Musings Of A New Southern Man

Yes, I am up in the middle of the night to write and edit again. Nothing new there. It's just that the subject matter of my writing and editing has changed. I must explain. I served as editorial director of woodypaige.com since The Denver Post columnist and ESPN personality launched the website in the fall. Well, the title "editorial director" is a bit misleading. That implies I could actually edit copy that went onto the site. Maybe wire editor is a better title. I also said "was" because Woody decided to pull the plug on the .com venture on May 1 because we couldn't get a national advertiser to help pay the bills. But for all those months, we gave it a heckuva try. Our biggest problem: We just didn't have the right business model. We posted links to 28 to 30 sports-related stories every day. It was designed to entertain that valuable 18-to-34 age demographic, but we never entertained enough of them. That led to lower numbers than advertisers wanted...

They say a reading of Ten Commandments can change a guy's life. I am sure that is true. But there are Ten Commandments, and then there are the Ten Commandments for an author. Those "tablets of stone" for writers came recently from James Scott Bell, one of the better writing coaches in the business. Bell's Commandments have forced me to take a long look and a wrecking ball to my second novel. I won't detail which commandments had such a great impact on me, but Bell taught me two lessons in the plainest language yet: refine character, complicate plot. I took those lessons and took a hard look at what I had written. There was only one conclusion to make: I had work to do. So, at 3:42 a.m. Saturday morning, with the music of Bach playing in my headphones, I reentered my novel. I had Bell's commandments playing in the back of my mind as well. This won't be a short exercise. I am taking entire sections I wrote and refining them. I am tossing out sections o...

I finished reading "Gone Girl" this week, and I must say I am better for the experience. Author Gillian Flynn takes readers on a thrill ride, only in a different way than in the standard mystery/thriller/suspense bill of fare. Her style concentrates on two people, Nick Dunne and Amy Elliott Dunne, and she details the smallest inner workings of their lives. Oh, yeah, there is the detail about Amy going missing, you know, the whole "Gone Girl" thing. Flynn takes considerable time to introduce the characters. Make that CONSIDERABLE time. She takes almost 100 pages to set up the timeline of the relationship between these people. That could be tiring trudging for many readers, but Flynn lets us have an enjoyable ride. Her unveiling of these people is done with humor and intricate skill. You read through the thrill of Nick and Amy first meeting, into infatuation, love, questions and ever-widening cracks in their marriage. Then Amy goes missing, and the crime plot be...

There was a mistake I left in my manuscript through numerous edits. It didn't escape one of my middle-of-the-night review sessions. It concerns a secondary character and his recognition of my main character, Daniel Pace. Early in the book, he sees Pace's name on a list and shows no recognition. Much later, near the end of the book, he informs Pace he knew about him for years. No!!!! Inconsistency!!!! But that's what is great about fiction. I took a few minutes to go back to that first incident and rewrite. Secondary character recognizes Pace's name at first glance. End of mistake. I will have more blog entries later, but this is going to be a busy author's day. AIC, for sure. Fire up Pandora for classical Latin guitar and get into that creative groove. Love it.

Welcome back to The Weekend Blogger. Let's contemplate the query letter. There is only one thing that is more important to an author trying to break into the publishing business, and that's the quality of the novel. But before the novel can have an effect, the query letter has to interest an agent enough that he/she will ask for part or all of that novel for review. That makes the query letter a high-stakes game. In a way, it's the author pushing in all of his/her chips. The problem is that some agents get hundreds of query letters a day, all delivered into what is charmingly called the slush pile. That query of mine has to stand out among all those other queries or else it will be treated like slush in your driveway. The agent will sweep it into a pile and never think about it again. End of a chance to be published, at least with that agent as the guide for that project. The perfect query letter has to have one trait: It has to lead to publication. All the nice verbi...

When I launched into this literary world, I couldn't give you a proper definition of "voice" in a novel. I figured it was something akin to the time-honored explanation of "what is pornography?": It is hard to define, but I know it when I see it. That view has changed. Here's the explanation I give today: Voice is your creative side speaking through your characters, setting, pacing, dialogue and detail. Let me accent the part of that definition that needs it. Voice is YOUR creative side. You can't force yourself into creating a character or writing in a genre with which you aren't comfortable. So what if vampires are the big literary hook these days, or zombies? If you don't have Anne Rice's heart and mind and aren't interested in detailing vampires, don't go there. Which brings me to my main character in the novel I just completed. His name is Daniel Pace. Nice, simple name. He has a simple day job, but he has made extraordinary ...

This entry comes with a big tip of the cap to Harlan Coben, who posted on Twitter recently that he reads his manuscript aloud as the final step before submission to the publishing house. Here's a hint: It works. No, make that "it works great!" I did this on the fourth read through my novel. What an eye-opener. I think writers get so locked in on small sections of their manuscripts while doing a normal edit that they forget to look at the entire picture. It's that "can't see the forest for the trees" problem. Reading the novel aloud corrects that. Give yourself an entire day's work time to do it, if you have written a novel of any size. Here's what I found once I read aloud: The pacing wasn't right. I took too long in cutting to the chase (no pun intended). I had some great chapters that exposed my character's voice, and some backstory, that didn't need to be there. There was some good writing. I will admit that. It just didn...