Category Archives: writing

Deadly Ink: “Get Your Facts Straight”

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crime-scene-30112_640A panel at last weekend’s Deadly Ink 2015 conference represented a spectrum of views about the research lengths mystery writers go to. At the “as factual as possible” end of the spectrum was K.B. Inglee, a writer of historical mysteries who is also a history museum docent and reenactor (talk about living your research!), closely followed by Kim Kash, who seeks a realistic recreation of Ocean City, Maryland, where her fictitious characters and stories play and play out. Setting her mysteries there began when she wrote a tour guide for the city, a compilation of facts and contacts that has since served her well.

Tim Hall, who writes cozy-ish mysteries set on Long Island said his kind of story is so character-driven that what’s needed is enough research to make sure they remain internally consistent. No blue eyes on page 30 and brown eyes 100 pages later. Similarly, S.A. Solomon does enough research to ensure plausibility. A big gaffe makes readers start to doubt the whole story—a disaster for mystery.

Surprisingly, the one author of “alternative universe” mysteries, Roberta Rogow, said the science fiction audience is one of the most demanding. Any would-be sci-fi authors who hope they can “just make it up” soon learn otherwise. That pleasure is reserved for another genre: fantasy. And even there, devoted readers patrol for consistency.

A key benefit of research the panelists agreed is that it helps the writer avoid stereotypes, generalities, and clichés in their characters, places, and actions. When you know the exact particulars of something, you can describe it with greater exactitude. “I took the bus” becomes “I caught the packed bus from the Weekly Breeze office uptown near the Delaware border, down to DaVinci’s around Fourteenth Street. There was only standing room on the bus, it being dinner hour with everybody heading out for crabs, fries on the boardwalk, and happy-hour drinks.” (from Kim Kash’s Ocean City Cover-up).

Although Wikipedia can provide a quick overview of a topic for writers, it’s more useful in terms of pointing them in the right direction for further research. Hyperlocal resources are readily available online, though there’s no substitute for visiting the place being written about. Several panelists are devotees of “just talking to people.” While people’s time is valuable, especially that of professionals (cops, investigators, medical examiner staff), these writers have found that all kinds of people—most of whom seem to be would-be novelists themselves!—are delighted to share their knowledge.

Recent books by these Deadly Ink panelists:

  • K.B. Inglee – Her story “The Devil’s Quote” leads off a 2015 story collection And All Our Yesterdays—mystery and crime through the ages
  • Kim Kash – Her other Ocean City mystery is Ocean City Lowdown, and the book that started it all: Ocean City: A Guide to Maryland’s Seaside Resort
  • Tim Hall – He grew up in the Long Island area he writes about, but still has to keep up with the changes! Dead Stock was his first book
  • S.A. Solomon – Read her fine story “Live for Today,” published in New Jersey Noir, published by Akashic Books
  • Roberta Rogow – Her most recent series involves an alternative history of the Island of Manatas (Manhattan), volume 3 of which is Mischief in Manatas

Why I Cried Last Night

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woman writing

(photo: Mike Licht, Creative Commons License)

Earlier this summer, my heart sank. I was reading about yet another manifestation of the gender divide in agenting, publishing, marketing, and reviewing women-written fiction, which, even if unconscious, leads to and promotes a gender divide in the books readers choose, an issue I wrote about in my post, “Will Men Read my Book?” A vicious circle if ever there was one.

Subject Matter Matters

The essay was Nicola Griffith’s “.” She compiled data showing that not only have men won most of the major literary awards over the last 15 years, when women have won them, they’ve mostly won them for books about male characters. Think Hilary Mantel, the only woman to have won two Man Booker prizes, both for books about Thomas Cromwell, or Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winner The Goldfinch and its protagonist Theo Decker. (Rufi Thorpe has written an amusing, but pointed essay on what it’s like to have her first novel published and the tone-deaf reactions she received. Male at pool: “I mean, yours was just a novel about girls.” Author: “Yeah, I know that.” Male at pool: “I just don’t see how anyone could compare it to actual literature.”)

“Everybody kind of knows it’s true, but they don’t want to see it,” Griffith said in the Seattle Review of Books. Later in that essay, she says, “The way we’re brought up is that stories about men are important and stories about women are fluffy and domestic and kind of boring.” This page from a publisher of predominantly women-written mysteries is a revealing display of that preconception in action. It sends a clear marketing message: These are lightweight books. Not that there isn’t a place for such books and the readers who enjoy them. This publisher is just up-front about what they do and, inadvertently I hope, perpetuating a stereotype.

The Evidence Piles Up

In June, I groaned reading Kamila Shamsie’s essay in The Bookseller on another aspect of the gender divide. She, too, turned to statistics, analyzing The Guardian’s end-of-year book recommendations by some 252 cultural figures, mostly writers. The data showed that more men than women get asked to recommend; of those who are asked, more men than women agree to do so; and those men are more likely to recommend yet more men. Says Shamsie:

I’m going to assume that the only people who really doubt that there’s a gender bias going on are those who stick with the idea that men are better writers and better critics, and that when men recommend books by men that’s fair literary judgement, while when women recommend books by women that’s either a political position or woolly feminine judgement. To these people I have nothing to say, except: go read some Toni Morrison. 

Desperate Responses

I pulled my hair and rolled my eyes as, over the summer, the reaction to this situation became increasingly creative, if quixotic. Shamsie has proposed that in 2018 UK publishers bring out only new titles by women. US writer Amanda Filipacchi tried to “pose like a man” for her book jacket photo when she discovered that in these pictures “The men looked simpler, more straightforward. The women looked dreamy, often gazing off into the distance. Their limbs were sometimes entwined, like vines.”

And white male writers have been urged to acknowledge that “the white male experience has been overexposed, at the expense of other experiences, for centuries.” Or, as American fiction writer John Scalzi has said, in the massive role-playing game of life, “‘Straight White Male’ is the lowest difficulty setting there is.”

Submissions (A Too-Apt Word?)

Right now, I’m in the middle of preparing submission packets for small publishers. It took two days to prepare three packets. I’ve been working on the current packet since Sunday, off and mostly on. Each publisher has different requirements, some puzzling. My novel, three years in the works, has been professionally edited by an award-winning mystery writer, professionally proofread, and the police-related parts reviewed by a former NYPD detective and terrorism expert. It’s in its, oh, eighth? draft.

Then yesterday, I read this the story by Catherine Nichols. Discouraged by the lackluster response (usually a one-line rejection or, commonly, no reply at all) to her agent query letters—you need an agent in order to approach most publishers—she began sending her materials out using a male pseudonym. Over a weekend, she sent six agents the same letter and same book synopsis and sample chapters she’d been sending and received five responses, with three requests for a manuscript. Ultimately, under her own name, 50 queries received two manuscript requests, whereas “George’s” 50 queries generated 17 manuscript requests. George is, she says, “eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.”

The agents’ comments to Catherine (similar to those I have received myself) consistently cited “beautiful writing,” which Nichols points out “is the paint job on top but not the engine of the book,” whereas they said George’s work was “‘clever,’ it’s ‘well-constructed’ and ‘exciting.’” It received lengthy critiques, not the typical form-letter brush-offs.

She points out that the agents she approached were both men and women, “which is not surprising because bias would hardly have a chance to damage people if it weren’t pervasive. It’s not something a few people do to everyone else. It goes through all the ways we think of ourselves and each other.”

I wept.

Resources
VIDA, an organization dedicated to Women in Literary Arts
Sisters in Crime, helping women who write, review, buy, or sell crime fiction
The other side of the coin: Male writers who write as women
Historical Underpinnings of Continual Sexism in Publishing, Emerson College

“He’s Got a Gun!”

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gun, firearm, weapon

(photo: r. nial bradshaw, creative commons license)

The late Elmore Leonard advised budding crime-writers, “when your story starts to drag, have someone pull out a gun.” Maybe too many of us have been following that advice, because several recent books aim to inject more accuracy into the portrayal of guns (and other weaponry). Errors make some readers swear off a writer and, as the introduction to The Writer’s Guide to Weapons: A Practical Reference for Using Firearms and Knives in Fiction
explains, “no wrath is greater than that of firearms enthusiasts.”

According to a recent post in Jane Friedman’s excellent “Resources for Writers” blog, written by Benjamin Sobieck, who also wrote the Writer’s Guide, above, here are key points about guns that writers should keep in mind to avoid those credibility-shattering results:

  1. Clip and magazine are not the same. A clip holds cartridges that go into a magazine. Most modern firearms don’t require a clip. But it sounds good, no? Clip: Manly. Magazine: Better Homes & Gardens
  2. Bullet is not the same as shell, round, or cartridge. You never find empty bullets on the ground after a shooting. Casings, yes.
  3. The whole pumping of a shotgun or cocking the hammer of a handgun is a sound cue from the movies, intended for intimidation, but, as Sobieck says, “less to do with looking tough and more to do with being stupid.” These extra and in most cases unnecessary pumps/cocks just “dump unfired ammunition onto the ground.” Why would anyone intimidate another person with a firearm, if it weren’t ready to fire? Good question. Ask your author.
  4. While this would seem to be an “it goes without saying” kind of thing, a character should never look down the barrel of a gun to see whether it’s loaded. Who’d be that stupid? I had a clip showing a tv character actually doing this, but it has disappeared. Sorry!
  5. And, perhaps the most pervasive of all gun errors in both news and entertainment media currently, the term “assault weapon.” This actually is meaningless. ANY weapon can be used for assault. The industry doesn’t use it. Sobieck says “tactical rifle (or shotgun), machine gun, submachine gun, fully automatic rifle,” or even “gun” are more meaningful than “assault weapon.”
  6. The term “automatic weapon” is often elided to mean either a semi-automatic weapon (which shoots one time with each trigger pull) or a “fully automatic weapon” which fires many times with a single pull. The idea of “automatic” weapons needs to be well defined. Fully automatic weapons are not very accurate after the first few shots because of recoil, so long, Rambo-inspired bursts of fire are actually useless if the goal is to hit anything.

Finally, in his book, Sobieck includes “Ten Golden Tips for Writing about Weapons,” which includes this advice: “If it’s in a movie or on television, it’s probably inaccurate.”

Novelist as Theater Director

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theater, stage

(photo: wikimedia)

A thrilling weekend in Williamstown and Lenox, Massachusetts, with a group of serious theater lovers—four plays in three days and rich presentations in-between. Unexpectedly, one of these presentations—a detailed review of the steps of play production—mirrored many of the challenges an author faces in preparing a work of fiction. Let me explain.

Once a theater company decides to produce a particular play its first step is to hire a director who will create the theatrical production. The director {the “author,” in this analogy and here you have to bear with me} helps build the creative team and find the cast {characters}, blocks the play and decides who does what when {plot}, and guides the aesthetic process of the production {editing}.

A large creative design team is needed to help put the play together. These designers take on various tasks, in keeping with the director’s vision for the play and what this specific production is to convey. While of course a director starts with a script, just as an author begins with a more or less firm idea, the way a play emerges in its staging is unique to each production. Literary critics have decided there are only about a half-dozen basic plots, which suggests much of what differentiates the tens of thousands of novels published each year results from loosely analogous attention to the same creative elements a play director must consider.

In theater, set design establishes the physical world of the play; costumes, makeup, and props help define characters. In novels, authors must use description of the scene, and the appearance and clothing of the characters for exactly the same purpose. Lighting and sound design help create a play’s mood and tell the audience “where to look,” just as authors establish mood and focus attention—or, in the case of a mysteries, misdirect it—on key information. Dialect coaches make sure the words come out the way a character of a given era, nationality, and class would say them, and on the page, dialog has to ring true, too.

Choreographers and fight directors design the more complex or risky stage action. Stage-fights have to be both safe and realistic. (Realistic is easy, we were told, safe is hard.) Fiction has similar problems. A battle between two people or a hundred has to seem dangerous—even when it involves a continuing character who we know will survive to appear in the next book. At the same time, heroes must escape in a plausible way. They can’t get off too easily. A recent thriller I read had a confusing scene near the end, in which it wasn’t clear which shooters were inside their cars, in the street, along the wall, or wherever. I couldn’t visualize it, even after three re-reads. In my writing group, we call this a problem in choreography.

While the theater director has a whole team to take care of these essential component parts, the novelist works solo.

In casting a play, a director thinks about the skills and personalities of potential actors, and whether they can fill their roles. The author likewise must decide what type of person to create for the role they will play in the novel. How much can people such as those they describe believably stretch when facing the demands the plot places on them? How are other characters likely to react to them? At the same time, they must avoid creating stereotypes and “stock characters,” who would move through the novel like cardboard cutouts.

The whole process of rehearsing a play—from the initial read-through, to the blocking, through final rehearsals—echoes the editing process. Plays aren’t rehearsed just once; it takes time and myriad adjustments and refinements for all the creative parts to mesh together. Similarly, thinking of a novel draft as similar to a theater production, it’s easy to see the kinds of editing an author must do: tuning up all aspects of design/description, focus, realism, choreography, and character development to best serve the ultimate product—that best-selling, award-winning novel taking shape in the theater of the author’s mind.

5 Forensic Science Myths

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forensic

Mystery: why is this trainer so clean? (photo: West Midlands Police, creative commons license)

CSI’s wise-cracking investigators, expensive cars, and sexy co-workers with great hair? High on the drama scale, low on reality. Crime and mystery writers striving for drama and accuracy have to get past such exaggerated expectations. Deborah Cole, a forensic scientist with the New Jersey State Police, spoke to a recent meeting of the Liberty States Fiction Writers Group about forensic science myths.

The first is how television has primed people to believe that forensic science is infallible. The reality is that it cannot always provide definitive answers. Nor is it true that scientists never make mistakes or mess up the chain of custody. Sometimes “a good defense attorney can find holes,” she said. (Interestingly, criminals have become aware of the power of forensics and have learned from tv how to cover their tracks more effectively.)

Response is not as fast as people expect. Some states have only one crime laboratory, and crime labs are often small and outfitted with, well, not-the-latest equipment. As a result, they may have a backlog of testing to do, which adds to the time needed to complete tests (or whether they are ever completed at all, with unexamined rape test kits a prime example). Some tests themselves take a long time to produce results. Tests for different toxic substances must be conducted individually, and all this may take a month or more to complete.

Forensic scientists do not interrogate suspects and witnesses, regardless of what tv suggests. Not their skill set. And they certainly don’t make arrests. They may be called to a high-profile crime scene, but they aren’t there first (unlike in the UK’s Midsomer Murders tv series where the ME and crime scene team is always working away—with findings!—by the time the investigating detectives arrive). When they do visit a scene, they collect evidence to bring to the lab for analysis by someone else.

One scientist cannot handle an entire case. Forensic scientists are specialized (in the lab, their focus may be toxicology, chemical analysis, ballistics, and so on), which means that the evidence from a single case may be tested by a number of different scientists. The New Jersey State Police lab employs 130 scientists in different disciplines, and they are involved in some 35,000 cases a year.

Another reason one person can’t do it all relates to the Locard exchange principle: “whenever two objects come in contact with each other, there is always an exchange of material.” The practical application of this principle is that material from the clothing, floor, furniture, car, or other environs of the crime, which is gathered from the scene, from the victim, and from the suspected perpetrator (if there is one) must all be processed in different rooms and even by different people, in order to avoid cross-contamination.

Finally, Cole said (and she laughed when she said this), tv gives the impression that every day is exciting!

Further Information:

♦Useful for writers: http://www.forensicsciencesimplified.org/onducting Forensic ♦Research: A Tutorial for Mystery Writers: http://www.writing-world.com/mystery/forensics.shtml
♦Forensic workshops, including “TV v. Reality”: http://www.crimemuseum.org/forensic-workshops
♦Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us about Crime, by Val McDermid (2015)

 

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New Authors’ Wishful Thinking

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wishbone

(photo: Dayna Bateman, Creative Commons license)

The SheWrites website recently posted a Brooke Warner essay on ways aspiring authors can be tripped up by wishful thinking. If you’re an author—or a friend of one—you may recognize these thought patterns. I do! Their root is often simply impatience. After spending so much time writing the book—years, maybe—we want to move on. Warner says:

  1. New authors shortchange the time spent on their query letter, proposal, and marketing strategy, in the hope it can be planned and implemented in “a matter of months.” I am a prime example. I have sent out query letters for my “finished” manuscript, been mostly rejected (or ignored), worked on the manuscript more, revised my queries, tried again; lather, rinse, repeat. Finally, having worked with an external editor, I’m so much closer to having a publishable manuscript than when I was first querying—but I didn’t realize that then!
  2. Authors hope they can avoid doing promotion by outsourcing their social media activities. Although there are services that would do this for me, I’ve never considered it. I learn a lot from doing my own social media, and while I’m not 100% successful, at least it’s me, not a “a hollow message” that potential Facebook friends and Twitter followers see.
  3. As a last resort, they purchase social media lists. At best, a short-term strategy. Doesn’t work.
  4. They hope to avoid the additional delay and expense of having a book copyedited and proofread. I don’t know whose fault it is—ultimately, no one should be more committed to a good outcome than the author—but I’ve seen so many books lately that were not given the chance to be their best. Is this just a cosmetic quibble? When I see a book that consistently calls an Italian gentleman Signore Rizzo, when it should be Signor Rizzo, it shows me the author has a tin ear. And if he makes that kind of error (among so many others), how much care will have been taken with every other aspect of the writing?

Ultimately, authors must not be trapped by wishful thinking, because the competition is so tough. “Take this as a reality check that it’s hard, especially as a debut author, not only to sell books but also to get a book deal, to get serious media attention, to get reviews.” Eyes wide open, says Wagner, give authors the best shot at avoiding disappointment and achieving a satisfying publishing experience. But it’s hard not to wish it were all a little easier . . .

5 Things Submitting Writers Should Know

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five, matches

(photo: Martin Fisch, Creative Commons license)

AGNI is the well-regarded literary magazine published by Boston University, and its editor is Sven Birkerts. For the June edition of The AGNI Newsletter, Birkets took advantage of the journal’s current hiatus in accepting author submissions to reflect on what its editors hope to find when they read their “towering backlog” of poem, short story, and essay manuscripts.

How big is that “towering backlog”? Birkets says he typically receives a hundred new manuscripts a day. He made five points for writers to consider.

  1. Understand the initial screen – submissions are first triaged into three categories: those clearly off the mark one way or another (more than 60 percent); those that may have potential (25 percent); and those with “obvious appeal” (less than 12 percent), which are circulated to appropriate readers. He doesn’t say whether those 60 receive an immediate “No, thanks,” or whether they get into a process that takes the two to four months noted in AGNI’s submission guidelines. (AGNI turned down a short story of mine, and it took six weeks.)
  2. Understand the need for fit – The approximately one-third of the submissions in the “maybe” queue are reviewed for both quality and goodness-of-fit—as Birkets puts it, whether they fall within its “aesthetic profile.” Determining the likelihood that a story will be a good fit is ideally an author’s responsibility, in part. It’s why literary journals typically suggest a prospective submitter read a few copies before sending in their work. In other words, self-triage. “It does take some time to scout out likely venues for work,” he admits, “but it also takes time sending and re-sending to ones that turn out to be unlikely.”
  3. Focus on the most important – What AGNI editors look for in a cover letter is a quick statement and a short list of the author’s most notable previous publications, if any. By contrast, the first sentences of the story receive the editors’ careful attention. Birkets describes why beautifully: “As an editor confronting the day’s abundance, I want to find a reason to stop reading as soon as I can. As an editor in love with good writing, I want to find that I cannot stop.”
  4. Don’t fret about a lack of previous publications – This, he says, is not a barrier with AGNI, and, contrariwise, well established writers can be rejected because of the lack of fit noted above Birkets estimates that about half the stories AGNI publishes are by newly discovered writers.
  5. Be committed to the importance of the work – This is the hardest of his points to distill into concrete advice, but may be the most critical. He says he wants to see work that is “an authentic and necessary expression, something that couldn’t not be written.” In other words, the writing must be propelled by the author’s deep conviction of its necessity in a noisy world. “We know when we are in the presence of that and, believe me, we are interested,” he says. I have a friend whose OK novel was published a few years ago. Sometime later, I asked him whether he was writing another. “No,” he said, with astonishing candor, “I found out I don’t have anything to say.”

For my many writing friends who do have something to say, AGNI’s submissions period opens again September 1.

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Charles Baxter’s Careful Touch

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selfie

(photo: Paško Tomić, Creative Commons license)

Tin House’s blog, The Open Bar, recently published a wide-ranging interview with Charles Baxter, touching on such writers’ dilemmas as including humor, narrative voice, and creating resonance. Baxter has written five novels and five short story collections and teaches at the University of Minnesota. He also created one of my most treasured “writing bibles”—The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot.

The Tin House interviewer, Susan Tacent, starts by talking to him about humor in literary fiction and how difficult it is to achieve. “It has to look easy,” Baxter says, “light as a feather, effortless. . . . Trying to be funny is the death of comedy.” The subtlety he goes for (in an era of the cheap one-liner) relies on characters’ being unintentionally funny, especially those who usually are “terribly serious: monomaniacs are hilarious.” The Producers has been playing in our CD mix, and I can’t help but think of Dick Shawn as Hitler, never noticing how ridiculous he is. Such incongruities between characters’ and readers’ perceptions can be arranged by the author, he says, but must use “invisible wires.”

Similarly, he tells Tacent, narrative voice “should arrive naturally and not be forced” and writers develop their own unique voices, whether they are striving to or not. Some writers’ voices are overbearingly strong, while others recede. Baxter’s preference is the “pale neutrality of Checkhov’s prose.” How different are these three contemporary literary voices, which seem apparent in even a sentence or two, picked at random:

  • Everyone laughs except Bix, who’s at his computer, and you feel like a funny guy for maybe half a second, until it occurs to you that they probably only laughed because they could see you were trying to be funny, and they’re afraid you’ll jump out the window onto East Seventh Street if you fail, even at something so small. – Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad
  • He paused at some trash in a corner where a warfarined rat writhed. Small beast so occupied with the bad news in his belly. It must have been something you ate. – Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
  • There have been worse accounts of his situation. He wants to say, she is not a mistress, not anymore, but the secret—though it must soon be an open secret—is not his to tell. – Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Tacent also asks him about creating a “lush” style in fiction, which Baxter believes is achieved by following a character over a long time period (David Copperfield) or engaging several time-frames at once to create depth and resonance. His new book of short stories, There’s Something I Want You To Do, includes five stories whose titles are virtues and five that are vices. Baxter achieves that lush interconnectedness among people by showing aspects of “the same scenarios again and again, with one story’s protagonist reappearing as a minor actor in someone else’s tale,” as Boston Globe reviewer Buzzy Jackson describes it.

Baxter says the stories “seem to be suggesting that there’s another world right next to ours,” or perhaps there are competing and simultaneous realities. Such a construct veers away from what he considers the overworked idea of “the singular ego”—“both in fiction and outside of it.” Epitomized, perhaps, by the “selfie.” Or, Dick Shawn’s unforgettable “Heil, myself!”

Freelance Editing Services Booming?

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red pencil, grammar, comma

(photo: Martijn Nijenhuls, Creative Commons license)

Is there a bit of wishful thinking behind Simon Owens’s article from Mediashift on how self-publishing has been great for freelance designers and editors? I read so much—even real books with covers and an actual publisher—that clearly escaped a firm editorial hand and would have benefited from one. Self-publishing, he says, has created “a rising need for the kind of editors who offered the feedback that could be found at traditional publishing houses.” Recently, I bit the bullet and sent the manuscript of one of my novels to a freelance editor who specializes in mysteries and thrillers—and is an award-winning mystery author in her own right. It was one of the best writing decisions I’ve made. A terrific experience.

Perhaps Owens hopes his words will encourage more editors to enter the author support services field. The numbers are certainly there: An estimated 3,500 new books are published every day in the United States, not including ebooks. This estimate is based on the number of new ISBN numbers, which many ebook authors don’t bother to obtain. The first response to this need was a deluge of unqualified or barely qualified editors and designers, overpriced services of marginal value, and discouragement and frustration among authors. If an editor is not well qualified (including familiarity with genre considerations) or if the author is unwilling to make changes, an expensive and frustrating experience is in store.

If the numbers are there, the dollars may not be. The majority of self-published authors make less than $5,000 a year on their writing. Even established writers (i.e., members of the Authors Guild) are earning 24% less from their writing now versus five years ago, says a new survey.

The acute need for author support services and the highly variable quality of what was out there led to development of invaluable websites like Reedsy and Writer Beware. These sites are true author advocates—pointing out bad actors, scams, and other traps laid for those hopeful souls who say, “I just want to write. I don’t care about all this businessy stuff.”

Owens’s sources say competition among books actually requires “more emphasis on producing a professional product, both in design and editorial standards” and, I’d add, faith that the audience knows the difference, for which evidence is scant. And, of course, if an author isn’t looking to self-publish, a solidly edited product is essential for attracting agents and traditional publishers.

Two reputable-sounding sources for editorial assistance cited by Owens are Reedsy and New York Book Editors, whose freelancers generally are former employees of traditional New York publishing houses. Ideally, says freelance editor Rebecca Heyman, “There should be no gap in quality between independently-published work and traditionally-published work.”

“Accidents” of Research

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dinosaur, dig, paleontology

(photo: wikimedia)

In the May issue of The Big Thrill, writer Gary Grossman discussed how he dug deep for the themes and jigsaw pieces of his new “geological thriller,” Old Earth. There are two kinds of research that I do. One is akin to fact-checking: Exactly how should a flash-bang be described, and how does it work? On what street corner in Rome is the Anglican church? What variation of baklava do Turks eat? This kind of research is essential, in order to keep readers convinced that their books’ narrators know what they are talking about. More about my research process is here.

Although that kind of research can be a springboard for ideas, the other type of research, which Grossman describes, is more wide-ranging, more generative. Old Earth begins some 400 years ago in Galileo’s time, thought the principal story concerns characters who are present-day paleontologists involved in an excavation. As Grossman wrote, he began to feel the need for a powerful inciting incident, one that would be “profound, believable, and grounded in truth.” So he expanded his research on Galileo and discovered some of the astronomer’s less famous inventions, which turned out to be authorial gold.

These facts provided a plausible jumping-off place for plot development, an opportunity to link the historical and modern-day portions of the novel, and an imaginative yet believable motivation. They were, he says, “A wonderful accident of research.” Such interconnections in a novel create a natural resonance for the reader and make the work more meaningful. Good storytellers who use such links–in fiction and non-fiction alike–make their work both more interesting and more universal.

He terms his discovery an accident, but it’s really a case of “chance favoring the prepared mind.” It’s the kind of thing that can happen when a writer stays open to possibilities and connections. In the process, the discovery became an adventure for Grossman, as well as for his subsequent readers.

Writers frequently talk usefully about the need for balance between research and writing, since many writers so love to do research they can get lost in the byways of investigation and neglect to even open up the most recently saved file of their novel-to-be. It’s a matter of figuring out how much detail—and in Grossman’s case, how much depth—is needed to craft a story that is both believable and memorable.