Over the course of the last 25 years, we have done work with a variety of companies and organizations to help their employees become better writers. We teach the basics of structure (scene, series, and theme, you know the drill); the primacy of voice; killing your darlings; how to begin a little bit further on because that is where the good stuff actually gets going; and how to earn your end—through the somewhat torturous process of sorting out the middle.
With that said, at InkHouse Public Relations, we were not only invited to help people become better writers — but become the people they were intending to be all along. Over the course of a decade, we were privileged to teach people how (and why) to leave your reader wanting more, but also to help writers describe what their grandfathers meant to them, how to come clean about their addictions and still be able to manage people (in fact, to be able to manage them better), and how to reach back into the past and connect some of the dots of their experiences to discern where things might be heading in the future.
At InkHouse we put together yearly books of essays, or hosted Moth-style readings, bravely sending the work out into the world so that clients would really know who they were working with—fusing the personal with the professional, in a way that benefitted both lenses. Under the auspices of co-founder and CEO, Beth Monaghan, an excellent writer in her own right, we operated with the understanding that creative non-fiction was neither “unprofessional” nor was it “too personal” — if it was good. Then it could benefit all kinds of relationships, including the one you have with yourself.
We would never want to put words into Beth’s mouth, but it seemed like she realized that some of her employees wouldn’t work for her forever. Hey, it happens. And that means that you have a responsibility to develop not only their resumes and their experience, but their hearts and souls — and to help give credence to a human being’s natural creative gifts. And that is why our work at InkHouse is this month’s chosen highlight from the last quarter century.
Why do we recommend learning how to meditate to all writers? In part, it is so you will have greater access to your flow state when meditation becomes part of your creative ritual. Sure.
But it is at least as much so that a writer will learn how to wait. Lose the sense of rush, is one of our favorite mantras that applies here. And not just the rush over the course of an entire project, with its side tracks and dead ends, where every draft takes longer than you think, and there are more drafts required than you would ever initially have considered necessary.
Meditation can also help you lose the sense of rush at the outset of every writing session, so that you come equipped with the all-important skill of presence. When you don’t know how to wait, you hurry into words that aren’t quite the words, hastily choose subjects and scenes that might be important eventually but are not where your heart is right now. Because, after all, time’s-a-wasting!
Actually, if you want to become a good writer, you have to be able to wait for so long that the waiting itself becomes interesting. During that time, you naturally shuffle through what you thought you had to do at the desk so you can get to what you want to do. The longer you wait, in fact, the more you are able to pay attention. And the less it seems like waiting at all, in the sense of waiting for something to happen.
Because things are happening all the time. And then, among the presumably infinite stream of happenings, you can tune your ears and your eyes to what you have been looking for all along, beneath the surface or just outside the frame of the picture.
Plus, when a real idea comes, you will be ready for it — your reflexes will be primed so that perception becomes action. The words and lines and paragraphs fall together in a way that would have seemed quick just a little while ago, but are now just part of a natural unfolding.
On the one hand, as an editor, you don’t want to repeat yourself. On the other hand, I do find myself saying some of the same things over again (so much so that, at times, I will just copy the comment from above and paste the same exact one below). That made me wonder if it might be helpful to describe some recurrent challenges I see, so that writers might get ahead of these issues before they become structural. In that spirit, here are four common editorial observations along with a brief exploration as to what they might mean on a larger scale.
1. THIS FEELS A LITTLE ABRUPT: I understand that links, those transitional passages that fuse one scene to another, often come last. At the same time, nothing benefits “the willing suspension of disbelief,” as Samuel Coleridge put it, more than a causal connection between scenes, or a temporal one, or some other reasoning (which is clear enough to the reader) why something should come next and something should come after that.
So why might this “feel a little abrupt”? It could be that the order of scenes (or subheads, if you are working in non-fiction) is actually off — a common enough challenge to navigate in the drafting process. In fact, you can actually work backwards and say: if this feels a little abrupt, might it be that things don’t go in this order at all?
If, however, you are content with the current sequence of things, then you might have to dig deeper to discover why a segue between one scene or paragraph to another isn’t satisfying. What is the tributary, the meaning, that can be harnessed, so that your river of discourse can flow?
2. DRAGGING IN HERE: As you can see in this reel, I am a big fan of something happening in a work, regardless of the genre. It’s like Robert Louis Stevenson said, “When we are in a hot corner…we want incident, interest, action: to the devil with your philosophy.”
Now, I understand that the novel as an art form was, in part, invented to give voice to interior monologue. And that people read for different reasons; some, like the British novelist Laurence Sterne, maintain that “digressions are the very soul of reading.” Nevertheless, I often find myself wondering while editing, what is the point of this speechifying, if nothing is going to happen? That is the first definition of scene, after all: A scene is where something happens. The second definition follows from that: a scene is where because something happens, something changes.
I don’t think it is just my taste for (relative) minimalism — as evidenced by the fact that the contract for my forthcoming parenting memoir, Amnesty Day, called for 70,000 words — a bar which I found almost impossible to reach. Rather, I think I am not alone when I find myself asking, “Is it so much to ask for for something to happen?”
3. QUESTION TO BE ANSWERED: This is a good one — see, they aren’t all bad! This comment means that we have identified where something is at stake. There always has to be an unanswered question that the reader keeps in mind. Otherwise, as the theater critic Louis Catron once said, “When the questions are answered, the play is over.”
If you have gone to the next level with the Book Architecture Method, you know that every series — those repetitions and variations of an object, a character, a relationship, or a phrase which create meaning — has to ask a question. The question might be basic (“whodunit?”) or it might be complex; it might be brief, or it might require most of the narrative to answer. But these questions are literally what keep the pages turning, so that we can find out whether someone ends up safe, falls in love, gets what’s coming to them, etc.
Some advanced considerations in this category include: a question being resolved in such a way that it poses a new question, not having so many open questions at one time that the reader can keep them straight, having the same question open too long without development so that the internal progression stalls, and — if at all possible — avoiding those kind of clumsy recap paragraphs when the author tells us all of the open questions at once.
But perhaps the most important aspect to keep in mind is that, following the logic that a series worth tracking has to ask a question, that question has to eventually be answered.
4. AVOID REPEATING THE SAME WORD IN THE SAME SENTENCE: This might seem obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is the challenge to not repeat the stem of the same word in the same paragraph, or even on the same page.
At last count, there are about 170,000 words in current daily use in the English language. Even if you don’t fancy yourself a word nerd, the average native English speaker knows at least 20,000 words and usually more like 35,000.
So, use them. One of our Book Architecture core values is, “We use our words.” We aren’t too afraid to raise the bar with our vocabulary, even in a social setting that doesn’t seem to call for it. Let other people puzzle the meaning of a word out from context…or even go look it up.
This comment isn’t solely designed to help you avoid repetition; it is also meant to encourage you to think about the exact shade of meaning you are trying to convey. To lift your writing out of cliche into an original expression with every word choice.
Ironically, the better your writing gets, the more challenges that will present themselves. Because some words are so dynamic that they can’t even be repeated in the entire manuscript. We learned this injunction from editor Annie Tucker, who once told us that the mark of a good editor is that they can remember you used a word like “deromanticizing” once already, and even though it is now 183 pages later, you can’t get away with it a second time without making it seem like your resources are limited.
In our ongoing series of unpacking what exactly it is we do here at Book Architecture, we’ve shared what both a Phase One and Phase Two of developmental editing looks like, with the former featuring manuscript evaluation and the latter manuscript revision. But what about the clients who don’t have an existing manuscript? What if they’re looking to us to largely help generate that?
What we’re talking about, then, is ghostwriting.
Ghostwriting is a term that can have a lot of negative associations, but while we have ghostwritten dozens of books in as many disciplines, we’ve never once ghostwritten someone their philosophy. We are hired writers, the way a business hires an accountant or a lawyer — but those professional service providers don’t take credit for an organization’s success. With that out of the way, let’s get into the nuts and bolts of what the process looks like.
The First Draft: Generating Material
When a ghostwriting project commences, we begin by digesting all of the material that already exists on the topic, be it the client’s video presentations, white papers, collections of notes, stabs at an outline, and/or general research. Then, we begin to generate new material with purpose, but openness, as everything that is unearthed during this phase has value. Zoom-based video interviews that we transcribe often form the heft of this step, but we might also send the client a series of email prompts to which they are encouraged to respond in an unselfconscious way (i.e., no copy editors here). They might keep notes on their phone of anything that comes to them, or in a journal that they will later type up and send to us. Whatever adds to the expanding vision is of help here. By the end of this stage, we will have a glorious mess of between 50,000-70,000 words…the length of an actual first draft.
Between The First and the Second Draft: The Outlining
Time spent here in analysis both allows our creative mind to rest, and pays huge dividends for a reorientation to a successful second draft. We use a series of proprietary exercises from the Book Architecture Method to see the work from different angles than the mindset we previously applied. Without forcing it, the end goal of this interim stage is the generation of a detailed outline which accounts for all of the best material that has been generated thus far, and that serves as our personal roadmap for moving forward.
The Second Draft: Bringing the Best Parts Up a Level
Draft two focuses on three things: what is truly working (something that was identified during the previous analysis), on new opportunities for generating first draft material to be woven in, and of course, on what can be cut. During this phase, the client becomes the editor, reviewing drafts and offering comments through whatever mechanism is comfortable for them. Much of the collaboration during this step also occurs via video calls that will be transcribed, only this time around the questions have grown much more focused.
Between The Second and the Third Draft: Working with Beta Readers
Beta readers are people who read a work before it is finished and offer feedback, and they should be chosen for their diversity — while also being part of what the client sees as the audience for the book they’re writing. We can recommend and hire beta readers on the clients’ behalf, or they may have people they are connected to personally and/or professionally that they want to bring into the process. Beta readers are then given a questionnaire with ten specific questions that we have generated to weigh in on, thereby targeting their responses into useful, actionable insights.
The Third Draft: Making It Shine
The first draft is about getting it down, and the second draft is about making sense. The third draft is about making it good. Beta reader responses can contribute powerful information to this last stage of the drafting process. With the client, we populate a punch list of changes that we want to make and sections we want to improve. The best way to keep the momentum here—an inevitable challenge at this juncture—is to keep the subject matter of the revision fresh. Or, as a mantra for this draft might read: “Hit it, and get out.” Where we land at the back end of this is the polished draft, and it is this draft that will go to copy editing—a palpably exciting moment!
