by Bobbie Christmas
Q: What’s the difference between book doctors and book coaches?
A: In a nutshell, book coaches work on you, whereas book doctors work on your manuscript.
Coaches encourage you, guide you, give you deadlines, and check on your progress with your book. Coaches may also edit as you go along, depending on the services the coach offers, but not all coaches are editors—or good editors.
Book doctors take what you think is a final draft of your manuscript and examine it for technical flaws, gaps in the information or plot, lack of creative style, and any other errors that might keep it from being marketable. Depending on the services the book doctor offers, he or she might also line edit for errors in grammar, punctuation, syntax, and noncompliance with Chicago Manual of Style. Based on feedback from the book doctor, writers can then create a true final draft ready to be sent to potential agents, publishers, or printers.
Book coaches make sure you write your book, good or bad. Book doctors make sure the book is the best you can make it.
Q: How accurate do fictive details have to be? Must the time lines, street names, and names of famous people all be accurate, even if the story is made up?
A: Fiction writers have the key to their own worlds and can create their own cities and street names. They may even create famous people who never lived. If, however, they choose a real setting, the street names are best if kept accurate, to enhance the story. Read Dan Brown‘s The Da Vinci Code or Grisham‘s The Broker, to see how real their settings are in Paris and Italy. A new industry has grown up around certain books, in fact. When I visited Paris, I learned of tours that focused on tourist spots mentioned in The Da Vinci Code. The same is true of Savannah, which has tours to the places mentioned in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Yes, that book is nonfiction, but the movie added Hollywood twists that weren’t real.
Even when writing fiction, though, the basic facts must be accurate. For example, be sure that weapons used in your novel were available in the era in which your novel is set. Double-check the spelling of any brand name you use. Be sure animals act in normal ways for their species, unless you are writing children’s books, science fiction, or horror. When the author inserts popular song titles or real news from the period of the novel, readers feel more ensconced in the era as well.
Research and accuracy is essential, no matter what you write. If your facts are accurate, people learn something from your novel, too, which is a bonus. I learned a great deal from reading novels by John D. McDonald, James Michener, and Lawrence Sanders, for example. I also edited a fascinating novel that involved deep-sea divers, and by the time I finished, I felt as though I had been underwater myself. What a grand experience!
Q: How do we support ourselves while we’re writing our books?
A: If you’re writing nonfiction, you can write a proposal instead of the whole book, and if you’re lucky, sell the book based on the proposal and live on the advance while writing the book. My advance paid for only a month’s expenses, though, so I continued to edit books and write articles to maintain my income while I wrote my book at night and on weekends.
Writing and selling magazine articles is a great way to work on your own time, but you need to know how to write an article and how to find the work, and writing articles can be a full-time job in itself.
At one local meeting of The Writers Network I posed your question about how to support ourselves while we write our books. The consensus was that most of us kept our day jobs, whatever they were, and wrote our books at night and on weekends.
In reality most of us writers don’t make enough money off our books once they are published, anyway, so we’d better have another solid source of income, no matter what.
Bobbie Christmas, book editor, author of Write In Style: Use Your Computer to Improve Your Writing, and owner of Zebra Communications, will answer your questions, too. Send them to Bobbie@zebraeditor.com. Read more Ask the Book Doctor questions and answers at www.zebraeditor.com.