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Journals and Dreams: The Unsung Heroes of Literature

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Today’s post is by Tzivia Gover, author of Dreaming on the Page.

Journals, like dreams, are the unsung heroes of the literary world. Countless works have been inspired by both and represent great repositories of raw material for books, poems, movies, plays, songs, and more. Each of my published books was birthed from the pages of my notebooks and is peppered with snippets of dreams and morsels of dream wisdom.

Not all authors remember or rely on their dreams, but dreamers and journal-keepers are uniquely blessed as writers. We never have to contend with the blank page, because we can use our dreams as texts and lines from our journals as prompts. Like a pot of broth simmering on the stove, the contents of our journals nourish us and provide the basis for countless delicious creations.

But first: a case against journaling your dreams

Some days, recording dreams can feel as unnatural as saving nail clippings or strands of hair caught in your comb. Wouldn’t it be healthier to rinse dream residue away in the shower each morning rather than gather each one to preserve in notebooks that fill your already overstuffed closets or drawers?

I tend to revisit this question when packing to move, or when I need extra storage space for winter clothes and I’m confronted by the accretion of nearly a half century’s worth of journals. That’s when I begin to question the conventional wisdom about the importance of writing dreams down, and instead I begin compiling evidence against it:

Dreams don’t need writing. Dreams were around long before the relatively recent technology of writing was even developed. So, clearly you don’t need to write down dreams to reap their benefits.Dreams resist writing. If you’ve ever opened a book within a dream, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of seeing words swim and squirm so you can’t make them out.Statistically speaking, the written word is rare in dreams. (Although writers’ dreams are often the exception to that rule.) In this way, at least, it seems dreams and writing don’t mix.Dreams seem to recoil at being preserved on the page; they flicker into consciousness, then dissolve swiftly into forgetfulness. Is stitching them to the page with pen and ink as misguided as trying to sew our shadow to the soles of our feet?

But there’s no use arguing, or trying to build a case, as to how this question will be decided. Each time I present this argument to myself or others, it is resolved in favor of journaling dreams. After all, it’s not writing dreams down that’s the problem. The problem as I see it is this: We’re told to keep notebooks, but we rarely learn how to use them to mine meaning from our dreams or to glean literary gems for our writing. To make our notebooks earn their place on our shelves, we can use them to convert our dreams and musings into poems and stories, and as places where we can reflect on our literary process.

Also, our journals, including the entries that slosh over the shoreline dividing day and night, are central to a way of life that can serve us well. They represent and facilitate our commitment to doing the inner work that allows us to show up more fully for life each day.

10 really good reasons to write down your dreams

1. Know thyself. Journaling dreams helps you better understand yourself from the inside out, which in turn helps you understand your characters better, brings deeper empathy to your work, and makes you an all-around more interesting writer.

2. Write regularly—and better. Building the habit of writing dreams each morning is a great way to build writing into your everyday routine and improve your skills in the process.

3. Gain a wealth of material. As you record dreams in your journal, you are creating an encyclopedia of plots, landscapes, characters, themes, and ideas you can return to any time you need material for your poetry and prose.

4. Build a better relationship. Writing dreams regularly helps you become acquainted with the Scheherazade within who spins tales while you sleep. Becoming conscious of your nighttime narrator can make you a more confident storyteller and prime you to dream up new material by day, too.

5. Play with words. Freud memorably pointed out that dreams are masters of wordplay, including unpredictable puns, clever homonyms and homophones, and layers of meaning hidden just beneath the surface of words. Paying attention to dreams plugs you into these amusing and profound aspects of words that you can celebrate on the page as well.

6. Magnify the magic. Tracking dreams can reveal moments of magic (meaningful coincidences, precognition, and clairvoyance—to name a few) in what can otherwise be a writer’s relatively staid existence.

7. Stay calm and moodle on. Moodling is a word that’s so much fun to say that I’d love it no matter what it means. As it turns out, moodling is a term used by Brenda Ueland, author of If You Want to Write, to describe an activity that allows your mind to go slack and dissolve into the present-tense timeless moment. Gardening, doodling, rearranging the figurines on your shelves, listening to music, doing puzzles, and collaging are all ways to moodle. You can also add dream journaling to the list. This seemingly nonproductive time is essential to a productive writing practice.

8. Show what’s too beautiful to hide. In a letter to his brother, Vincent van Gogh described one reason he painted: “It is so beautiful, I must show you how it looks.” With just about anything else we do or witness during the day, others may have seen or overheard it, too. But the dream is ours and ours alone. Writing the dream is how we preserve it so we can learn from it, express it, or share the otherwise ephemeral experience.

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9. Warm up. Starting your day with your dream journal and a mug of something delicious to drink is a wonderful way to check in with yourself and warm up to the page, too.

10. Keep your friends. When you gush to a friend, “I had the most amazing dream last night!” you may find that most people back up a few paces or suddenly remember an important appointment they need to rush off to. In addition to all of the above benefits of keeping a dream journal for writers, an added benefit is that the page is an eternally patient, listening ear. Tell your dreams to your journal—and save the highlights reel to share (sparingly) with your loved ones.

What Sleeping With Jane Eyre Taught Me About Pacing

Photo by Nareeta Martin on Unsplash

Today’s post is by Brevity blog editor Heidi Croot.

I’ve been sleeping with Jane Eyre, lately—courtesy of The Sleepy Bookshelf, a podcast designed to help me snooze.

Except it’s been keeping me awake.

I’ve loved this classic since childhood, every reread captivating me as if for the first time.

But it soon became clear that I was sharing my bed not so much with Jane, as with Charlotte Brontë herself. Listening to the novel has been showing me things I had missed on the page—the first-person narrative drawing me in so close I could almost believe it was memoir—and night after night I’ve been reveling in a writing-craft class led by the venerated author.

One such class addresses a storytelling weakness that shows up a lot in my writing and editing practice: high-tension scenes that rush to their finish with the speed of a bullet train.

Brontë’s talent for keeping readers on tenterhooks reminds me of Matthew Dicks and his hourglass technique, which he shares in Storyworthy (entire book, so good!).

Going too fast is one of the biggest mistakes storytellers make, Dicks says. When you arrive at the moment readers have been waiting for, “It’s time to slow things down. Grind them to a halt when possible.”

Consider the properties of an hourglass: the upper chamber containing story still to be told. No grain of sand before its time. All flowing inexorably to the same destination.

In one of my favorite scenes (spoilers ahead), Jane Eyre returns to Thornfield Hall after a year of yearning, desperate to clap eyes on her great love, Mr. Rochester, whom she fled upon learning at the altar that he was already married.

As she approaches the Hall, I itch to press fast-forward. Would he be there? Would they helplessly reunite, or would her moral restraint prevail? Had I been turning pages, I’d be reading very fast indeed—which is what readers do when narrative tension flames through the roof. How else to defend against an author’s merciless manipulation?

But because I was forced to listen and wait, I caught Brontë in the act of tipping the hourglass—again and again.

She sends Jane on four separate journeys to find Mr. Rochester, starting with a 36-hour coach ride from her home to Rochester Inn—ample time for reader anxiety to flare. Rather than simply asking the innkeeper for news of her lost love, Jane prolongs hope by walking the remaining two miles to the Hall.

It is a walk designed to drive the reader to the edge of endurance.

Fields, stiles, woods, trees, rookery.

We suffer through Jane’s inner debate on which vantage she should approach the Hall for maximum delight.

Will she glimpse her beloved standing at his window? Will she be so mad as to run to him?

We watch her principles waver as she asks herself, “Who would be hurt by my once more tasting the life his glance can give me?”

The orchard, the gate opening into the meadow, what the crows are thinking as they sail overhead.

“I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house,” she tells us at last. “I saw a blackened ruin.”

She asks the questions tormenting every reader: What has become of Mr. Rochester? Did he burn alive?

In horror, she hurries back to the Inn to question the innkeeper—an insufferable man who takes his sweet time getting to the point—and we sigh with relief when Jane commissions a chaise to take her 30 miles to Ferndean Manor, Rochester’s second home.

After all these interminable delays, we’re approaching the end of this torture. She’ll be there before nightfall!

And she is, but vexatiously disembarks a mile from the manor so Brontë can arrange for her to lose her way in the woods.

The gloomy wood, the close-ranked trees, the grass-grown track, the sylvan dusk.

A thousand grains of sand fall, possibly a million.

When we finally see the blind man outside his front door, groping for equilibrium in the rain, and then witness him with Jane in an ecstatic embrace, I’m a veritable wreck—and also a happy reader, replete and reverential.

Here’s what particularly interests me about the art of pacing, and it is basic mathematics. When we combine a writer’s misstep in hurtling through high-tension scenes, with a reader’s tendency to devour such scenes in frantic gulps—fast plus fast adds up to reader letdown and disengagement.

Writers need to go slow to go fast.

In her guest post First Pages Critique: Getting a Handle on Pace, book coach and editor Hattie Fletcher tells a true crime writer that her story needs to slow down.

What? True crime—a genre prized for its high-stakes tension and aerodynamic speed—should slow down?

But a more relaxed pace is precisely what this book doctor prescribed. “Get a head of narrative steam going,” Fletcher advises. “Stretch out a little into the storytelling and trust that if you keep doling out details, readers will stick with you for the bigger story you want to tell and the questions you want to explore.” 

Matthew Dicks would offer Hattie Fletcher a knuckle bump. A 36-time Moth StorySLAM champion, Dicks knows how to tell a tale. As he illustrates so enticingly in Storyworthy, choosing an hourglass tempo when the stakes are high—via journeys (physical and emotional), details, reflection, one step forward and two back—can quicken our readers’ pulse while keeping them emotionally invested. Literary tools as essential to writers of creative nonfiction as to those who spin fiction.

Savouring Jane Eyre on audio continues to feed my love of craft. Wide awake and smiling in the dark, I listen to Brontë flaunt her formidable delay tactics. Such a master class on how to control a story’s pace. Such a sorceress’s skill in dispensing sand.

And now I must go. It’s time to get some sleep.

Writing a Really Short Book Description Is Harder Than It Looks

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Today’s post is by author Amy L. Bernstein.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote to the Royal Society of London: “I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.”

Yes, writing short can be far more difficult than letting the pen rip. And writing a short description of your novel — like the three tight paragraphs you need in a query letter — is one of the hardest tasks of all.

So much can and often does go wrong. By “wrong,” I mean that authors often set out to do the opposite of what they ought to do.

The default position usually involves stringing together as many plot points as possible. As in: This happens, then this happens, and then this happens.

While a chronological narrative describing how your story unfolds may be the backbone of a full-blooded synopsis, it’s virtually the opposite of what you want in your short description, especially for a query.

For one thing, you can’t possibly squeeze in all the plot or action in three short paragraphs. For another, too much plot results in a lack of focus—at the expense of a clear concept and a clear window onto the protagonist’s wants, needs, obstacles, and how her story ends.

The sooner you stop trying to tell the whole darn story as if you were writing CliffsNotes, the sooner you can focus on writing a description that captures the reader’s attention.

Consider this precious real estate. Every square inch—i.e., every word—needs to be packed with meaning, and every sentence needs to lead us onto the next, not by jumping from scene to scene, but from one vital turning point in the story to the next.

The connective tissue of a short book description is a potent blend of emotion and meaning. You must leave out most of the incidents and characters to achieve the clarity that reveals the feeling your story engenders as well as what it all adds up to—what it means to the reader.

Three short paragraphs are enough, believe it or not, to create this connective tissue built upon high stakes, tensions and obstacles, and a satisfying resolution (or at least, a hint about how the story ends).

But this is not enough space to jam in backstory about your protagonist’s early childhood, the name of the street he lives on, or the names of his three best friends. What do such details tell us about where the story is headed and why that matters? Nothing.

The truth is, it’s much easier to write a very short book description badly than to write it well. As Franklin surmised, writing short is devilishly difficult.

Here are some specific pitfalls to avoid:

1. Forget the phrase “my story is about.”

That word, about, will trick you into stringing together a series of plot points or individual scenes that may not actually tell us (in an interesting way) what the story is about, only some stuff that happens. The reader (an agent, editor, or publisher) wants to grab hold of the concept—the book’s big idea and the emotions it evokes.

Suppose you were pitching the fairytale, Cinderella. Instead of setting out to tell the reader how she ends up an orphan forced to wait on her evil stepmother, give us the bigger picture.

In Cinderella, a lonely orphaned girl meets and falls in love with a prince and lives happily ever after—with a little help from a magical fairy godmother and her own open and forgiving heart.  

Notice how that brief summary doesn’t offer a blow-by-blow account of what happens. It doesn’t even mention the evil stepmother! Actually, Cinderella’s stepmother and stepsisters may cause her misery, but they are not the direct catalysts of her growth and change: the fairy godmother plays that role, as does the prince when he chases after her. And note the nod to the protagonist’s inner character—her essential goodness. It’s hard to get that (quickly) from story alone.

2. Don’t report your story as it unfolds chronologically. 

Instead, gather up the three or four most important things that happen (mainly to the protagonist) even if these events skip across time. Choose the turning points that bring us inevitably to the climax. This approach is like stringing beads on a necklace, but instead of including every bead in the box, you only pick the biggest, brightest, and shiniest. This necklace must sparkle!

3. Don’t start with or include unnecessary backstory.

This includes where the protagonist lives or went to school, unless that’s essential to the action or critical to the setting. Ask yourself: Does the reader need this detail to feel the story’s beating heart and gather its larger meaning? Eye color won’t do that.

Also, you might be tempted to kick off with a perceived inciting incident that’s actually nonessential backstory. For instance, don’t start with: “When Susie left Cleveland for college in San Francisco…” if in fact every important scene, and the point of the book as a whole, takes place after Susie has moved to San Francisco, and perhaps beyond that.

4. Don’t name multiple characters and try to explain all the relationships. 

Focus on the protagonist and, say, his love interest or nemesis. That’s usually enough. Naming six characters in three paragraphs distracts the reader from the book’s key concepts—and indeed, makes it impossible to lay out an overarching concept.

5. Keep the description focused mainly on the protagonist, not on secondary characters. 

That should help you focus on the critical actions that matter and help us see how the main character grows and changes. In genre fiction, such as romance, you’ll want to focus on the pair of lovers, which means following two characters—but primarily in relation to one another, like moons orbiting the same planet.

The secret to writing a very short book description—apart from having endless patience and drafting and revising countless times—is to remember its purpose. This is the text that sells the book’s sizzle. It’s not intended to familiarize the reader with the entire story and everyone in it. Give us just enough to care, to empathize with the protagonist’s plight, and then leave us wanting just a bit more.

By the way: I could have written a much longer article on this topic, but I took extra time to write only as much as I needed to drive the key points home.

One Well-Chosen Detail: Write Juicy Descriptions Without Overwhelming Your Reader

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Today’s post is by author and writing coach April Dávila (@aprildavila).

Have you ever read a description in a book and actually stopped to say to yourself, “Dang, that’s good.” And then maybe read it again?

If so, you’ve probably also read a book where you found yourself mumbling, “I really don’t need to know every detail about this guy’s library/tools/muffin recipe” as you flip a few pages to find where the story picks up again.

It takes practice to write immersive descriptions that draw readers in, without going overboard so that we bore them and lose their attention. It’s one of the more delicate elements of craft.

Let’s start with how to write lush prose.

Writing engaging descriptions

I was reading Moonglow, by Michael Chabon, recently and came across this description of an ominous figure:

His close-cropped skull was indented on one side as by the corner of a two-by-four. In the crevice formed by his brow and cheekbones, his eyes glinted like dimes lost between sofa cushions.

The specificity of the description just floored me. I can absolutely see this guy in my head and I wouldn’t want to bump into him in a parking lot staircase. It got me thinking about great descriptions, and their opposite: clichés.

The dreaded cliché

A cliché is any turn of phrase that you’ve ever heard before: fire-engine red, soft as a pillow, robin’s egg blue, fast as a speeding train. You get the idea.

Basically, a cliché is a symbol. It’s the literary equivalent of clipart. If you write that someone sat down beneath a tree, you basically just painted a cartoon tree in the mind of your reader—two vertical lines with a squiggly circle on top.

But if your character nestles their butt between the swollen roots of a craggy oak, feels the rough bark, sees the dappled light fall through the canopy of tiny, waxed leaves, now you’re onto something. Now the reader can really see (and feel) that specific tree.

Characters can be cliché too. If you’re writing an elderly lady and you tell us she has gray hair and wrinkles around her eyes, an image will form in the mind of the reader, sure, but an opportunity has been missed to create a specific character, one unlike any other.

As an example, consider this description from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:

… in the last years she continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing. She looked as if the nimbus of humanity were fading away and she were turning monkey. Tendrils grew from her eyebrows and coarse white hairs sprouted on her lip and chin. When she put on an old dress the bosom hung empty and the hem swept the floor. Old hats fell down over her eyes. Sometimes she put her hand over her mouth and laughed, her eyes closed and her shoulder shaking.

The difference is in the details. Specific details are what lift descriptions out of cliché. But digging deep for details is difficult because our brains are inherently lazy. We see something pale blue. We check our mental files for ways of describing it and come up with “sky blue.” Accurate, yes, but you’ve missed the chance to describe the object as only you can.

Choose your details wisely

Whenever I teach students about writing lush descriptions, I inevitably get someone who raises their hand and says they would rather their work be an easy-to-read page turner than a long-winded, overwritten bore. I wholeheartedly agree.

Master film editor Walter Murch, once said  “…trust one, well-chosen detail to do the work of ten.” Part of digging deep for unique and interesting details is removing any excess wording that would weigh your story down.

Now, to be clear, I don’t advise worrying about this while you’re writing your first draft. When you’re in the process of getting a story on the page, go ahead and drop in all the hyperbolic, cliché language that comes to mind. It doesn’t matter on the first draft. Those tired images can work just fine as place holders. But when you go back to edit, consider the possibilities that exist if you can whittle down to just one perfect adjective and cut the rest.

Think outside the normal descriptions you already have in your head. Light doesn’t just shine. It can smooth, dance, and scrape. Consider the awkward pine tree or the lank marsupial. One of the more fun parts of writing is putting words together in unusual ways, then editing, editing, editing.

An exercise to practice

If you’d like to sharpen your skills at writing descriptions, pick a place, any place, and describe it every day for a month without ever repeating yourself. It’s difficult, and by day three you will have to dig a little deeper for your descriptions. By day 30 you will no doubt surprise yourself. This is a great way to exercise your writing muscles.

At the end of the month, go through what you’ve written and choose your favorite description. Odds are, it’s something no one else could have written. It is uniquely yours and your readers will love you for it.

Embrace Your True Subject: A Writer’s Case Study in Running from (and Returning to) Herself

Today’s post is by author Heather Lanier.

The problem was Jesus. He kept appearing in my poems. And not even in the way typical fans of Jesus would like. He was peculiar: silently doodling in sand, or teetering with endearing doubt, or kind-of sexy in chiseled statue-form, suspended on a human-sized cross. Christians would not dig some of this. Nor (I assumed) would the literary poetry world, whose faith tolerance is limited.

As I tried to assemble a decade of my published poems into a book-length manuscript, I found other issues: Eve, remembering how much she loved going naked. Mary, of all people, pregnant and worrying about carting God-in-human-form above her pelvis. And sweet Lord, I even sometimes used the word God—that abyss-deep noun we pretend we all agree on the definition of.

This was why, when I first spread the dozens of poems across my office floor and tried to assemble them into a book, I thought: I need to bury the Jesus poems. And the overtly religious poems. I need to hide them behind the poems about misogyny and motherhood and pandemic politics and grief.

It was a classic move: Believe what you have to say isn’t worthwhile. Hide it. Try to turn yourself into another kind of writer.

I’m a professor in a graduate writing program at a state university in New Jersey. By year’s end, my students must write a 30,000-word manuscript. For many, it’s the longest project they’ve ever attempted. Almost none of them are writing about religion, and yet many still fall into this same trap as I did—thinking they should become a different kind of writer. They’re poets, but they suspect nobody reads poetry, so they try a novel instead. That’s what real writers do, right? They think. Or they’ve got an important personal story to tell, but they fear the earthquake their words could cause in the tectonic plates of their lives, so they decide to write … a fantasy sci-fi novel instead. Or they want to write a fantasy sci-fi novel, but someone in their family dismisses the entire genre, so they embark on some heady nonfiction project about narrative theory.

There are as many variations on this theme as there are writers. About a month into the fall semester, each usually returns to their callings, however scary. The poet realizes she has no interest in plot. The sci-fi-attempter discovers that, even on an invented planet, he can’t escape himself. The person longing to write sci-fi can’t say no to the strange world in her mind.

At the end of the year, I read reflection after reflection about writers trying to run away from their true subjects. About how much time they wasted doing this. About how scared they were of what they had to say. And about how, eventually, they came home to themselves.

You’d think, as a professor of writing, I would have caught myself immediately. You’d think I would have been able to identify the trapdoor before stepping into it. Instead, I thought I was being savvy. Bury the poems about faith!

Alas, I suspect every writer is prone, at one time or another, to the new shapes this trapdoor takes, the surprising ways it can appear in the house of our psyches.

And so, I tried to bury the Jesus poems. This wasn’t particularly hard. Motherhood is another heavy theme of mine. (Ah yes, another subject the literary world has a history of heralding without caveats or condescension—and yes, if we agreed on a sarcasm font, I’d be using it right now.) So, pregnancy kicked off the collection—so much pregnancy poetry, in fact, that the manuscript felt like it would keel over from the weight of a disproportionately ginormous belly.

Then came the babies, along with a second section on motherhood. Section three is where I stuck Christ and Mary, et. al. But then I tied it all up with a globally impactful fourth section on political issues—you know, important public stuff. “Masculine” stuff.

Do you see the other trapdoor here? It’s a particularly gendered one, architected from a woman having to contend with misogynistic readings of her work as drivel because it finds revelation in the domestic, in the private. (Memory: a male chair of a hiring committee tells me in an interview that all the good nonfiction is not memoir but researched writing, about things like war. I was writing a memoir. I did not get the job.) By ending the collection on this “public” material, I was attempting another kind of running from the self.

The problem, of course, is that the book didn’t work. It turns out that it never works to run from ourselves—not in regular life, and not in art-making, either. (I don’t know whether to be relieved about this or dismayed.) You know how I knew I was in trouble? The manuscript couldn’t find its title. This meant I didn’t know what was binding the thing together. Which meant a reader wouldn’t either.

I like to think all our good ideas come from our inner wisdom—that faithful compass inside each of us. Weirdly, the way I got out of my rut came, of all places, from Facebook. It came when I saw a call from an editor seeking literary manuscripts specifically about spirituality. Poetry, novels, essay collections—Anne McGrath at Monkfish Publishing was open to any genre. And any religion. She just wanted work that was both literary and spiritually curious.

I finally asked a question every artist probably needs to consider at some point in their lives: What if the thing I’m trying to bury is the thing that needs to come forward?

I spread the poems out across the office floor again. I thought about what a book would look like if the collection began with religious wrestling. What if my shaky faith and ongoing doubt and incessant yearning for the Divine appeared as a thread, stitched throughout, rather than a hard-to-digest middle chunk?

Something weird happened. The collection started to cohere. Poems about the wildness of being pregnant got bigger beside my speculation about Mary’s pregnancy. My grief over a family member’s murder was more powerful next to my floundering attempts at prayer. My rage about the absence of women in images got more interesting when placed near a poem about Jesus stopping an angry mob from stoning a woman. I still created four sections, and the poems are unmistakably from a feminist mother’s perspective. But the whole collection begins—and ends—with spiritual seeking.

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We sometimes think of poetry as dismissing of audience, as privileging the writer’s intentions over the reader’s presence. It was the presence of an actual audience, this time in the form of an independent publisher, that helped me conceive of my collection. I arranged and rearranged it. I called it Psalms of Unknowing. I sent it to Monkfish. One month later, they accepted it.

Maybe it will always be our plight, as writers, to try to turn ourselves into other kinds of writers. The versions of this trapdoor are numerous, as newly constructed as any piece of art we try to make. But our ways of getting out of them are equally varied: an intuitive voice, a smart response from a friend, even a post on Facebook.

How High Stakes Keep Readers (and Viewers) Invested

Today’s post is by author and book coach Susanne Dunlap (@susanne_dunlap).

I’ve lately been on a kick of re-reading and re-watching my favorite books, movies, and TV series. This has enabled me to really dig into not just what drew me to them initially, but why I love them and how the writer achieved a result that pulled me in and kept me glued to the page or the screen.

Most recently I’ve been rewatching Bridgerton on Netflix. Wonderful acting, swoon-worthy costumes and sets, and pure romance in an idyllically integrated fake Regency setting—a recipe for escapism.

Until you get to the prequel, Queen Charlotte, that is. While it’s based on Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton books (and Quinn collaborated), it’s written by Shonda Rhimes, who served as producer on the first two series. In a departure from the escapist romance characteristics, Rhimes takes a rather preposterous (but imaginative) premise in a direction that—to me—feels more weighty and important, as well as more compelling and dramatic. How does she do it?

The answer comes down to one key element. Stakes.

First, a little about the series

Queen Charlotte is still at heart a romance, with all the usual tropes. The meet cute, two protagonists starting out at odds, coming together, then being wrenched apart along the way to achieving their ultimate understanding. It’s an unequal partnership at first: the lofty king and the lesser foreign noble, forced into an arranged marriage.

But there’s much more to this story than the romance. Like the original Bridgerton stories, it’s rather a delicious and clever mixture of genuine history and sheer fantasy, taking as its “what if” the story of the mad King George III of England’s marriage to Charlotte of Mecklinburg Strelitz—a marriage that resulted in thirteen offspring—and making Charlotte not only someone on a lower social rung than the king, but also Black.

It’s the origin story, as it were, for the integrated world of Bridgerton. What the Regency Bridgerton universe presents as a fait accompli—a completely racially integrated society—Queen Charlotte exposes as an experiment that the dowager Princess Augusta found herself backed into out of necessity. It could have gone terribly wrong.

How does that affect the stakes?

In a romance, the internal and external stakes are often personal—which doesn’t make them any less real or compelling. But in Queen Charlotte, the personal stakes are amplified first by the historical reality, then by the fictional premise on a societal level.

The historical fact of George III’s madness in reality created perilous power vacuums in the stratified world of eighteenth-century Britain. The fate of an entire dynasty rested on the ability for the king to be suitably married and produce viable heirs who did not inherit his tendency to mental illness.

In the Bridgerton ecosystem, the foreign spouse-to-be, as I said, is not only more lowly, but also Black. This catches the court by surprise, and they solve the problem of public perception (admittedly stretching credulity) by pretending it was their intention all along, ennobling all the wealthy Black subjects in Great Britain (“the other side”) and inviting them to the wedding. An “experiment.”

This is a welcome change, but it’s also fraught with peril: If things go wrong in any way, the experiment will have failed and “the other side” risks losing everything.

Those two plot elements—the king’s madness and the society-level experiment—establish one stratum of stakes. They are interesting enough and complex enough to power a simpler story. But Rhimes is not content to stop there. Instead, she piles up and accelerates the stakes on multiple levels: personal, political, dynastic, romantic, and financial. Even better, all these high-stakes plotlines are timed to resolve, to traverse their different arcs, in concert.

With multi-layered plots, timing is everything

While the origin story itself could have been the sole basis of the series, instead Rhimes gives us two parallel timelines. Queen Charlotte appears in the early timeline as her younger self, the reluctant queen to be. In the other timeline, she is a mature monarch, holding together a realm with a puppet king who is unable to rule—and has no grandchildren to continue the line, despite their brood of thirteen.

Charlotte’s character in the first two Bridgerton series is that of a frosty, demanding queen whose main purpose in life seems to be to reign over “the ton.” The king is a shadowy presence, only appearing in cameos that serve to humanize her a bit.

The subplot related to the external stakes of “the other side” also echoes across both timelines. That is the journey of Lady Danbury, confidante to the queen and close friend of Violet Bridgerton in the more recent timeline.

In the earlier timeline, Lady Danbury becomes the conduit for the permanent changes that will result in the continuation of “the experiment.” She has the most to gain or lose depending on the outcome. In the later timeline, she has a less important role, but nonetheless bears a secret that has a direct connection to her friendship with Violet Bridgerton.

A ballet of partners and plots

Perhaps the most important element of the origin-story timeline resides in the character of King George. While he played only a minor role in the original series, in Queen Charlotte, he is co-protagonist. He literally embodies the personal, political, and dynastic stakes as a self-aware character who knows his condition renders him unfit to rule—and possibly dangerous to his unsuspecting queen.

Rhimes cleverly keeps the viewer in the dark at first about exactly why George behaves as he does toward his bride: avoiding her, keeping himself separate, making her excruciatingly lonely as a stranger in a land where she’s not allowed to forge her own friendships. We have an inkling—we know he’s got a mental illness, after all—but still, his actions seem excessive.

At precisely the point when his behavior becomes inexplicable to the viewer, Rhimes gives us an episode entirely from his POV. She peels back the curtain on what he’s been struggling with while Charlotte is feeling abandoned. A brilliant structural choice.

And what a struggle. George submits to torturous treatments in the hopes that he can be cured. Why? Not just for the sake of his realm, but for the sake of his relationship. It’s clear at this point that he is in love with Charlotte and cares for her enough to endure physical pain to keep her safe.

From this moment, the stakes just keep getting higher:

Charlotte is pregnant. Will the infant inherit his father’s disorder?Lady Danbury’s husband dies. Are the newly bestowed titles to be hereditary, or will everyone on their side lose everything in a single generation?Parliament is looking for proof that the king is fit to reign. But George’s inability to address them threatens to have him deposed, leaving the matter of succession dangerously unresolved. Without George, the “experiment” dies too.

And if that isn’t complex enough, there is another subplot involving the Queen’s man and the King’s man that foregrounds an additional sticky contradiction: duty and passion.

A romance, with muscle

The coup de grace at the end of Queen Charlotte is the way Rhimes not only resolves the individual plot lines, but how she brings the two timelines together. The deep understanding Charlotte and George reach in the earlier timeline bleeds into the later timeline in an unexpected—and intensely poignant—way. And in the later timeline, Lady Danbury reveals her secret to Violet Bridgerton without saying a word about it.

Rhimes uses complication not just to keep the viewer guessing, but to continually amp up the stakes and make us more and more invested in the outcomes for the characters. Once you care about Charlotte and George, it’s impossible not to follow them to the end.

Those who dismiss the romance genre as formulaic and predictable miss the real artistry that those tropes and conventions can enable. In Queen Charlotte, the combination of Julia Quinn’s glittering fictional world and Shonda Rhimes’s instinct for stories that keep you glued to the screen episode after episode results in something worthy of admiration by a storyteller in any genre.

The bottom line: Don’t settle for the obvious and simple level of stakes for your characters, historical or otherwise. Challenge them, push them, give them meaningful—and high—stakes that are believable in the context of their world.

Your readers will be enthralled.

3 Common Fears of Hiring a Freelance Editor

Photo by Pixabay

Today’s post is excerpted from How to Enjoy Being Edited: A Practical Guide for Nonfiction Authors by nonfiction writing coach and editor Hannah de Keijzer.

Hillary Weiss Presswood is a powerhouse brand strategist who projects confidence like a disco ball. But in the middle of writing her first book she asked me an important, not-so-sparkly question:

“Do you ever find yourself judging clients juuuust a teensy bit?”

Are you judging me?

I hear some version of this question often—most editors do—and I understand it completely. You’ve worked really hard. You generally like to be good at what you do. You certainly want to write a good book. And you’ve poured so much of yourself into your writing that sometimes your writing starts to feel like a part of you, so anyone criticizing your writing is criticizing you. That’s painful. It’s also not what’s happening in the author-editor relationship.

Here’s the distinction I like to draw. I’m never judging, but I am using judgment all the time.

Passing judgment—as in to “criticize or condemn someone from a position of assumed moral superiority” (thanks, Merriam-Webster)—has absolutely no place in editing. It honestly doesn’t occur to me. Not even a teensy bit.

But judgment is an essential part of an editor’s job in the sense of informed discernment, “the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions” (thanks again, Merriam-Webster). Editors make judgments on every page of your writing, about your writing, so that we can draw out the best in it. I want your book to be clearer and more compelling after I edit it than it was when you passed it to me. Ideally, working with me will also help you level up your own writing and revision skills so you get better as a writer, project after project. My judgment works toward those ends.

But, as LeVar Burton used to say at the end of every Reading Rainbow episode, you don’t have to take my word for it. So what do other editors have to say?

Kendra Olson emphasizes learnable skill instead of bad or good: “An author I worked with on a developmental edit expressed concern that her writing might not be any good. I told her that I tend to view writing as being more or less skillful; in other words, writing is a muscle that can be strengthened. The author-editor relationship plays an important role in this.”

Jennifer Lawler, editor, editing teacher, and Resort Director at Club Ed editorial community, says: “As part of the editor-vetting process, get a feel for how a prospective editor talks about the authors they work with. If their Bluesky account is a constant stream of snark about authors, of course you’re going to feel judged if you have them edit your manuscript. But if you’re working with a good, well-trained editor, they’re going to be focused on helping you do the best work you can. They’re not thinking that you’re an idiot for misspelling your own name. Everyone occasionally makes mistakes, fails to see the broader perspective, and uses fifteen words where three will do. Your editor isn’t judging that, they’re just trying to help address it.”

Language editor Claire Cronshaw says, “If it’s the idea of accuracy that’s scaring you, don’t worry about it. Getting the accuracy right so the story can be enjoyed is where editors and proofreaders can help you. So bring your work to me without fear of embarrassment. I’m not judging you. An editor is not an examiner. An editor is not your teacher. Don’t let school day hang-ups get in the way of your success.”

How do I know when it’s time to let go?

Some writers can’t wait to pass their work to an editor so they can stop looking at the damn thing. Others tinker and tinker and tinker, convinced it’s never quite good enough; someone has to pry the manuscript out of their hands. Most folks are somewhere in the middle but wonder when it’s the right time to pass the work off for a boost. So how do you know when it’s time to stop working on your own—when it’s “ready”?

Here’s how you know it’s not ready: if you haven’t done at least one thorough, careful revision on your own, preferably more.

But it is ready if you think it’s as good as you can get it without help, and you want it to be better. It’s ready if you aren’t sure what to do next or even whether it’s making sense to other people. It’s ready if you think the next step is one in which you don’t have as much skill—like if you’re a big-picture thinker but you need help lining up all the little details to support that big picture. It’s ready if you feel you just can’t “see” it anymore. It’s definitely ready if you’ve started to worry that your revisions are actually making things worse or sucking the life out of your writing.

There’s a sneaky second question here: When are you ready to hand the manuscript off to an editor? If you’re having trouble separating yourself from the manuscript—you can see the document is ready to go but you’re not emotionally ready to let it go—take a deep breath. Why aren’t you ready? Would it help to reread the section on judgment above? Consider talking through the why of this with a friend or colleague whom you trust not to tease or shame you, but to listen, help you explore, and invite you to let go.

If you’ve put in the effort to find a professional editor you click with, I hope you will let yourself take the leap, trusting your editor to handle your work with respect and care. A good editor is rooting for your work and for you, doing their best to enliven your book and make you look great in the process. And communicate with your editor. Feeling nervous? Tell them. They may suggest a tweak to their working process, like a midway check-in, that will help set you at ease.

Will you rip the heart out of my book and make it sound like someone else? Amazon • Bookshop

I’ll tell it to you straight: there are some editors out there who are more concerned with their vision and voice than with yours. They might very well smother your book or tear its heart out. But the editor who will do that is, frankly, not good at their job. A good editor will speak up thoughtfully and straightforwardly when they think your preferences are holding your manuscript back, while honoring your style and making the best of your voice shine.

This is one reason why the initial emails and conversations with a potential editor, their testimonials, and the sample edit are so important. Do you like how the editor treats you? Treats your manuscript? How they ask questions and phrase their suggestions? If not, it’s OK to move on and find someone else who will take better care of your work.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out How to Enjoy Being Edited: A Practical Guide for Nonfiction Authors by Hannah de Keijzer.

Creative Planning for Authors and Poets

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Today’s post is by Orna Ross, the founder of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi).

I don’t believe in the old adage that “if you’re failing to plan, you are planning to fail.” Writers understand the subconscious mind and know you can often rely on it to deliver more elegant solutions than hard thinking.

But I do believe in creative planning for authors, the kind of plan that recognises the power of the subconscious. That emphasizes intuition, imagination, and flexibility, as much as structured, data-driven goals and systematic processes, allowing for organic growth and adaptability.

Through my own experiences, and through observing tens of thousands of authors as director of The Alliance of Independent Authors, I’ve seen poor plans and no plans derail many books and authors. Without a system to integrate the learnings from the inevitable failures and vagaries of the creative life, sub-par performance and associated discouragement become almost inevitable.

Maya Angelou said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”  Soldiers or social workers might disagree, but yes, blocked, unfulfilled ambitions burn inside us, and create very real, very painful psychological conditions. It doesn’t have to be like this. Recent research and ancient wisdom about the creative process is now available to us all.

And the number one truth about that process is that creative resistance points up where we need to grow, if we’re to achieve the things we want.

The gap between where we are and where we want to be is full of creative challenges.

For many years now, I’ve been working on a creative planning program for writers. It began with my own needs, at a time when planning for me was no more than a to-do list and a daily check-in with my creative self. As a novelist with a traditional publisher, that had worked well enough for me. Or so I thought!

When I took back my rights to become a working indie author, my planning method wasn’t good enough. The to-do list felt like a tyrant. I’d go to sleep ticking tasks off in my head and wake up remembering things I’d forgotten.

I tried other planning systems but either they were too mechanistic and boxed me in, or they weren’t planners at all, just fancy calendars. They didn’t account for the messiness of creativity. They didn’t acknowledge the writer’s need for creative rest and play as well as work. And they had no understanding of the dynamics of creative resistance, block and failure.

As a self-publishing novelist and poet, and director of a busy non-profit, I needed a much more creative planning method.

The common ways authors fail

Writing a book that finds its readership is quite the challenge, and anyone who sets out to do it can be become derailed at any stage of the process.

Fail to complete the first draft: The vast majority of manuscripts never reach “The End.”Fail to complete the final draft: A wave of creativity carries most writers through the first chapters but things often peter out, or the writer gets caught in the self-editing process.Fail to publish: Getting your book produced and distributed calls for skills that are very different from those needed to write a book. Whether you decide to publish the book yourself or use a traditional publisher, you’ll need to be highly motivated, organized and resilient. For indie authors, there are extra challenges. Writing and publishing draw on very different parts of the cognitive and emotional systems and the number of moving parts can be confusing, especially on a first book.Fail to build an author platform: No matter how you publish, you need to do the author’s part in marketing, promotion and platform building. So many writers fail to even try. Others fail to educate themselves in how books are marketed in these digital days.Fail to profit: If you just want to write and publish a book for personal reasons, all good, but if you want to make a living as a writer, you need to work out how to do it in a way that’s sustainable for you—so you can write and publish more books. For indie authors, publishing is a business and businesses must make a profit to survive.

When writers experience any of these failures, they can become utterly discouraged. They unthinkingly feed themselves unproven explanations and assumptions. That they “love writing but hate marketing,” for example, even though for a writer marketing is writing. Or that they are not “good enough,” or that success is a pipe-dream, possible for others but not for them.

All of this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is another way. To understand that writing and publishing are two high-order skills that a successful author takes time to master, and each in their own way. That there is a creative solution to any challenge an author might meet on their way to mastery. That our “failures” are flags, pointing up where we need to grow and change to get where we want to go.

This is where good creative planning comes in. When the inevitable failures happen, without a plan we can be submerged by our feelings and emotions. With a creative plan in place, we can integrate the experience, and the learning it affords us, into our creative process.

Writers at every level, and every stage of development, benefit from creative planning.

What is creative planning?

A good creative planning program is much more than a way to divide up time. While it works with quarters, months, weeks and days like any planning system, it allows room for the unexpected and the open-ended messiness that is part of the writer’s life.

Often, there’s an inherent tension between the act of writing (an intimate, self-directed process) and the business of publishing (a public, other-directed process). This tension can be disconcerting for many authors but with a robust creative plan in place, balance becomes possible.

By setting clear boundaries and allocating dedicated time for both pursuits, writers can ensure that their artistic integrity isn’t compromised while still achieving success. When both publishing and writing proceed from creative principles, everything works better.

A robust creative planning system helps us to acknowledge what’s going on for us, and figure out how to harness our own creative energies in an optimal way, through all the varying challenges we meet. It sets us up so creative flow can … well, flow. Getting into flow isn’t just about spontaneous inspiration. It’s about guiding inspiration with intention.

At its core, creative planning is the act of methodically mapping out where you are, where you want to go, and how you are going to process the challenges that are coming up for you today.

It defines and sets clear measures of success that incorporate your mission, passions and sense of purpose into your daily work.It filters time and money through processes that boost creative productivity, author platform, and return on investment.It balances qualities that are often wrongly posited as opposites—productivity and pleasure, purpose and promotion, money and meaning—and integrates the different aspects of the job. An author must wear three hats: maker, manager and marketeer. A good creative plan makes room for all three, each week.

It also acknowledges the importance of planning creative rest and play. In our quest for work achievement and the pressure to keep ticking off our to-do lists, we often overlook that creative magic happens in the doing, yes, but also in the undoing. A mind allowed to rest and play is a mind primed for creative flow, when work time comes round.

The act of recharging our creative capacities should not be treated as an afterthought but the very foundation of our most inspired work—in our publishing and platform building, as much as our writing. Creative rest and play aren’t breaks from the process, they are the process. My experience, and the experience of so many of the authors I’ve worked with, is that they should be planned for—or they won’t happen.

Introducing Go Creative! Planning

Over the years, as I navigated the realms of writing and publishing, I developed a planning method that has kept my creative journey both fruitful and joyful, in the face of many challenges. Now I’ve decided to share it, not as a one-size-fits-all solution, but as a framework that respects the individuality of each author.

I’ve observed many authors feeling adrift or overwhelmed but I know that when we harmonize our work, rest and play; our inner maker, manager, and marketeer; our passions, mission and sense of purpose, we ensure that our creative wells never run dry. We support ourselves in the best possible way, as we unfold our own, chosen vision of success.

I want to see as many writers as possible living out their creative dreams, without getting lost in the labyrinth of overwhelm, resistance and block. Through the Alliance of Independent Authors, we offer self-publishing advice that answers questions and solves problems, but this planning program is more personal. All the advice in the world doesn’t help if you’re not on the right path.

The program is born out of my desire to see all authors not just survive but thrive, and is my way of extending a hand to all.

If you’d like to learn more about creative planning, and how to bring the program to other authors, visit my Kickstarter.

How to Read (and Retain) Research Material in Less than Half of Your Usual Time

Photo by Stas Knop

Today’s post is by author Thelma Fayle.

For the last two years, I’ve had unexpected success in experimenting with my “chipmunk research method.” I was inspired to try this technique after hearing an intriguing comment made by my friend Oriano Belusic, past president of the Canadian Federation of the Blind (CFB).

Blind since age seven, he has learned to read at high speeds. (I use the term “read” for audiobooks, as this is the word used by most blind people I know.) Oriano uses a screen reader, which he routinely sets to a speed of 2.5. A speed of 1 is normal audiobook speed for most of us.

When I first stood by his side while he read an email, I could not understand the fast and garbled speech. Yet, Oriano says he is on the slower end of the spectrum when it comes to screen reader speed. He said he knows blind people who, through repetition, practice, and experience can read at chipmunk-fast speeds of 3 or 4.

I was skeptical, but my friend insists anyone can train themselves to discern fast speech. He suggested our brains, with very little coaching, can do unexpected things outside of our usual understanding of “normal.”

I learned he was right.

As a recent MFA graduate (narrative nonfiction), every day I encounter more nonfiction books than I have time to read. So, I decided to try speeding up my research methods by reading the hardcopy version and the audiobook at the same time.

To avoid purchasing two copies of the book, I often borrow the hard copy from the library, and purchase the less expensive audiobook from Audible. Speeded-up listening is not the old speed-reading hype from years ago. That approach involved more scanning than reading and was never successful for me. This is different.

When I started reading a thick book that would normally have taken me two or three weeks to finish, I decided to play around with the audiobook speed. Over a couple of days, I notched it up to 1.2, and then 1.5, 1.8, before eventually pumping it up to 3 a few weeks later. As I read the print book, I keep pace listening to the audio version. The idea may sound improbable, but I felt like I did when I learned to skip French ropes when I was nine. One minute it looked impossible, and the next I was doing it.

The process involves using several senses as I visually read, listen to every word, and underline critical passages (if the hard copy is mine). Keeping up with the fast speed requires studious focus with a simple pause or rewind if I need to stop and reflect.  While I was at first doubtful about whether this would work, I have discovered I have uncommon retention of the material using this technique—and believe it or not, after using it for a couple of years I find it relaxing to be intently focused on the content.

I also love knowing that I can pick up any huge nonfiction tome and read it thoroughly in less than a week. This approach is probably better for reading nonfiction than fiction—unless you are reading fiction for research or are under a time crunch.

Below are a few examples of recent successes on my path. I read these titles in one-half to one-third of the completion time listed on the audiobook:

The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford’s Frame translation, 1957) — 883 pages, listed on Audible at 50 hours, took me less than 20 hours to read.Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc — 436 pages, listed at 20 hours, took me 9 hours.A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders — listed at 15 hours, took me 5 hours.Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake — listed at 10 hours, took me 4 hours.The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant — listed at 9 hours, took me 6 hours. (I slowed down on this one to revel in the hauntingly beautiful nonfiction story. I did not want it to end.)

Over time, I have adjusted my research process to read at different speeds. How I feel on the day and the complexity of the text may determine the speed I choose. I am a little slower if the subject is less familiar to me, i.e. science.

My chipmunk research method is a towering time-saver, allowing me to—believe it or not—enjoy researching and doing more of it. I hope this offers you a useful idea to explore.

However, there is a drawback: Reading at a normal audio speed of 1 now feels unbearably slow!

How to Turn an Essay into a Book Deal

Photo by CJ Dayrit on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author Catherine Baab-Muguira.

Getting a traditional, “Big 5” book deal is almost unbelievably difficult. Many will try. Few will succeed. What’s more, talent is cheap. Hard work, persistence, unchecked ambition-slash-megalomania? They’re cheap, too.

What can help you land a deal is “proof of concept.” Let me explain.

In marketing, “proof of concept” refers to the process of testing a new product or strategy to assess its sales potential and viability before you go all-in on a full-scale launch. It usually involves conducting a limited, real-world trial, the purpose of which is to gather evidence that will allow you to make a larger, grander case. I did 12 years’ hard labor in corporate marketing. That’s how I know.

When it comes to selling your book, proof of concept means demonstrating there’s a large, enthusiastic audience out there ready and willing to shell out $18 for your masterpiece. And a great way to do this is by publishing a nutshell version of your big, central idea in essay form.

How it worked for me

In the summer of 2017, after months of pitching with no luck, I finally found a home for the essay I was dying to write. It was about how reading the work of Edgar Allan Poe during a deep depression had effectively saved my life. Restarted my creative drive. Renewed my hope for the future.

Numerous prestigious outlets, from the Washington Post to The Atlantic, had rejected or ignored the pitch, so when the literary website The Millions agreed to run it and pay me a whopping $25 for the privilege, I was thrilled. My motivation came down to personal fulfillment and sharing an interesting experience with the world, not fame or money. The token compensation mattered not at all. What I hoped for was an audience, and in that, The Millions more than delivered. My essay went modestly viral in a literary world kind of way, racking up likes and shares on Facebook and Twitter, and became one of the site’s most popular articles of the year.

By this point in my freelance career, I’d grown accustomed to following my own work around the internet. It fascinated me to see Redditors discussing a piece, and to track which newspapers, magazines, and other outlets shared the piece on their socials was especially gratifying. Often these same outlets had rejected the pitch.

This time out felt no different, at least not at first. I googled the title of my article and discovered what readers were saying, a process that brings both pleasure and pain. Then I noticed something I hadn’t expected: my piece was being shared in gigantic Poe fan groups. For instance, by the official Edgar Allan Poe Facebook fan page, which has nearly 4 million members. I’d never realized so many Poe fans existed, or for that matter, that they gathered in dedicated online spaces.

I kept digging, and what I learned lit my brain up. Not only did my fellow fans number in the millions, many shared the same view of Poe as I did: He was their hero, too. A kindred spirit struggling with mental-health issues, and an inspiration to pursue their artistic work despite knowing it would almost certainly go unpublished and unappreciated.

It would be dishonest to say that, from this point, my book proposal wrote itself. Book proposals aren’t easy to write, hahahaha dear God no. But making the case for a self-help book based on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe became much easier once I could point to the article’s success—and even share emails from readers responding to the piece.

I hadn’t meant to “pilot” my idea, but pilot it I had.

How it can work for you

How this advice applies to nonfiction is straightforward, but it can apply to fiction, too. You could pilot your big novel idea as a short story. You could also pilot it as an essay on your main topic or theme, or the autobiographical experience which inspired you to write the book.

Whatever genre you’re working in, the process remains simple—dare I say easy.

Step 1: Write the pitch.

Begin by crafting a compelling pitch for your essay. This pitch should be a concise and engaging description of your idea, clearly conveying the core concept that you plan to explore. (For more on freelance pitching, see here.)

Step 2: Pitch editors at relevant outlets.

Identify and research relevant online publications, magazines, or websites that cater to your target audience. Carefully tailor your pitch to these specific outlets, highlighting why your essay aligns with their readers’ interests, and referencing articles the outlet has recently published. Keep in mind you may have to pitch lots of outlets before finding a taker. Begin with your top choices and work down from there.

Step 3: Promote the hell out of your essay.

Do not bet on organic success. Instead, once your essay is published, do every last thing you can to maximize its reach. Share it across your socials, obviously, and don’t fail to beg your friends, family, and followers to do the same. Consider tapping into your professional network, too. For example, I belong to Study Hall, an online organization for freelancers with an active listserv, and once a year, members can ask each other to “boost” a particular piece. You may also belong to organizations in which you can ask for support from like-minded individuals, too, which can go a long way toward amplifying your essay’s reach.

Step 4: Gather data by stalking your work around the internet.

Keep a close eye on the performance of your essay. Google the headline in quote marks (as in “My essay title”) and see what Redditors are saying. Keep track of views, likes, shares, and comments. If notable people, organizations, or publications share your piece, make a note. This data will help you prove your concept resonates with a large audience, perhaps even a distinguished one.

Step 5: Belabor your essay’s success in your query and proposal.

What’s the point of all this? Making a big ol’ to-do about the success of your article. In other words, don’t bury the lede. Foreground that success in your query letter when approaching literary agents, and foreground it in your book proposal, too. You can and should mention its success in your Overview essay and in your Audience section.

Step 6: Maybe do all this in video form, not essay form. I don’t know. You tell me. It’s worth a thought.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge how much the internet has changed since 2017. The heyday of the “first-person industrial complex” appears to be behind us, with short-form video most definitely emerging as the tool du jour. That doesn’t mean you can’t effectively pilot your book idea. It means you should consider piloting your idea via video, if that’s a thing you’re into and a medium you like. And, frankly, even if it’s not a thing you’re into and not a medium you like. At the very least, consider doing both—piloting via essay and via video. Leigh Stein offers some excellent advice on the point.

Break a leg, friends! And go get that proof of concept.