I find it fitting that my first blog for EME is about how important it is for an author to blog. As an agent, I greatly prefer an author who has an established online presence. Blogging helps accomplish that, but it also has several secondary benefits.

It helps you build and maintain an audience. Thanks to the internet, an “ivory tower” writer can now reach millions instantly through blogs and the like. Blogs fall into the recent explosion of social media in that they like to have communities. Live Journal was designed around the idea of grouping readers and writers with similar interests to create grand conversations. But no matter which site you choose to host your blog, there are groups you can join that list your blog with those with similar subjects. This kind of networking greatly increases your chances of people stumbling upon your blog. If they enjoy it enough, they’ll subscribe and maybe even tell a friend. And just like that, you have new fans?loyal readers who may be interested in buying your book.

It helps establish you as an expert in your field. If your book is about your experiences as a skydiver, then susieskydives.blogspot.com would be a wonderful opportunity to provide helpful tips, reviews of places you have jumped and maybe even bust a few myths about how dangerous it is thought to be. With the right kind of networking, aspiring skydivers searching the web could find you, see what you have to offer and come back regularly for the valuable information you post. They may even want to buy your book (see a pattern forming here?).

If you are not an expert, blogging can be a way to reach out to those who are. Be a good blogger. Read other blogs. Comment on other blogs. Ask to guest blog or invite others to blog for you. You’ll learn a lot, make some good friends and establish a reputation for being a good literary citizen.

It helps establish you as a real human being. Author blogs tend to be rather informal and conversational in their execution. As a result, a lot of the author’s personality comes through. I tell my authors to aim for this, spicing up their usually informative blogs with an appropriate amount of everyday events that relate to what they are writing about. If your book is about class struggle, your trip to the grocery store or your extreme dislike of cockroaches could very well be presented in a pertinent fashion. Your readers will appreciate the window into your life and develop feelings of kinship and loyalty, perfect for when your book comes out.

It gets you in the habit of writing. Perhaps blogging is not the highest form of literary creation, but it is creation, nonetheless. And to have an effective blog and a prolific writing career, you have to get in the habit of writing regularly. This simple act of taking time out to sit in the chair and get words out onto the page is so important when you go to write “for real.” Writing is like a muscle. You have to exercise it regularly or it will emaciate to the point of uselessness.

It can even kick start a writing session. When the muse is singing, you don’t want to waste that creative burst on a blog post. But sometimes, the vocal cords could use a bit of warming up. Often enough, the hardest part of writing is beginning. The simple, often conversational nature of blog writing is a lot easier to get out onto the page. Once the page is no longer immaculate, it becomes a lot easier to mark up. And once an imagination is in motion, it tends to stay in motion.

Agents ask for it, but it’s best when they don’t have to. The unsolicited keeping of a good blog shows a prospective agent (and later, publisher) that you are serious, proactive and effective in building your platform and marketing your work. I mentioned that I greatly prefer an author with an established blog. But if you don’t have a blog and your project is just too attractive to pass up, I may still sign you and then have you start a blog. Blogs are just about necessary these days. They may take time and effort, but I wouldn’t waste yours if it wasn’t worth it.

It’s fun. No, really. It harkens back to the days of keeping a childhood diary. You can, within reason, write fairly informally about whatever you want and have a great time doing so. Isn’t that why we write in the first place? To have fun? You get to blog. How awesome is that?

GORDON—Read more about this editor

Having trouble deciding whether to outline your whole novel in advance or to let the story (and characters) take you where they will? In this article, one of our novelists tells you how he arrived at a hybrid approach that gave him the perfect combination of freedom and structure.

NO “ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL” APPROACH TO PLANNING

When it comes to writing your novel, how you choose to map out the plot is a lot like how you say “potato” (i.e., po-tae-to or po-tah-to)—there really is no one-size-fits-all right answer (though I am partial to po-tae-to, myself). At one end of the spectrum, there are the writers who outline all of the major plot points of their stories before ever writing a single word of text. And at the other end of the spectrum, there are the writers who forego an outline altogether, opting to let the ideas and plot points flow naturally as they go from prologue to epilogue. If one of these options works for you, who am I to argue? Good job! But in my own writing, I have found that a hybrid approach—combining the two techniques—works best for me.

DISCOVERING A HYBRID APPROACH

With Sunshine’s Darkness (my first novel), the idea for the story came to me as part of an assignment in a writing course that I was taking. To be honest, at the time of the assignment, I really didn’t think the seeds of this story would ever mature to a finished product. Realizing that, I sat down at my keyboard and just started typing out content to fulfill the course requirement. Ideas weren’t fully considered, and even the characters weren’t fleshed out (nor do they necessarily have to be when you first start writing your novel). As I typed out the first ten chapters, I realized how much FUN it was to see ‘where the day took me.’ Since I hadn’t outlined anything, I was free to let the ideas that flowed forth take me in any direction. This was great!

That meant I never had to worry how new twists and turns would affect my end game (because at that time, let’s face it, there was no end game; just a grade). I was free to be creative—and what could be more fun than that?

Two months later, the class ended. But by then, I was so engrossed in writing my novel that I realized it was a project I just had to finish. I was nearing the halfway point. I was also starting to get knots in my stomach, and at first I didn’t know why. It seemed every time I sat down to write, I had the dreaded ‘block.’ Up until then it had been fun to just sit down and let plot twists flow forth as they came to me. Now suddenly I was tensing up every time I sat down to write. Worse, my characters were starting to stress me out because I didn’t know which direction to take them in, nor did I know the answers to two important questions that kept nagging me: “Who lives in my story?” and “Who’s going to die?”

For several days, I focused on mapping out the second half of the book, writing down explicit scenes that each of my main characters would experience, all the way to the final chapter. In many ways, my novel was finished—insofar as the plot was concerned. Now all I had to do was fill in those scenes with prose and I would be done.

What started out as free-flow writing for the first half of my novel blended into a near-rigid outline for the latter half. If someone had told me to outline this novel from the beginning, I don’t think I could have done it. After all, it was the process of discovering who my characters were and what my story was really about that solidified where I would ultimately go with the second half of Sunshine’s Darkness. That freedom to let the plot—and the characters—develop was vital to my story. Likewise, if I had continued a free-flow style of writing, it would have been impossible for me to calculate the exact moments when major plot twists needed to occur in order for certain characters to end up where they needed to be. Put another way:

By adopting the use of the outline for the second half, I was able to weave together the story that had developed freely in the first half, bringing the story to a satisfying and logical conclusion.

FINDING YOUR OWN APPROACH

If you decide to follow my method, you need not follow it to a tee. For example, you might choose to outline in the beginning a few key scenes that you want to take place, while still allowing your characters and plot to develop freely around those scenes. I didn’t do this for Sunshine’s Darkness, but with my second novel I did: I began the novel by outlining three key scenes—and the order I needed to tell about them in order to move the plot along. Likewise, you don’t need to slavishly follow your structured outline in the second half of your book if you come up with some amazing plot twist or new ending that will blow your readers away. For Sunshine’s Darkness, I thought I knew exactly what the last couple of chapters were going to be; but when I got there and it came time to write them, I found several of my characters were still left hanging. So I created a whole new ending that would weave together the characters who still had these loose threads. When something like this develops, you toss your outline aside and wrap up your book with what works best.

But whichever you choose, the one thing to keep in mind is this: It’s the end result that matters. Whichever style you ultimately choose for writing your novel, as long as it gets you to a satisfying, publishable, and FINISHED end-result, then you’ve done your job. Bravo!

So what works for you? Do you map it all out? Do you let it flow freely? Do you have a hybrid approach of your own? Leave a COMMENT to share your own techniques for developing your characters and your stories.

GREG—Read more about this editor

Is it “red, white, and blue,” or is it “red, white and blue”?

Most professional writers will tell you that’s a matter of style. And they’re right. You may choose to place a comma after the next-to-last element in a series (hence the name serial comma) or you may choose to leave it out; neither practice is wrong. What you shouldn’t do is use the serial comma haphazardly or allow your choice to give rise to confusion in your text.

Even if you choose, as a rule, to avoid the serial comma, there may be instances in which it must still be used. Consider, for instance,

John, a teacher and a lawyer

Does this refer to three people (i.e., John and a teacher and a lawyer)? Or is it one person (i.e., John, who is both a teacher and a lawyer)? If the former, the serial comma would make that clear:

John, a teacher, and a lawyer

The serial comma’s use is commonplace in American English usage, though less common in English of the British variety.

Since, in our editing, we try to bring consistency to the use (or nonuse) of the serial comma to the extent possible without causing confusion, I often get asked about the pros and cons of its use. The biggest advantage to the use of the serial comma is clarity: when all of the elements in a series are separated by commas, there is less chance of ambiguity in the list. For example, if I am listing the kinds of sandwiches I’m making for lunch, only the serial comma ensures that it’s clear what I’m actually serving. Consider:

Ham, peanut butter and banana and jelly

Without the serial comma, this may mean:

• Ham
• Peanut butter and banana
• Jelly

Or it may mean:

• Ham
• Peanut butter
• Banana and jelly

In fact, though I wouldn’t want to try it, without the serial comma it could even mean just two kinds of sandwiches:

• Ham, peanut butter, and banana
• Jelly

With the serial comma, the ambiguity is removed:

Ham, peanut butter and banana, and jelly

The strongest reason for ordinarily omitting the serial comma is to conserve space. In fact, it is from the world of newspaper writing that the practice seems to have taken its root in the United States. Among others, the practice of avoiding the serial comma is advocated by the Associated Press Stylebook and the New York Times, along with a number of leading British and Australian stylebooks. In favor of using the serial comma are, among others, the Chicago Manual of Style, the APA Manual, the AMA Manual of Style, the U.S. Government Printing Office, and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.

All things being equal, I’m inclined to recommend the serial comma’s use. However, rest assured that—as long as your intended meaning is clear—neither its use nor its nonuse is wrong.

Have thoughts or questions about this topic? Leave us a COMMENT to share.

ALBERT—Read more about this editor

The very word “thesis” seems to suggest that you’ve got something to prove—an idea you want to advance. So I suppose it’s no wonder that most of my thesis directing projects began in the same way: with a student appearing at my office to propose the study topic, invariably saying, “I’d like to prove . . .” They always seemed startled when I would respond by asking in return, “Why study the issue if you already know the outcome?”

Thesis and Hypothesis

Of course, every thesis and dissertation is built on some kind of insight—some theory that will be proven or disproven in the course of the study. That is to say, every academic thesis begins with some hypothesis. But if the truth of the hypothesis were clear before the study was even begun, then it would hardly seem worthy of the time, the effort, and the trees that are bound to be sacrificed to the project.  No, if a thesis or dissertation is worth writing, then its outcome has to be an open question—a question no one has yet answered in the way it is being posed in this work.

Willing to be Proven Wrong?

“What is your hypothesis?” After startling my would-be directee with the question about why the thesis should be written at all, my next question was usually about the theory that had inspired the work. And the very next question after that was always as startling as the first: “Are you willing to be proven wrong?” It’s a question worth asking because it gets to the heart of one of the greatest threats to any academic work: BIAS.

We all know the righteous indignation we feel when we discover that the outcome of a legislative process has been designed to benefit a powerful political lobby—that’s bias. We would be horrified to learn that the outcome of a drug’s clinical trial had been bought and paid for by a drug company—that’s bias. But the same is true of the studies that go on in every area of academia. They are intended to be in the service of people’s search for truth—not anyone’s pet idea or fragile ego. We can never divorce ourselves from the perspectives we bring to our work, of course, but those perspectives don’t have to determine the outcome of our research; if an academic is going to make any kind of real contribution to thought, his or her work has to be free of bias. And that means beginning any serious study with the willingness to be proven wrong. The interesting thing is this: a dissertation or thesis project that disproves the author’s hypothesis is every bit as valuable to the academic community as one that proves the author right. And it is just as worthy of the degree—maybe moreso, since that kind of conclusion makes it pretty clear that the author didn’t rig the results.

Sometimes a topic is just too close to the author’s heart to be given the objective study it deserves. What do you do if you find you care about something so much that you couldn’t imagine having your ideas about it proven wrong? Simple: write about something else! Seriously. Odd as it seems, the things we care most about are often the worst topics for our academic study—because academic study requires objectivity. And where we care too much, our study is likely not to be objective. Those may be the topics we have to leave to someone else.

What Is the Point?

All lofty ideas aside, there is a very practical reason why master’s and doctoral students are expected to write theses and dissertations: to learn (and prove that they have learned) the methods and theories involved in conducting serious research in their disciplines. The thesis is a kind of test, proving that one has mastered the skills required to carry on serious research in this field without supervision. The harsh truth is this: if you cut corners and force results when a committee of professors is going to examine your work, the hopes are fairly dim for honest, rigorous research when your only critics are your own students. In short, careful, unbiased research in the thesis develops a habit that is likely to live on in your professional life—and so does its opposite.

OK. Let’s not leave all lofty ideas aside. This one seems worthy of mention here: a rigorously researched dissertation or thesis might just make a contribution to future thought in your field. I suppose we all begin our studies thinking that our brilliant ideas are going to be striking new edifices of thought rising above everything built before us. Then we get bogged down in the tedious details of the research and begin to wonder if we can build anything of value at all. In reality, your master’s or doctoral work will probably not become a skyscraper of its own in the academic city. But it can be the next floor you build on top of someone else’s work. And if you build it carefully—so that it is solid and unshakeable—it may prove to be a good foundation for the work of someone else yet to come. In the world of academia, that kind of collaboration is how really great ideas get built. And isn’t that reason enough to do our work as honestly and carefully—and that means as objectively—as it deserves to be done?

Have some experience with academic writing? Some thoughts on bias in thesis-writing? A question about this topic? Leave us a COMMENT to share.

ALBERT—Read more about this editor

Finding Your Voice 

As a professor of composition and rhetoric, I’ve read countless college essays. I’ve read students’ thoughts about everything from justice in Plato’s Republic to salsa dancing at the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. What I’ve discovered in these essays is that while students often struggle with choosing a topic and sticking to it, their biggest difficulty in writing is finding their voice. By “voice” I mean the expression of their thoughts in a mode that fits both the assignment and its intended audience. Conquering this much-dreaded hurdle, however, requires only three simple things: thought, a clear grasp of the assignment, and an awareness of the reader.

First Requirement: Thought

Whether you’re texting a friend or composing the next great novel, what is made visible in the act of writing is a unique mind, specifically your unique mind. Writing, of whatever sort, is a deeply personal act. And that is no less true when you’re grappling with a European history paper or a chemistry lab report. Even when you’re given a topic you find boring, the more you make an effort to engage thoughtfully with it, the clearer your writing will be.

Second Requirement: A Clear Grasp of the Assignment

The second requirement for finding your voice is to have a clear grasp of the assignment. This is important! If you’re confused or the assignment is very general, catch your professor or TA after class or shoot them a brief e-mail and ask for clarification. This is not brown-nosing; it’s commonsense. You don’t want to waste time or valuable fractions of your GPA by writing an essay that misses the mark.

Third Requirement: An Awareness of the Reader

Developing an awareness of your reader is the final component of finding your voice. For most college essays, your professor is where the proverbial buck stops, meaning you need to maintain an appropriately formal tone and use proper diction in your writing. Texting shorthand is not permissible, nor is slang. And unless the assignment specifically allows first- and second-person references, refrain from using them. A word of caution about vocabulary: six-syllable words dragged out of a thesaurus should not be mistaken for a formal tone. Formality in writing involves using terminology that most clearly expresses your thoughts. The goal in writing is always clarity of expression, and that isn’t guaranteed by the length of the words used.

The Key is You

In brief, the work of writing a college essay involves thinking carefully about a specific assignment and articulating your thoughts in an appropriate manner. The key to this is you—your thoughts. One of the most disheartening things for me as a teacher, besides reading papers where “u” has been substituted for “you,” is when students are completely disengaged from their writing, when their “voice” is absent. Whether you’re summarizing the findings of an interminably long journal article or writing a narrative essay about your career plans, be present to the (clearly grasped) task. This will give you a firm foundation for the (appropriately expressed) accomplishment of it.

Have some questions about your college essay writing? Or some thoughts or experiences you’d like to share? Leave us a COMMENT.

CLARE—Read more about this editor

Online users tend to scan text on a Web page rather than reading the page word-by-word.

Every article you read on writing content for the Web will inform you of this.

What does scanning the text really mean?
How does this affect what content we write?

Useit.com reports on a recent eyetracking study which indicates that users with a high-literacy level read approximately 20 - 28% of the text on a Web page. Often the user will read the first sentence or paragraph of an article then skim vertically down the content with eyes stopping at headings, bullet lists, bolded text, links and numerals. Another sentence or two may be read to see if the content is relevant and useful. The captivated reader will continue reading.

Online users tend to be extremely focused on a specific task or objective. They spend the absolute minimum amount of time on a new page to see if it relevant before moving on to another page, or worse - a competitor.

With a limited amount of time to keep the user’s attention on a Web page and encourage them to read, how do we write compelling and easy-to-read content?

Online Writing Tips—in a Nutshell

• The title of the page is important. The first two words of the title need to be the initial attention grabber. In a navigational menu or a list of pages, it is the first two words of the title that the user will notice.
• Use the inverted pyramid style of writing with the most important points or conclusion first. The interested reader will continue reading to gain the background.
• Keep sentences short yet concise. Long sentences are for print material.
• Be factual and informative. Most online readers are looking for information or researching a product or service. Avoid excessive promotional language and “land-fill” sentences. These are sentences that are used to increase the word count and have no real value to the reader.
• Throughout the page use sub-headings, bolded text, bullet lists and links where appropriate. Avoid massive blocks of text.
• Have clear calls-to-action. Users should not have to look for the next step. Users like actionable content.
• Use numerals instead of spelling out numbers where they represent figures or facts. This is against traditional copywriting standards but is expected when writing for the online medium.

Many writers struggle with the non-traditional methods of writing content for a Web page.  It goes against how we have been taught to write in schools.  The Internet has changed reader behavior so we must be dynamic and cater to these changes.  A great Web site for more information is the Jakob Nielsen site: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/.

Earlier in this post, I mentioned that users with a high-literacy level scan Web content.  How do we cater to the low-literacy user?

We will talk about that in another post.

 [LF1] Link http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

Have some experience writing effective Web content? Or perhaps a question for our Web expert? Leave us a COMMENT.

LISA—Read more about this editor

What Do We Mean By “Voice”?

One of the most elusive terms when discussing fiction is Voice (especially when it is capitalized). You will hear the word get thrown around in so many different directions and meaning so many different things to so many different people that it often becomes useless when trying to critique a work-in-progress in a workshop setting or within the editor/writer give-and-take. As both a teacher and editor, one of the first things that I try to do with my writers is to settle on a critical vocabulary that we can both understand and agree upon, so that when we get to the nitty-gritty of evaluating and critiquing manuscripts, there are no misunderstandings.

Voice, because of its expansive definition, is one of the most important terms to define and agree upon. Often we hear the term in its more sweeping usage—when, for instance, we speak of a young writer “finding her voice”; or of the “voice of a Dickens, or a García Márquez,” so distinctive on the page that a reader can choose a passage from among many and recognize it as the specific writer’s. On the opposite end of the spectrum, in a much narrower definition, we often hear readers speak of the voice of an individual character—one of the many particulars that differentiate him from other characters. As an editor, I use the term in its more direct relationship to the text or narration, often qualifying it as the narrative voice.

Voice is one of the craft elements that the reader experiences most directly and immediately. There is no story without the narrative voice, whether it is a very familiar first-person narrator or a distant omniscient one. Voice is the lens, the vehicle, through which the reader experiences all the other elements that make up the story. As an editor, therefore, it is important to define this term as precisely as possible, without any of the mythical baggage that comes when speaking about Voice in its capitalized and more mythical form.

Three Modes of Voice

I break the narrative voice into three distinctive categories, which guide the reader through the external world of the story, and through two levels of the internal world of characters. Contemporary fiction depends on these three modes almost exclusively. And as a writer, especially when engaged in the process of middle or late revision, it is important to know the modes the story relies on and the dramatic rationale for such reliance.

• The first mode is the descriptive voice. This is the part of the narrative responsible for relating to the reader most of the external world of the story, including the concrete world, the action, the spoken dialogue, the smells, textures, tastes and so on—essentially anything that can be perceived with the five senses. Very few stories can survive without the descriptive voice, since the world of the senses is the stage where most of our stories take place. 
• The second mode is the reflective voice. This is when the narrative begins to delve into the inner landscape of specific characters. The reflective voice is one of interpretation, processing and judgment on what the descriptive voice has laid out for the reader, whether on an action, a place or another character’s physical quality. Unlike the descriptive voice, which can often belong only to an impersonal third-person narrator, the reflective voice often occurs as a sort of duet, being at once the voice of the narrator and of the specific character whose ruminations we inhabit. Very few examples in contemporary fiction exist without a healthy dose of the reflective voice. In fact, the best of contemporary fiction seems to strike a powerful balance between these first two modes, often weaving them together in the same sentence.
• The third major mode is the direct internal voice, otherwise known in literature courses as stream-of-consciousness. It is an internal mode like the reflective voice, but it often attempts something much more radical: to directly transcribe the thoughts of an individual character as they occur. Some writers, like Proust, argue that such a task is impossible—that, since thoughts occur in the evanescent present, they are therefore not verbal or subject to the linear laws of language. Other writers, like Joyce, spend their whole lives proving that indeed the pattern of thoughts could be replicated on the page.  In contemporary fiction, however, this remains the least deployed of the three modes, but it is nevertheless a very powerful way to approach certain characterizations.

It is through establishing these clear definitions of some of the most difficult terms in the jargon of workshops and editing that I can more confidently approach each manuscript as a coach and editor.

Do you struggle with the issue of voice in your fiction writing? Or perhaps have a question for our novel expert? Or some techniques of your own that you’d like to share? Leave us a COMMENT.

MATEO—Read more about this editor