RESEARCH

Sherri — a regular reader at my weblog — asked me recently what books I’d recommend to somebody who has just started writing fiction. It’s a reasonable question, as there are about a bazillion how-to-write-a best-selling-novel-and-get-published books out there.

There are several distinct subcategories of the writing-related how-to books — craft, theory, inspiration, marketing/sales, reference, exercise — and in each of these there are good and bad (that is, less than useful) books. I personally am primarily interested in books that fall into the areas of craft, inspiration, and reference.

Reference books aimed directly at writers have to be approached with great caution. Some of them are expertly put together. For example:

When I started writing historical fiction seriously (approximately 1995) I was still on the faculty at the University of Michigan. This meant that I had a fantastic library at my disposal. Faculty could (and probably still can) send an email or call and say, here’s a list of books and articles I need. Later that day, the books would arrive at your office door. The article would be copied and delivered, too, even if it had to come from another library.

You could keep the book as long as you needed it, unless it was recalled by another faculty member or student. I held onto some books for the full ten-plus years I was there. If it turned out to be no use to me, the library person would take it away again.

Spoiled? You betcha. And blissfully happy.

Then I left academia and for a good long while I was really stuck. In the early 2000s, there was not much available online. I ended up buying a couple hundred books — some of them which turned out to be no use to me — and paying for the copying of hundreds of articles. Some books were simply out of my budget range. Sometimes I was able to get a banged up reading copy. Thacher’s New American Dispensatory (1802) was something I really needed, but the copies I found were all between $500 and $3,000. I eventually got hold of a so-called reading copy, which means the book is in such bad shape that it’s not really collectible. I paid $60 for it, and it was well worth the expense.

In general though, this process of tracking down references was frustrating to the extreme, not to mention expensive. If I wanted to collect books, I would not be complaining. In fact, many of the books I need I would like to have in hard cover, but this is for research and I don’t need the beautiful tooled leather and gilded edges.

I keep thinking I could put at least fifty books (all out of print) up for sale at Amazon or Ebay or one of the bigger used-book conglomerates. Eventually I’ll do that. But even if I regained a good portion of what I spent, that wouldn’t address the bigger problem. Public libraries are generally really good about inter-library loans, but the things I need are often so unusual and rare that the ILL system soon sways under the burden.

And then Google Books came along. Google decided to scan books — all books, every book they could get) and make them available and searchable online. This caused huge (and well founded) consternation among authors like me, who pay the mortgage with royalty checks. If you could read The Pajama Girls for Lambert Square for free, would you buy a copy? Most people would not. So the Authors Guild stepped in and the lawyers got busy and in the end there was an agreement and a settlement. The Electric Frontier Foundation summarizes the situation (read the whole article here):

Kath here.  Today’s post is the first from WU’s newest contributor, Rosina Lippi.  Enjoy!

For the historical novelist – for anyone interested in history – the internet has brought about a revolution. We are floating in a sea of information that deepens and spreads minute by minute. It’s incredibly empowering, but it also has its dangers.

If you came of age before the internet, you will remember how things were. An argument over supper about any given war could not be resolved by opening a laptop. If it was a Saturday night, you were most probably clueless until Monday, when you could call a reference librarian or go there yourself. A million questions, small and large, simply remained unanswered, and we lived with that. The capital of Peru, the author of Antigone, where Napoleon was held captive, when women got the vote – if you didn’t have access to a good encyclopedia, you wondered or started calling friends in the vain hope that one of them would know when Wrigley Field was built.

Since that time, we have gone from one extreme to the other. At two in the morning I can crawl through newspaper archives to find out the rent on a typical three bedroom apartment in Manhattan in the year 1900. I can look at museum exhibits on Edwardian dress or Bronze Age artifacts, or read an article on bovine diseases. As more and more becomes available on-line, things only get better. Or worse, depending on your perspective. My husband, the Mathematician, has developed a particular expression he puts on whenever I start a sentence did you know: Just interested enough to prove that he is listening; just distant enough to discourage me from telling him exactly how pencils were manufactured in 1800. If I’m particularly animated about something I’ve found, he will raise an eyebrow a half inch or so to acknowledge my discovery.

And that’s fair enough. I don’t understand anything about his work, either.

Some of you may already know about this approach, but this can be a valuable tip for those who don’t, so I’ll risk boring the savvy ones with this info.

First, keep your entire book manuscript in one electronic file—it’s a huge time-saver. I know writers who use a separate file on their computer for each chapter of their book. Each of my novels is in one file—the whole thing. It would drive me nuts to have to open up, let’s say, a file for chapter 9 in order to check on information I needed for a scene in chapter 22—for example, maybe I need to make sure where I stashed a clue back in chapter 9 that now needs to be discovered in 22.

A file-per-chapter writer friend didn’t see how I could do the whole-ms-in-one-file thing and be able to navigate successfully.

The key is using bookmarks to move quickly and easily around a complete novel manuscript.

With the Microsoft Word and WordPerfect Bookmark tools, wherever you are in a manuscript you can insert a bookmark and easily come back to it from any other place in the manuscript. I used it frequently in putting this book together to jump from where I was writing to a previous section to check on something in another section. I’d insert the letter “a” as a bookmark where I was, go to where I needed to go, and then just use the bookmark to hop back. I use “a” because it comes up at the top of the bookmark list. And you can use it over and over—when needing to do the same thing further on in the manuscript, when I went to insert a bookmark the “a” was at the top of the list and it was simple to just click “insert” and have the “a” bookmark in the new place.

First off, I want to thank you all for your congrats. This has been a wild few weeks, for sure. And, since Therese Fowler removed her supergirl mask in comments, I’d like to say a public thanks to her, too–my willing pre-publication blurber. Thanks, Therese! You’re the best of the best!

Okay, on to today’s post…

A funny thing happened shortly after I landed my fabulous agent: I imagined a new story. Just like that. I could see her–my quirky protagonist with her dark aura and strange quest. I fell in fast love and just knew it: this would be the next story I’d write.

The idea didn’t come entirely out of the blue. Once upon a time, I considered writing a follow up to Unbounded and wrote about 200 pages of a script. I dusted it off recently and looked at it with fresh eyes. Not right. Too much a mess to inspire anything but the call from my recycling bin. But a few CPs reminded me of a scene that lay somewhere in the rubble–set in the mountains of West Virginia. Full of atmosphere, a little creepy, mysterious. I re-read it and felt a shot of ice through my bones. This was the setting of my next story.

My protagonist came alive shortly after that–a physically damaged girl with ethereal yearnings that send her and her sister on the strangest of all quests. Along the way, they’ll meet others, affect them. They’ll all be changed.

Story bones are so important. What’s your theme? How can you spindle it out, focus it in? Where does your character begin? What is her journey, her arc? Ironically, digging for story bones links back to my beginnings at a writer–my time as a researcher. Here’s where you find the gold…