Be Your Own Editor

Some of you may have read my posts on my experience taking a Fiction I class last winter at Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Joan sends in this follow-up question:

Would you advise enrollment in an online Gotham Writers’ class?

A little background—I have zero education in creative writing and am really afraid of feeling like a loser in a class packed with MFA types. My self-esteem is solid except where writing is concerned. Any snobby mention of my elementary style will send me quivering to the corner.

So, two sides to my question—is Gotham online worth $445, and do you think a writing class will brutalize my ego?

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Contributed by Jurgen Wolff

It’s a truism that dialogue is not the same as actual speech; we are too inarticulate for our speech to serve as an exact model for what fictional characters say. Nonetheless, it’s by listening to real people that we can develop an ear for dialogue.

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Here’s a sign that publishers are beginning to rethink their business model in the face of new methods of book promotion and distribution: the Author’s Guild isn’t happy with a change in the standard book contract at Simon & Schuster, effectively granting the publisher rights to a book well beyond the point when a book would, under most current contracts, be considered out of print. (Rights to out-of-print books normally revert to the author.) S&S now wants to retain rights if the book remains available in any form, including digitally or via print-on-demand.

Chances are they’ll come to some sort of compromise in this case, but it signals the beginning of a inevitable restructuring of the legal and financial relationship between publisher and author in the age of the internet and print-on-demand. Something to keep an eye on.

Check out GalleyCat for a good summary of the situation and industry reaction.

If you hate sports and never write about sports and have no intention of ever writing anything remotely to do with sports, you can probably skip this post. But I advise you to bookmark it, because you might find yourself writing a romance novel one day in which the hero is a former slugger for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Okay, maybe not the Devil Rays…

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Ben writes:

I recently decided to actually write a novel, something I have been kicking around for years. I recently read your article on e-marketing and had a few questions for you. I obviously haven’t sold my manuscript, I haven’t even finished it yet, but you are the first person I’ve found who I can ask questions to directly so I hope you will have patience with me. I currently only have one sample chapter completed and was wondering, do you wait until your manuscript is complete before searching for publishers, or do you use samples to begin the search early? Any advice you have would be wonderful.

Congratulations on writing your first chapter, Ben. Now get back to work.

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Contributed by Allie Boniface

Dialogue.

It’s a tricky thing, getting it right, getting it realistic, getting it paced and tagged in just the right way. And yet it can be one of the most powerful elements of writing. It can deliver character, conflict, backstory, emotion, all in the span of a few short exchanges and utterances.

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