerful visual and modular drag-and-drop feature?

Ultimately, yes. The trick is inserting many descriptive, often temporary, headings in combination with Word’s styles and navigation pane. Here’s how it works:

Getting Word to behave more like Scrivener

Insert descriptive headings throughout the manuscript. You might insert a heading above each:

ChapterSectionSceneFigure or illustrationSidebarAny unit of content that needs to be easily identified or moved.

The goal is to clearly identify where a chunk of content begins. By default, that chunk ends where the next chunk (denoted by a heading of the same level) begins. 

Assign styles

Open Word “Styles” and assign each of the descriptive headings a standardized heading style. Assign “heading 1” style to chapter titles, then assign “heading 2” to other types of content. (This keeps the hierarchy as flat as possible to begin; more levels can be added later, after you get the hang of it.) Here’s an example of a nonfiction manuscript set up this way:

Open the Navigation Pane

Now that headings are set up, open the navigation pane via View > Show > Navigation Pane. The Navigation Pane will display vertically along the left of the screen. For the sample pages above, it would look like this:

Use the Navigation Pane two ways. First, you can navigate to specific content by clicking on that specific heading. Second, and most wonderfully, you can reorganize content by dragging and dropping the headings. Navigation Pane headings behave much like Scrivener’s index cards and are easily shuffled around.

Dragging a heading moves all associated content together in one bundle. This works beautifully across a large document and is far easier than trying to cut/paste/or drag blocks many pages apart.

Craft headings strategically

By crafting brief, standardized headings, you’ll make it easy to scan and browse the Navigation Pane. I sometimes use ALL CAPS to make certain information more prominent.

That’s why in the sample shown above, chapter is shortened to CH#. This leaves room to see more of the full title in the pane and also to scan visually for chapters across the entire book. Source interviews are , and graphic elements are identified as .

For fiction

Fiction writers can adjust this approach for their needs by crafting headings to describe POV, scene, location, interiority, backstory, etc.

Below, on the left, is an imaginary raw fiction manuscript set up this way. On the right, content has been dragged and dropped into an alternate sequence using the Navigation Pane. Notice that on the right, backstory segments were nested or “demoted” by changing from Heading 2 to Heading 3.

Getting creative

At one point during my book’s evolution, I wanted to keep an eye on word counts. The Navigation Pane helped there, too. First, I checked a chapter’s word count, then embedded that total into the heading format of , such as “750 CH8 Attunement” or “5000 CH2 Science of Family.” Then I could scan for chapters that were complete versus those that needed more content.

Last steps

When the draft was ready for final production, all I had to do was strip out superfluous headings and replace abbreviations with the full spelling.

Despite the extra effort of inserting headings and stripping them out later, this strategy was a huge help. It allowed me to play with my book’s structure and track where I had located case studies, visuals, and so on. It reduced scrolling and prevented messy cut and paste errors. As a final bonus, I didn’t have to master new software while under deadline pressure!

Final note: If you run into trouble, double check Word’s advanced settings to make sure that drag and drop is enabled via: File > More… > Options > Advanced > Allow text to be dragged and dropped.

How Do You Know What Backstory to Include?

Photo by Eepeng Cheong on Unsplash

Today’s post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin (@FoxPrintEd). Join her for the three-part online class Mastering Backstory for Novelists beginning on April 10.

Backstory tends to fall into two main categories. The first and most ubiquitous kind pervades the story with subtle brushstrokes, filling in texture and depth and color on its characters and world. It is infused throughout almost every line of well-developed story like oxygen—you may never notice it, but it’s essential.

The second paves in elements of character or plot background that play a specific or significant story role. This type of backstory may be more overt, and can even take center stage at times: particular history or circumstances that are integral to the plot.

In both cases, though, backstory risks feeling clumsy or intrusive if it’s not directly relevant to the main, “real-time” story.

Related: Backstory Is Essential to Story Except When It’s Not

The challenge of incorporating backstory fluidly and organically is to know which aspects of a character’s past and the circumstances of their present are in fact essential and intrinsic to the actual story, not extraneous or distracting.

What makes backstory intrinsic

Characters, like human beings, aren’t made up of merely a handful of traits, experiences, and behaviors. They—and we—contain multitudes.

Yet all readers see in your story is one sliver of that complex pie: the remnants and fallout of past and current influences that help determine how characters act, react, and interact in this story.

You can’t bake just a slice of pie, though. As the creator, you’ll want to know more about your story world and the people who populate it—to bring the story more realistically, vividly to life, even if not all of that backstory makes it onto the page. But trying to present all and every detail of those influences would overwhelm the story, dilute it. You have to determine which parts of the character’s life before your story begins are directly intrinsic to the story readers are now experiencing. Backstory is intrinsic when it immediately and materially serves the story in some key way.

Intrinsic backstory has a direct bearing on why the character acts, reacts, behaves, or thinks as she does in this story.

Everything characters do, say, and think is rooted in the factors that have shaped them in the past, as well as their present circumstances, aside from what’s actually happening in the scene.

Is your character habitually late for work, going through a divorce, a former combat veteran, an assault survivor, just had a fight with their kids for the millionth time about homework, for example? Any of those factors may play some role in what the character feels, thinks, and does in the scene, even if it’s not about those things.

Authors obviously don’t need to track back the origins of every single aspect of character behavior, but offering shadings of context can deepen characterization and help readers more deeply invest—both in key story areas and where their actions or behaviors might otherwise seem opaque, confusing, or inconsistent.

Bonnie Garmus uses backstory for both these purposes in this scene in Lessons in Chemistry, when protagonist Elizabeth Zott is told horrific news:

When Elizabeth was eight, her brother, John, dared her to jump off a cliff and she’d done it. There was an aquamarine water-filled quarry below; she’d hit it like a missile. Her toes touched bottom and she pushed up, surprised when she broke through the surface that her brother was already there. He’d jumped in right after her. He shouted, his voice full of anguish as he dragged her to the side. I was only kidding! You could’ve been killed!

Now, sitting rigidly on her stool in the lab, she could hear a policeman talking about someone who’d died and someone else insisting she take his handkerchief and still another saying something about a vet, but all she could think about was that moment long ago when her toes had touched bottom, the soft, silky mud inviting her to stay. Knowing what she knew now, she could only think one thing: I should have.

Elizabeth’s history with her brother doesn’t play a major role in the story or her arc, and it has nothing overtly to do with the police informing her of a death. But her flashing back to that moment in this scene lets readers feel the impact of it on her, and explains her seemingly passive reaction. Garmus weaves in specific background details like this one to create a full, believable portrait of why Elizabeth is who she is when readers “meet” her, and to show why she behaves, reacts, thinks, and acts as she does.

Intrinsic backstory has a direct bearing on what is happening in the story and is necessary to fully understand it.

Characters don’t exist in a vacuum, and readers need some understanding of the backdrop of their lives, past and current.

That doesn’t mean creating exhaustive descriptions of the company they work for and their entire history there, or info dumps on the geopolitical situation and social mores of the time, or biographical deep dives on their social circle. It simply means setting the stage, painting in enough detail and context so that readers get a realistic sense of the characters, their situation, and the world they live in, where relevant to the story.

In Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network, main character Charlie—back from college pregnant at 19, unwed, and a disgrace to her parents—is en route to Switzerland with her scandalized mother in 1947 for a clandestine abortion, though she plans to sneak off to London on the trip to pursue a lead on her beloved cousin Rose, missing since the war.

Readers need to understand several aspects of Charlie’s backstory to fully invest. The historical and social backstory of Charlie’s world is directly germane in that it makes her pregnancy more scandalous and more urgent—abortion is illegal in the U.S. in 1947, and having a child out of wedlock is likely to cost Charlie her reputation and her future in her upper-middle-class, post-WWII environment. The recent war is also a motivating factor in Charlie’s arc: her brother’s death as a result of the war and her cousin’s disappearance after it.

Quinn gradually laces in context about Charlie’s brother’s suicide after he returned from combat, missing a leg and mentally troubled, a factor intrinsic to Charlie’s state of mind that led to her uncharacteristic behavior with the boys at her school and her pregnancy. Her guilt for not being able to help him is a major driver of her compulsion to find Rose.

The author also threads in Charlie’s backstory with Rose, slowly painting a picture of their unusually close relationship, Rose’s disappearance and its impact on Charlie, and paving in more reasons Charlie feels driven to search for her.

These details of Charlie’s past help readers vividly understand Charlie’s goal of finding Rose, the character’s central driving motivation and the engine of the plot.

Intrinsic backstory has a direct bearing on the stakes in the story.

To fully invest in a story and characters, readers need enough context, history, or background to understand why what’s happening in the “real time” story matters right now.

In The Hate U Give, author Angie Thomas has just a handful of pages to make readers care about the character of Khalil, a childhood friend of protagonist Starr’s who has become a drug dealer, before he’s shot in a traffic stop by police. And Khalil’s importance to her is also crucial to establish believably and deeply, as it’s a central motivator for the plot and Starr’s character arc: Will she risk her friendships, her community, and even her life to testify about his death publicly?

So readers need enough backstory on Khalil to care, without stalling out these crucial opening pages of the story.

Thomas does it with several well-chosen snippets of Khalil’s character’s history and circumstances: Starr recalls his grandmother bathing them together when they were very little and “we would giggle because he had a wee-wee and I had what his grandma called a wee-ha,” a shard of memory that connotes childhood innocence.

We learn his mother has been addicted to drugs most of his life, and Starr recalls “the nights I spent with Khalil on his porch, waiting for his momma to come home.” This shows Khalil’s caring side, reveals a factor in his upbringing that is directly germane to his current situation, and also reinforces the lifelong bond between him and Starr.

That connection and his thoughtfulness and care are underscored a few pages later when he teases Starr that he’s older than she is by “five months, two weeks, and three days,” winking as he says to her, “I ain’t forgot.”

And just a few pages later, when Starr badgers him about quitting the job her dad gave him and selling drugs, Khalil says, “That li’l minimum-wage job your pops gave me didn’t make nothing happen. I got tired of choosing between lights and food,” and reveals that his grandmother was fired from her hospital job because her chemo treatments left her unable to “pull big-ass garbage bins around,” and she could no longer support Khalil’s younger brother, abandoned by their mom. These well-chosen details depict relatable, human reasons he felt driven to sell drugs—to care for his family—and build reader investment in his character.

Khalil is present and alive in the story for just 12 pages before he’s killed, but in that brief time Thomas laces in ample backstory to give his character the importance he has to have for the entire plot and Starr’s character arc to be effective. Starr’s relationship with Khalil and his background and family situation are essential for readers to see the fullness of who he is and to care about his death.

Tips for choosing backstory elements

Backstory can clutter the story when:

it isn’t directly relevant to the main story or charactersits sole purpose is to offer information and it doesn’t move the story forwardit’s more detailed/expanded than the story requires and stalls momentum

To keep backstory to just the necessary components:

The facts may be relevant, but not the details (e.g., that your character overcame a stutter early in life may matter, but not the specifics of how).You can convey a wealth of backstory with a single well-chosen representative detail (as Angie Thomas does in the examples above).Backstory is not the story—if it’s taking over your story, you may not be focusing on the right one.

Read more: How to Weave in Backstory without Stalling Out Your Story

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us for the three-part online class Mastering Backstory for Novelists beginning on Wednesday, April 10.

Using Beat Sheets to Slant Your Memoir’s Scenes

Today’s post is by writer and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison. Join her on Wednesday, April 3, for the online class Craft Your Memoir’s Beat Sheet.

Most memoirs involve some kind of loss—a breakup, a displacement, a dismantled dream, the death of someone dearly loved. The more painful the event, the more you’ll want to write about it. But as you revise, you’ll discover that some (or many) of your scenes aren’t needed.

To figure out what’s important, and how to write about it, you need to identify your memoir’s beats. Beats are part of the Beat Sheet tool Blake Snyder created for his book Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. These turning points work together to create a propulsive story that largely follows the hero’s journey—though once you understand the concept, you can apply it to other kinds of stories, like the heroine’s journey.

While it can be easy to spot the beats in a memoir with a clear quest, even nonlinear memoirs have them. Identifying both the beats and their functions can help you slant your material so that your book includes the right details in the right place to tell the right story.

Let’s say your book involves a breakup. Early drafts might include your courtship, the moment when you truly committed, the initial cracks in the relationship, the fights that led to the big eruption that ended everything, and all the post-breakup things your ex did that thoroughly miffed you.

This is a great start, but even when the relationship plays a prominent role, it’s likely you’ll need to trim things down. Before cutting too many darlings, or giving your book a full on weed whack, you’ll need to identify your book’s narrative arc, or the arc of internal transformation that happens within the narrator. Creating a beat sheet populated with your book’s key moments can help you identify how your narrator changes and which scenes illustrate this transformation.

If we continue with the breakup example, a beat sheet might uncover that your book is a harrowing tale of abuse where the breakup is a moment of victory that wraps up your book. But maybe you’ll discover that you’re actually writing about something else, and the breakup is either an unfortunate (or welcome) casualty of the primary story, or maybe the breakup is simply a catalyst that launches your journey.

Once your narrative arc is clear, you can decide how much real estate the relationship deserves, where the breakup belongs, and how to frame it so that it serves a specific function. To help you see what this looks like, let’s explore how breakups are framed in four different memoirs. (Warning: spoilers ahead!)

Breakup as ordinary world

Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, is about what she discovers about life, love, and herself after divorce. Her ordinary world, or the world before the quest begins, is one where a woman realizes she wants out of her marriage. Her divorce is important, because it sets the stage for what comes next, but it’s not the story, nor is it the catalyst inviting her on her journey.

In one of the book’s opening scenes, Elizabeth presses her head to the floor and realizes she doesn’t want to be married any more. Then, within the first 35 pages of her memoir—during which she gets divorced and has an unhealthy relationship with another man—she decides to travel to Indonesia after being invited by a medicine man (the story’s catalyst). Little of Gilbert’s marriage or divorce makes it into the book.

But what if the relationship takes on a larger role? How might that change the location and slant the breakup takes?

Breakup as opening for something new

According to Blake Snyder, your midpoint can either be an up moment where “the hero seemingly peaks” or a “low point where the world collapses around them.”

Suzette Mullen’s new memoir, The Only Way Through Is Out, is about risking it all to become who you truly are. It’s an identity story where one of her primary conflicts is whether to stay in her 30-year marriage. The decision to leave happens around the midpoint. Initially, it seems like a victory that makes room for her to pursue what she hopes will be a more authentic life. Then, a discovery about her ex occurs at the All Is Lost moment, which sends her life into a tailspin.

Breakup as unraveling

Divorce also plays a prominent role in Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas, a memoir about her second husband. Many writers hope to emulate this book because of the rules it breaks around chronology and point of view. But the story works precisely because it includes a whiff of narrative arc around her relationship with Husband Number Two. In fact, the book’s short vignettes largely chronicle their courtship and marriage, divorce, and reconciliation. Because the whiff of arc exists, it’s possible to identify the book’s beats.

The breakup in Safekeeping also takes place around the midpoint, but unlike Suzette’s false victory, it’s a deep low that Abigail briefly, yet specifically, describes. She stops cleaning, caring, or wearing anything other than her nightgown. Her children scatter. On days when she’s supposed to look for work, she smokes cigarettes, drinks coffee, and wanders, feeling completely lost. It’s so lonely, she welcomes back the raccoons she’d once complained about.

Breakup as relief

Sometimes the breakup is the victory that wraps up the book. When that happens, you must decide if it’s the finale or if it’s setting the stage for it.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House, the narrator spends most of the story pretzeling herself into a shape she hopes her partner will love. The book is filled with push/pull moments where the narrator is rejected only to be sucked back into this toxic relationship’s vortex. At the All is Lost moment, the woman from the Dream House breaks things off with the narrator, but then she recants only to say it was all a mistake. Or was it? The narrator reels, knowing the relationship is poison yet she feels powerless to resist its sweetness. In the Break into Three—or the point where the hero figures out how to solve her problem—she cuts all contact, making the breakup permanent. It’s not the book’s ending, but it’s where the narrator’s healing begins.

You can apply this work to your memoir by following these steps:

Learn all of Blake Snyder’s beats, such as the midpoint, “All Is Lost” or “Break Into Three” (here is a brief summary of all beats)Identify the scenes that serve as beats in your memoirUse your scene list to determine your narrative arcSlant key scenes so they do their beat’s primary workScrap anything that doesn’t belong

Learning to do this can streamline your revision process. As you complete this work, you’ll feel more confident about what truly belongs in your memoir, and more importantly, you’ll know which details matter most.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on Wednesday, April 3 for the online class Craft Your Memoir’s Beat Sheet.

Pay Attention to the Obsessive Workings of Your Mind

Photo by Ian Noble on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author and editor Lynn Schmeidler (@lynnschmeidler).

On New Year’s Day, during my senior year of college, a gruesome double murder took place in my hometown. The couple stabbed to death in their sleep lived across the street from my aunt and uncle, around the corner from my childhood best friend, doors down from where another old friend grew up.

Like everyone else in the town, I was shocked and frightened by the news. Although fingerprints were left all over the house, no match for them was found. Time passed but the case remained unsolved. The theory: it was a drug crime. The victims were doctors, so someone in search of drugs followed them home on the commuter train, and something went terribly wrong.

Four years later, when a suspect was finally arrested, my connection to the murders became even closer: the young man indicted was the quiet boy from the back row of my fourth-grade class. I was shocked all over again.

The case was big news, not only for those of us with connections to the town, but for the courts as well: the defendant confessed within the supposed guarantee of confidentiality of an AA meeting. He had been drunk; the murder took place in his childhood home; he thought he was killing his parents.

I couldn’t stop thinking about his childhood—what went on in that home that would drive him, in a drunken rage years later, to murder his own parents. And also what it was like for his parents, defending the son who the world knows tried to … meant to … did! kill them. And was he one of the boys I briefly crushed on in fourth grade?

I encourage my writing students to take their obsessions seriously, to follow them, delve into them. What we obsess about is our material. The story of the murders obsessed me. Because it took place in my hometown. Because I grew up with the man who committed the murders. Because the victims were not the intended victims. Because the intended victims were the parents of the man who killed them. The story of the murders, though, had already been told in countless news articles. Even in an episode of Law and Order. My task, then, was to find a way to tell my fiction about the facts.

So I went back to what the story did to me. It destabilized me. I could relate to everyone in the story—the dead, the convicted, the relatives of the dead, the intended dead. Then I asked myself: what else destabilizes me? Contemporary art—its rawness and its familiarity; secrecy—its power to protect and its certainty to betray; #metoo stories—their ubiquity and their endless ability to enrage.

Through the expanded field of these other concerns, I found my way into my own telling of the story: in “The Audio Guide,” a young, female museum intern takes revenge on the museum director (an older married man who seduced her and ditched her) by recording an explicit, tell-all narration for visitors to a disturbing art exhibit inspired by the double murders.

While headlines may inspire stories, ideas need not arrive as made-for-television crime dramas. With a properly tuned antenna there’s enough everyday strangeness to power an observant writer for the rest of their days: At the end of a yoga class one day, I had the distinct impression that we’d been left in savasana a bit too long. I opened my eyes to check the clock and noticed that the teacher was lying awfully still. For a moment I imagined she’d stopped breathing. Sleeping Beauty came to mind. (The yoga teacher was, as central casting and life in a 21st-century yoga studio will have it, a fairy-tale beauty—lithe body, perfect skin, waist-length hair.)

By the time I made it home, the idea of a story had hatched—Sleeping Beauty as told today, in her own words. I am obsessed with fairy tales, especially the original ones that are darker and stranger than their commonly known, sanitized versions. A little research led me to, “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” Giambattista Basile’s early 17th-century precursor to Sleeping Beauty replete with death, rape, birth, and betrayal.

But to allow for the story to explore something meaningful to me I needed more. Something to rub up against, a question to vex. When my students feel stuck, I tell them to think of a story as a braid—what three strands might wind themselves around one another to create a denser texture to their fiction?

So here we are, back to our obsessions. Keep track of them, note them down. I have obsessions enough to weave into a goddess head of plaits. “Corpse Pose” is a braid of Sleeping Beauty, a yoga studio, and a mother-daughter relationship. In my version of the fairy tale, Beauty works for her mother and is laid out on the dais of the studio she owns.

I keep a list of what I notice and can’t seem to let go of, the subjects of my obsessions, the endless supply of everyday strangeness that fill this world: an eerie street name, a rental scam, a joke I take at first to be a real story, a rock star impersonator, a gentleman pickpocket, a breast-pump model, a rare variety of parasitic twins, a vagina makeup, a spontaneously reversed vasectomy, an art film of people sneezing out rodents, a coke-addicted silent film actress with a pet monkey, a 4,900-year-old tree, a roll of unexpectedly double-exposed film showing events from years apart, the relativity of time.

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The trick is to pay attention to the unique workings of your own mind and to note the strangenesses that stick. They are your bones to worry—shake, chew, gnaw, lick. Wear your obsessions down, bury them, then dig them up again. While not all of my strange observations and growing obsessions have made their way into my fiction, each of the ones listed above is present and accounted for in my story collection, Half-Lives. Whether braided, expanded, or sometimes only casually noted, the headlines, facts, and observations that stick to you will seed your own work and grow it into the stories only you can tell.