writing – Writing Allsorts

Unfortunately, it seems if you ask ten authors how much research you should do for your story, you’ll likely get ten different answers.

Research? Who wants to do research?

Our answer? Simple. Enough to make your story credible and appealing.

One of the things we can assure you of: If you try and ‘wing it’ on story facts, some one will call you on it.

Some examples:

A recent book Bob read had the author placing her millionaire’s mansion in a white collar section of Brooklyn. The first two reviews posted called her on it. They then went on to lambast her for not knowing anything about Brooklyn, NY and not bothering to take the time to look the neighborhood up. From there, they launched into multiple issues with her story that could easily have been fixed with a little research. Both of them were further “insulted” for the author missing the beauty of their neighborhood and trying to make it into something it wasn’t.

Even the simplest of details will be caught.

In the second book of Bob’s trilogy, he had the fire department called out to deal with a car teetering on the side of a bridge. The fireman that the chief of our fire department had assigned to help me, called me on my description. “You had our primary engine busy on another call, so they brought out our backup engine and had them winch the car off the side of the bridge. The problem is, there is no winch on the front of our backup engine.” Ha! Who would ever have caught that? His wife! She was the one who read it over his shoulder and caught it right away.

Sometimes it’s not a case of being wrong, it’s a case of missed opportunity

An author whose work we edited simply described a park in London where her main characters met, as “beautiful”. When we read the scene, we remembered sitting in that park and how wonderful and relaxing it was; not to mention way beyond just beautiful, no matter what season. After double checking to make sure pictures on the internet reflected what we’d remembered, we directed her to the websites we’d found and suggested she “enhance” her description. We suggested she rewrite it so the reader wanted to catch a flight to London and go sit in the park.

If your going to include an animal in your story you very well better learn all you can about it (them). Dog, cat and horse lovers the world over will nail you EVERY TIME if you get it wrong. Trust us, they are merciless: and excellent at writing seething reviews! Bob had one rip him apart because she said he didn’t know how much a dead horse’s head weighed (you have to read my story to understand) and that no girl could lift it to slide underneath. What she missed (because she couldn’t wait to nail me.) was that the horse was still alive when he lifted his head so Bob’s heroine could slide underneath. (HA! Take that horse lady reviewer!)

Scenes are almost as bad as animals.

If you describe real places, you better be accurate. Someone (or ones) live there and if you mess up what their house, street, town, county, state or country looks like, you’ll get called on it. But more often than not it’s a major “missed opportunity” you should be worried about. This is quite often why Robyn uses fictitous towns in her stories so she can play around with geography and the layout of a town, add shops and other things knowing she’ll not get torn to pieces as if it was a real place.

We can go on and on and on covering restaurants, menus, plane flights, airports, stations, train trips, cemeteries, cities, parks, Victorian houses, carriages, cars (Yip, know what a Ford Anglia looks like? We do!), boats, planes, … well we hope you get the idea. And, yes, we’ve written and or edited stories about all of these.

Which leads us to our next section:

Research is fun.

With today’s internet, it’s almost impossible to find something that Google, Bing or Wikipedia (usually all three) doesn’t have a dozen or so pages describing it. Everything from its rich history to dozens of pictures and answers to typical questions about it. These are ideal sources for creating enticing facts and descriptions that you can use to tell and spice up your story.

A word of caution though. Don’t fall into the old pendulum trap. That’s where you go from little to no description to way too much description. Keep it short and make sure the descriptions and facts add to your story line. Don’t just add fluff for the sake of adding things. For example, if you’re writing a mystery, the character will notice the shrubbery they can hide behind but will probably not notice or be interested in the beautiful flower beds.

If your main male character is taking his love interest out for dinner, look up the restaurant, or one you know and like. Use pictures of the outside, inside and their menu to help you describe the scene. The outside only if it helps describe her amazement as they pull up to it. The inside and menu to show how impressed she is. Again, it should fit with the scene you want to paint and, it must fit into the story line.

Taking her off to the rose garden will only distract the reader when she really wants to find the perfect plant to do away with her ex. So, find and head her for the poison garden. There are pretty plants there too that she can appreciate while she plans his demise.

Your research can also be used to develop your characters. Is she totally impressed that he took her to a fab place or perhaps she couldn’t care less: in which case she might be noticing the worn seats, the inattentive server and the bland food.

So, the message here is:

Stand Tall!

Use your research to find both good and bad things you can use to help fabricate or enhance your story and even describe your characters.

You will be amazed at how you can use scenery to help describe your characters. Is she only impressed by elaborate things and classy places or is she okay with a warm cosey café with good food?

Is he taking her to a fancy place or a dump to see how she reacts?

Does she only love roses or is she overwhelmed when she gets a single daisy?

Is she happy going out in a rowboat or is she a cabin cruiser type of girl?

In each of these cases, research fancy restaurants, warm cafes, dumpy eating places, roses, daisies, row boats or cabin cruisers to help you decide what to use.

In closing, the more research you do for your stories the easier it will become. You’ll also find yourself discovering new ways to make your stories and descriptions even better.

***

For your current work in progress or anticipated work, how much research have you done or plan to do? How much of what you learn will be used to just make you smart or actually appear in your work? Finally, were you able to enhance your character descriptions using your research?

There are a lot of tools that you, as an author, can use to help entice readers to pick up your book and invite them to read it.

The most obvious of these are the Cover Image, Title, Tag Line and Description.

However, once they’ve passed these and opened your book to scan it, there are many things you can do to further pique their interest and entice them. Many of these are formatting items that are easy to do.

However, you’ll also find a raft of authors with excuses as to why you can’t, or shouldn’t, do most of them. Thus, for each element, I’ll cover why I think you should do it, how it helps pull the potential reader in and the ease with which you can incorporate it. Then, for each, I’ll also try and counter any argument for not doing it.

Let me briefly cover covers (pun intended)

Obviously, your cover should be attractive. But other elements you should think about are balance, contrast, bold colors and an easy to read title, tag line and author’s name.

Some of the biggest mistakes we notice are:

Fancy fonts that are hard or impossible to read. Typically, the fancier the font the more difficult it is to read.
Text colors that don’t stand out and are hard to read.
Black or dark backgrounds that drowned out text and images. Mystery and Dark Fantasies are notorious for this.
Author’s names. The latest trend is to emphasize the author’s name, above all else. Personally, unless your famous or an author I follow, your name is not important to me. And, I don’t want to have to hunt for your title and the genre of your story.

Speaking of tag lines, yours should not give anything away, leave the reader with a question and strongly help hint at the genre your story is in.

Finally, pay attention to your cover’s spine.

Remember, 90% of the time, that’s all that a potential reader will see when it’s on a shelf.

Is it attractive and easy to read?

Does your title reflect your stories genre?

Forward and onward to the inside.

Oh, as an aside, we’re often asked who edited our stories and who designed our covers. So, we’ve gotten into the habit of including who did each, on the copyright page.

Chapter Titles and Table of Contents

Many authors either don’t use a table of contents or only list chapter numbers.

We think doing so is a missed opportunity to help further pique a reader’s interest. When we open a book, one of the first things we come to is the Table of Contents. If there are Chapter titles, we’ll scan them to learn more and see where the author may be taking their story.

Chapter titles like:

London Calling
Fireman Fireman Light My Fire
Kusadasi and Ephesus, Turkey
Life Changes in an Instant.

All try to leave the potential reader with a bit of the story and/or a question.

Great, they go to London… and Turkey. What changes their life in an instant? Oh wow, fireman sex!

Many authors will tell you it’s hard to come up with chapter titles. Also, that they give away too much of the story. True, they may not be easy at first, but once you get used to adding them, they’ll get easier. You’ll also quickly learn not to give anything away.

After you’ve finished a chapter and moved into the beginning of the next, go back and ask what the previous chapter is about. Where does it take place? What’s the point of the chapter? Who’s the main character and what happens to them? From that, build a one to five word title. Just be sure it doesn’t give anything away.

Larry… heads to London… runs away… starts a new life.
A flower is more than a flower.
A new spell is cast.
A new clue is discovered.
Christin questions his… decision… life… choice.

None of these really give anything away but do hint at a story element. Travel. Discovering Nature. Witchcraft (or Romantic Enticement). Mystery/Crime Solving. Self-Discovery.

A second argument against a Table of Contents is that building a TOC is a pain and too hard.

Not so, if you use Microsoft Word to build your manuscript. With one click, Word will automatically build your TOC. This can be done at any time as you develop your manuscript.

First, make sure all of your chapter headings and titles are entered as “Headings”.

Select where you want to insert your TOC and click on the location. We usually add a page break after the copyright page and then click on the top of the new page.

Then go to “References” at the top of your Word document and select “Table of Contents” on the far left.

From there, select the style TOC you want and click on it.

Word will automatically build and insert your TOC on the new page.

Two additional features of Word’s automatic TOC are that you can update the whole table or just the page numbers at any time. This makes updating the whole table easy as you add chapters and allows a final page number update when you’ve finished your manuscript.

White Space

For us, there is nothing worse than opening a book and staring at page after page crammed with words.

As a reader, we need hints from the author as to when: to pause, scenes change, the story shifts to a new POV, dialogue changes, something in the story needs to be emphasized, and so on.

All of these can be indicated by punctuation but adding white space (an extra line before a new paragraph, addition of a scene break, use of bullet points, a new paragraph for each speaker) helps emphasize a change to the reader.

As important, white space helps relax the reader. Extra line spacing, increased margins, spacing between paragraphs, adding scene breaks, all allow the reader to pause and take a breath. Authors also use white space to help direct the readers speed, place emphasis where they want and, in effect, control the pace of the story.

Aesthetically, white space also makes the story more appealing by giving the reader the impression that the author’s main concern is presenting an attractive story.

The biggest argument given by authors for not adding white space is increased page count and printing cost. However, increasing the margins, line spacing and paragraph spacing would result in about a 10% increase in page count. Using Amazons printing cost, a 10% increase in page count for a 350 page novel would result in about a 40 cent increase in printing cost. This would increase the total cost to the author from approximately $4.50 to $4.90.

Font Style and Size

Last, but not least, keep your font style simple and the size no less than 12. The fancier the font, typically the harder it is to read. Also, the size and weight of the fancier fonts tend to vary considerably, often making them hard to read.

Summary

We have tried to mention the key things that we believe will attract readers to your book. These are the things we look for when selecting a book and things we’ve noticed others look for or at. In contrast, we’ve never seen a reader put back a book because it had a TOC with chapter titles, too much white space, clear font, or even too many pages.

We have however, seen many times when a reader mumbled “How am I supposed to read this with – such tiny print?” Or, “- with the pages so jammed with words?”

Several authors have mentioned additional things you can do to make your book more attractive. Most of these we consider as enhancements or extras. But, if you think of something we missed, please let us know.

In the meantime, happy writing.

Tag: writing

Researching your story

Tools of The Trade – Author’s Tools You Likely Didn’t know you have