Today I spent most of my morning taking a proofreading test so that I'll (hopefully) be qualified to proofread for the company I'm working at. First of all, I think it's worth noting that proofreading is written more or less in Greek---or at least that's what it looks like. Learning the marks is a bit like learning a foreign language, or a secret code. I've had some experience with it before, and had been studying for a couple of days, but I still had to stop frequently while taking said test and look things up in the Chicago Manual of Style they were so kind as to give me for reference.
But the reason I'm blogging about proofreading is because of one sentence I ran into on the test. It was a piece of dialogue, and ran something like:
"Slender yes. but with curves in the all right places."
Zomg! Grammatical error that's easy to spot!
But how to fix it? The most obvious fixes are to either replace the period with a comma or capitalize the 'b' in but. Unfortunately, that's a fairly major stylistic decision. "Slender yes, but with curves in all the right places." reads quite differently than "Slender, yes. But with curves in all the right places." One is just a statement of fact, but the other implies a wink and a grin--at least to me anyway. And it's difficult to tell whether the author hit the wrong key when going for a comma or forgot to capitalize a 'b'.
While I'm sure it gets easier with time and practice to make those guesses right, I think it definitely behooves the author to just make sure they get it right the first time...and it saves the proofreaders work, which is always a good thing. :-)
Friday, 6 June 2008
Thursday, 5 June 2008
Why Every Aspiring Writer Should Work in Publishing
Well there's the obvious--the contacts, the industry knowledge, the possibility of a career working with books that comes complete with a salary and benefits...but today I want to talk about how it can help your writing.
Whilst doing one of my favorite things today (and it really is...maybe I haven't been doing it long enough or maybe I'm just crazy), reading through the slush pile, I came across a pretty well written manuscript. Before you ask, yes I did send it up, because it was that good, and I'm fairly confident that it's worth at least asking for a full, though I can't really evaluate whether it will ever get published.
While that was exciting in and of itself, more important for me was the way this woman really grabbed me from the first page. I'm hard to do that with, and she did it by describing the psychic visions of her main character. I've gotten a lot of feedback (I sometimes call it flak...) about people not understanding the magic in my own writing, particularly in the initial pages. I've struggled with what to do about that, because I'm using those initial pages to do other things and I didn't want to give them up to description.
I have now been converted, because I had a moment, as an editor reading a slush manuscript, where I said "Okay, well done. Let's see what else you've got" and that is exactly what you want when your first page is read by anybody, but especially when it's read by an editor. So I'm now convinced it can work, which makes it worth experimenting with, and perhaps expanding my prologue and assigning it a fixed point of view to get the description done. We'll see. Either way, the point is that I now have a concrete moment where my work in publishing is paying direct dividends to my writing, and that's a very good thing.
Whilst doing one of my favorite things today (and it really is...maybe I haven't been doing it long enough or maybe I'm just crazy), reading through the slush pile, I came across a pretty well written manuscript. Before you ask, yes I did send it up, because it was that good, and I'm fairly confident that it's worth at least asking for a full, though I can't really evaluate whether it will ever get published.
While that was exciting in and of itself, more important for me was the way this woman really grabbed me from the first page. I'm hard to do that with, and she did it by describing the psychic visions of her main character. I've gotten a lot of feedback (I sometimes call it flak...) about people not understanding the magic in my own writing, particularly in the initial pages. I've struggled with what to do about that, because I'm using those initial pages to do other things and I didn't want to give them up to description.
I have now been converted, because I had a moment, as an editor reading a slush manuscript, where I said "Okay, well done. Let's see what else you've got" and that is exactly what you want when your first page is read by anybody, but especially when it's read by an editor. So I'm now convinced it can work, which makes it worth experimenting with, and perhaps expanding my prologue and assigning it a fixed point of view to get the description done. We'll see. Either way, the point is that I now have a concrete moment where my work in publishing is paying direct dividends to my writing, and that's a very good thing.
Tuesday, 3 June 2008
Harry Potter
In honor of my discovery yesterday that Harry Potter is now almost as old as he is in his first book, I'd like to take today and post my thoughts on the Harry Potter phenomenon and what made it work.
First off, and most importantly, there's Rowling's talent. She hit gold with her subject matter, but she also had what it took to capitalize upon it, and there are few people that could have done it so well. She plotted out a seven-book series about kids long after she was no longer a kid herself, and kept it believable and interesting at least through book five (which is, I must admit, as far I've read so far). That's an incredible accomplishment any way you slice it.
Okay, now that acknowledging her talent is over, let's look at why the story was so popular. It seems pretty simple to me, but I haven't seen many people discuss it. Sure, there's the orphaned hero with magic powers, the evil step-parents, the heroic destiny--all the most common tropes of fantasy and (more importantly, I think) fairy tale, but there are plenty of other books that have those and didn't achieve such success, and I'm not willing to pin it all on Rowling's talent. So what do we have that's different?
Boarding school.
I really think it's that simple. Kids love boarding school stories. They've been around forever but they're still huge in YA, which was Potter's target audience, and Rowling managed to put a new spin on hers by combining it with magic powers and doing it very, very, well. So if that's why it was initially successful, why did it remain so?
She matured her books at (or close to) the same rate her audience was maturing.
She did a great job of making her books more adult book by book. Let's look at the scariest things in each book, through book five where my knowledge ends.
Book One: Confrontation with a creepy teacher. Boarding-school mystery story.
Book Two: A giant snake. We've moved on to fairy tale.
Book Three: The Dementors. We're now on the dark end of the fairy tale spectrum.
Book Four: Failure to stop Evil with a capital 'E' (Voldemort) and the death of a child. We're now at the border between darkest fairy tale and modern fantasy.
Book Five: Not any real terrifying moments (death of Potter's godfather, perhaps?) but nervous tension the whole way through. Constant question of whether or not Potter can do what 'his destiny' is and stop Voldemort. We're now solidly away from fairy tale and into modern fantasy, and have moved on to a theme ('Can I do everything people think I can?') more resonant with teenagers than pre-teens.
The books get more and more mature as both Potter and his audience get older and older. I think that's a pretty good primer for how to write YA, because there will come a point when the kids grow out of YA, and if you want to keep them, you've got to grow with them. New readers, the next generation of kids, can always start with book one.
First off, and most importantly, there's Rowling's talent. She hit gold with her subject matter, but she also had what it took to capitalize upon it, and there are few people that could have done it so well. She plotted out a seven-book series about kids long after she was no longer a kid herself, and kept it believable and interesting at least through book five (which is, I must admit, as far I've read so far). That's an incredible accomplishment any way you slice it.
Okay, now that acknowledging her talent is over, let's look at why the story was so popular. It seems pretty simple to me, but I haven't seen many people discuss it. Sure, there's the orphaned hero with magic powers, the evil step-parents, the heroic destiny--all the most common tropes of fantasy and (more importantly, I think) fairy tale, but there are plenty of other books that have those and didn't achieve such success, and I'm not willing to pin it all on Rowling's talent. So what do we have that's different?
Boarding school.
I really think it's that simple. Kids love boarding school stories. They've been around forever but they're still huge in YA, which was Potter's target audience, and Rowling managed to put a new spin on hers by combining it with magic powers and doing it very, very, well. So if that's why it was initially successful, why did it remain so?
She matured her books at (or close to) the same rate her audience was maturing.
She did a great job of making her books more adult book by book. Let's look at the scariest things in each book, through book five where my knowledge ends.
Book One: Confrontation with a creepy teacher. Boarding-school mystery story.
Book Two: A giant snake. We've moved on to fairy tale.
Book Three: The Dementors. We're now on the dark end of the fairy tale spectrum.
Book Four: Failure to stop Evil with a capital 'E' (Voldemort) and the death of a child. We're now at the border between darkest fairy tale and modern fantasy.
Book Five: Not any real terrifying moments (death of Potter's godfather, perhaps?) but nervous tension the whole way through. Constant question of whether or not Potter can do what 'his destiny' is and stop Voldemort. We're now solidly away from fairy tale and into modern fantasy, and have moved on to a theme ('Can I do everything people think I can?') more resonant with teenagers than pre-teens.
The books get more and more mature as both Potter and his audience get older and older. I think that's a pretty good primer for how to write YA, because there will come a point when the kids grow out of YA, and if you want to keep them, you've got to grow with them. New readers, the next generation of kids, can always start with book one.
Monday, 2 June 2008
10 Years?!
I was doing my daily blog-post reading today, and I came across this picture at the Guide to Literary Agents:
Looks like just another post from BEA (Book Expo America, I believe), which is all anyone is posting about lately because it's a huge tradeshow and just about everyone who's involved in the publishing industry seems to be there. But can you spot what's wrong with this picture? With the help of MS paint, let me help...
10 years!! It's been 10 years since Harry Potter was published! Forget how old that makes me, let's think about what that means...we've had a full decade of Potter mania, and of one series single-handedly causing massive ups and downs in publishing sales figures. What the heck are we going to do now that it's over? My personal thoughts about Harry Potter and its dastardly success aside (well, at least until tomorrow, probably...;-p), when will I next have to drive my little sister to the grocery store at midnight so that she can have a book the minute it goes on sale?
I can't believe it lasted that long....10 years is a crazy amount of time for anything to hold the attention of the whole world, let alone a book.
Looks like just another post from BEA (Book Expo America, I believe), which is all anyone is posting about lately because it's a huge tradeshow and just about everyone who's involved in the publishing industry seems to be there. But can you spot what's wrong with this picture? With the help of MS paint, let me help...
10 years!! It's been 10 years since Harry Potter was published! Forget how old that makes me, let's think about what that means...we've had a full decade of Potter mania, and of one series single-handedly causing massive ups and downs in publishing sales figures. What the heck are we going to do now that it's over? My personal thoughts about Harry Potter and its dastardly success aside (well, at least until tomorrow, probably...;-p), when will I next have to drive my little sister to the grocery store at midnight so that she can have a book the minute it goes on sale?
I can't believe it lasted that long....10 years is a crazy amount of time for anything to hold the attention of the whole world, let alone a book.
Sunday, 1 June 2008
Serendipity
In case anyone was wondering about whether some things are fated, consider this:
I have been thinking a lot about my dialogue lately, as is obvious from my most recent blog posts. I'm also preparing to move out to New York City to start my summer publishing internship (I catch the red eye tonight, as a matter of fact), and part of that process was to find myself a messenger bag to take to work, as a backpack just looks goofy when you're wearing business clothes (one thing I learned in London).
The one messenger bag I own was a freebie I received when I attended the Pikes Peak Writers' Conference last year.
I thought I had emptied it out long ago, just after the conference, but when I lifted it to stuff it into my suitcase, I noticed it was actually quite heavy. I opened it up, and out poured a pile of papers and envelopes. Apparently my mother used it as a repository for junk with my name on it at some point while I wasn't home.
So I set about sifting the garbage (letters from the University of Colorado at Denver, to which I was considering transferring in Spring 2007) from the gold (notes from the conference itself) and I came across a magazine called "Writer" that must have been another freebie given at the conference.
Intrigued, I flipped to a random page...and what greeted my eyes but an article entitled "Shtick it to them: The art of dialogue includes deft stage business that adds action and detail."
Convinced that such a coincidence could only be the work of fate, I read through it and found it quite helpful. It was packed with examples of different kind of speech tags (I think the author who wrote it split them up into "dialogue", meaning "he said", "action", meaning "he scratched his head" and "thought", meaning "he wondered how long it had been since John had showered"), how they had worked for different authors, and suggestions on how to improve upon each type.
Reading the article was great for me, as it reinforced my conviction that the way I write dialogue isn't bad in and of itself (it was good to see that other, published, respected authors write the same way) but I'm not executing it as well as I could be. I use the same action tags too often and too freely, without giving much thought to them. I need to go back and take a much closer look at what each of my characters would actually do while talking--what their particular tics are, so to speak, and then implement that into the writing, so that all of my speech tags, not just some of them, accomplish something more than simply filling space and breaking up long bits of dialogue.
I have been thinking a lot about my dialogue lately, as is obvious from my most recent blog posts. I'm also preparing to move out to New York City to start my summer publishing internship (I catch the red eye tonight, as a matter of fact), and part of that process was to find myself a messenger bag to take to work, as a backpack just looks goofy when you're wearing business clothes (one thing I learned in London).
The one messenger bag I own was a freebie I received when I attended the Pikes Peak Writers' Conference last year.
I thought I had emptied it out long ago, just after the conference, but when I lifted it to stuff it into my suitcase, I noticed it was actually quite heavy. I opened it up, and out poured a pile of papers and envelopes. Apparently my mother used it as a repository for junk with my name on it at some point while I wasn't home.
So I set about sifting the garbage (letters from the University of Colorado at Denver, to which I was considering transferring in Spring 2007) from the gold (notes from the conference itself) and I came across a magazine called "Writer" that must have been another freebie given at the conference.
Intrigued, I flipped to a random page...and what greeted my eyes but an article entitled "Shtick it to them: The art of dialogue includes deft stage business that adds action and detail."
Convinced that such a coincidence could only be the work of fate, I read through it and found it quite helpful. It was packed with examples of different kind of speech tags (I think the author who wrote it split them up into "dialogue", meaning "he said", "action", meaning "he scratched his head" and "thought", meaning "he wondered how long it had been since John had showered"), how they had worked for different authors, and suggestions on how to improve upon each type.
Reading the article was great for me, as it reinforced my conviction that the way I write dialogue isn't bad in and of itself (it was good to see that other, published, respected authors write the same way) but I'm not executing it as well as I could be. I use the same action tags too often and too freely, without giving much thought to them. I need to go back and take a much closer look at what each of my characters would actually do while talking--what their particular tics are, so to speak, and then implement that into the writing, so that all of my speech tags, not just some of them, accomplish something more than simply filling space and breaking up long bits of dialogue.
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