Writing Tip #2: Listen to Your Novel

Listen to your novel—and I mean this literally!  Once you’ve written and edited your book to where you think you’re about ready to fling it out into the world, take a few extra days and listen to it being read aloud.  You will catch redundancies, extra words, and awkward sentence structures that your glazed eyes just pass right over on the screen or on paper. After all, you know what you mean already, and it’s hard to read it so closely. Trust me, it is invaluable to hear the words spoken aloud.

Brace yourself.  The digital voices that reads your book in their relatively-flat monotone are nowhere near as wonderful as those brilliant voice actors who will one day make your work(s) sound like near-poetry. Nonetheless, once you’ve steeled yourself, take your story for a walk—or listen while you do chores, pet the critters, paint a canvas…  You may very well need some therapeutic activity to get through it, but it will be worth it in the long-term for your book if not in the short-term for your morale! Keep in mind that the advantages for your morale are more significant in the long run.

Various programs will read aloud your writing for you, but I use my Kindle Fire’s text-to-speech function with my Word documents, for which I’m infinitely grateful.  Keep reading if you want the instructions on how to use this device to listen to your audiobook, but otherwise, good luck and good listening!  Please do share with me your experiences with other text-to-speech programs in the comments.

As for the Kindle Fire, sometimes the voice glitches, and I have to continually check to see if I really had a typo, or if it’s just the voice narration. It’s usually the narration, but I’ve also caught many typos this way, so don’t neglect checking.  It is a hassle, though.

However, for all that I disparaged the monotone of the voice, it’s actually quite remarkable how well the auto-narrator reads the text.  So many inflections!  The pitch changes, even, when she reads conversation, to distinguish it from the other text.  Really impressive, honestly.

The Kindle document is slightly troublesome to set up the first time, as you’ll need to go into your Amazon account and tell it to allow documents from your email address to go through to your Kindle.  Here’s the procedure (at this point in time):

• 1. Log into your Amazon account.
• 2. Click on ‘Account & Lists’ at the top right of the page.
• 3. Under ‘Digital Content & Devices’, click on ‘Manage Your Content & Devices’.
• 4. Click on ‘Preferences’ (it’s on a white bar header at nearly the top of the page).
• 5. Click on ‘Personal Document Settings’.
• 6. Scroll down to ‘Approved Personal Document E-mail List’. Under this you’ll see a link for ‘Add a new approved e-mail address’. 

Whew!  There you are. I think you can take it from there. Took me ages to figure all that the first time. 

Once you’ve had your own email address approved, you can e-mail yourself attached documents at the email address listed in 'Personal Document Settings' under 'Send-to-Kindle Email Settings'. I usually use my Word documents—I don’t believe it will even read a PDF aloud for you, though you can still send it to read to yourself. But the Word documents can be better manipulated—fonts altered, too. The reading speed can even be changed.

Oh, but the documents don’t go right through!  No, sirree. Amazon will send you an email asking if you want that document to go through to your Kindle, and you’ll need to approve that within a limited-time window.  I usually just stay in my email account after sending a document so that I can approve it, watching for that confirmation-request email from them (maybe check ‘other’ and ‘junk’ folders if you don’t see that email right away). 

Make sure your Kindle is connected to Wi-Fi or a Hotspot. Your document will very likely not show up right away, however. Mine usually don’t.  I often have to Sync my device (that’s under the ‘Settings’ app on the Kindle Fire, way down on the menu) and then turn off my Kindle completely before I can get it to show up (after I turn it back on, of course). It might take a few minutes and another sync or two.  The troublesomeness of this varies, actually. Sometimes it’s easy-peasy, and other times I’m frustrated as hell.  But it’s best to go into it expecting a bit of a hassle.

Now, originally on my Kindle Fire’s Home Menu, the Documents App was clearly visible right off, but for some reason Amazon has restructured my Kindle Fire’s Home Page so that I have to go into the Utilities Folder to find my Documents App.  I click on this, and my emailed documents show up here.

Once your document downloads and you pull it up, you can tap on the screen to see various options. At the bottom right, there should be a text-to-speech option with a little sideways-triangle ‘play’ button.  Tap it to listen!  The Kindle will scroll through the pages while it reads aloud, and you can actually sit there and read it at the same time as you listen. That might be a wise thing to do, but I generally just keep the Kindle nearby so that I can easily mark whatever needs fixin’.  You don’t even need pencil and paper.  You can find the spot on your document, press on the word to highlight it, and press 'note' to enter your correction or thought.  When you’re done for the day, I advise entering those edits as soon as possible, while you remember them.  There’s an icon at the top of the page that looks like a page with lines across it. I use that to instantly retrieve my notes and marks so that I don’t have to scroll through the entire book endlessly.  It’s scary, but I delete these as I go—do save your Word document often on your computer as you’re making the corrections—so that I don’t miss any in the endless-seeming list.

I usually don’t bother entering a note, actually.  I just use a color-coded system for the highlighters. Blue means there’s a redundant word, change one of them. Red means delete.  Yellow means ‘Pay attention; this is kinda weird’.  Orange means ‘Change this! What were you thinking?!’

You can also bookmark the text.  That option is two over from the ‘note page’ icon.

Okay, so that sounds like a lot of hassle, but it’s worth it to review your book in a different way.  You’ll be surprise how much you catch by listening to it.  And you might even enjoy the listen. I do on occasion.

Anxious People by Fredrick Backman Is Oh-So Depressing!

I do NOT recommend the book Anxious People by Fredrick Backman.  It is well-written, and there is a sort of dry wit, but is oh-so tremendously depressing.  The author portrays a series of miserable, hopeless lives and often purposely misleads the reader. Nothing so finely done as The Sixth Sense, where the twist at the end was plausible.  No, this is simply an unreliable narrator—well, does that imply it was intentional?  It’s obviously intentional.  Annoyingly so.

  But seriously, don’t read it.  One of the author’s more subtle tricks towards the end, if I understood it correctly (I listened to the audiobook and didn’t back it up), was to make you think for a moment that one woman had jumped off a bridge (a minor, surprising plot point).  The story was so depressing throughout that by that point, I almost found it a relief!  Needless to say, when I realized she hadn’t, I wasn't as glad as you’d expect, which struck me as dire.  But again, I’ll say that there is a snarky wit that keeps you listening/reading, and the author wraps things up tidily at the end--almost too neatly, as if the smidge of hope that the author is giving you is fake, just a nice, 'happy ending' for the book.  The connections between the characters’ pathetic lives unfold slowly, and that part is well done. If you do choose to listen to the audiobook, stick through to the end, at least, as the narrator will provide you with a hotline number for if you’re feeling suicidal.  You may need it.

Writing Tip #1: Finish a Novel Using Daily Word Counts

To write my very first rough draft ever, I used a 30-day novel-writing kit by the founder of NaNoWriMo (originally National November Writing Month).  It had inspirational cards, one a day, and a calendar to fill in with my progress. I loved it!  The most important part of this kit, however, was its emphasis on and support for keeping up daily word counts.  

It really isn't so impossible to write a novel in a month!  Less than 2000 words per day can bring you to a short-novel-length work. For an optimal word count of 70,000 to 80,000 words, however, a writer probably needs to extend well past the 30-day cycle. My daughter used the process effectively in a month-long break from school, keeping up her word counts, but her novel was not near to being done when her time ran out, and she never did get back to writing on it--not yet, anyhow (I keep hoping she will; she's incredibly gifted). Some authors may find it works to just stick to that 50,000-word initial draft length, making sure to wrap it up shortly after hitting the mark, and then go back to add descriptions and metaphors and senses later--all those things that draw in readers.  Sometimes you'll add extra scenes--and at other times you'll delete redundant sections. I can be extremely redundant, I've found!

The worst part is finding yourself rewriting, again and again, when you meant to merely be proofreading that final time.  Each time you go back to do a 'last proof', you think of a better way to say something, a new comparison, more succinct phrasing.  I went through a strange phase where I wanted to clarify everything, and so that was one massive rewrite, but then I went back through later, slashing it all, wondering how daft I thought my readers were!

I say that's 'the worst part', but really, I think my books improve in some way with each go-through.  The edits certainly take more time than the original drafts, so be prepared for that.  I've heard amazing authors say versions of the same thing time and again: "I'm not a very good writer, but I'm a great re-writer!"

Word counts help motivate me to continue my writing. That daily grind is essential to completing a novel and helps it to be cohesive. Print out a calendar and fill in a progress bar.  I even use little foil star stickers to help motivate me--a gold star means I've met my goal that day, but I get a star for any day I even meet half my word count!  After all, at that rate it's only 60 days to a short novel, right?

So there we go. The basics of my writing process in a single-blog nutshell!

Silk: Caroline's Story, My Debut Novel

'Caroline Corbett is ready for the 20^th century, excited to find work and meet new people, but she gets more than expected when a rough-hewn farmer and a small-town doctor both engage her affections. She must choose between the two, but in doing so she fails to consider the girl Jessie, a young sociopath riddled with jealousy. Before long astonishing and horrifying events are set into motion.'

I am both looking forward to and dreading the release of my debut novel, Silk: Caroline's Story on October 14th, 2021. It feels rather like the kids leaving home for the big, wide world--I'm relieved not to have to clean up after them anymore, but they're my babies! I wrote Silk the fastest of all my novels--and then proceeded to spend the greatest amount of time on it, revising, proofing, revising, adding, deleting, editing, and then revising some more in an endless cycle. I wanted to at least share the above blurb with you all here, as I haven't done nearly as much blogging about the novel or this process as I thought I would--though, in truth, I actually did share the initial writing process on a blog of yesteryear. I had been wrestling with some mysteries in my genealogical research, trying to piece together what might have happened. Initially I stuck with exact dates and tried to stay true to known facts--but by the time the novel was done, I realized I'd miscalculated. Some of the dates were off. Not that this was a huge deal, when main characters were already entirely made up. The story is mostly fiction, inspired from here, there, and everywhere--but it was initially inspired by the confusing web of my family tree.

 The whole trilogy is, in fact, based on genealogical research as its very base inspiration. It's so romanticized and fictionalized, however, as to be fairly unrecognizable (adding stories to get from point A to point B, just as much of historical fiction does). I originally wrote it with the real names of my ancestors and relatives, but most of those have since been changed.  Caroline's given name remained the same, however.  I did keep that much.   

Writing Jane Austen by Elizabeth Aston

Writing Jane Austen was a jaunt to modern-day London and Bath, where an Austen-hating writer who specializes in the Victorian era is saddled with the daunting task of completing a Jane Austen manuscript. 

The actual author of this entertaining novel has written several ‘Mr. Darcy’ spin-offs, which I suspect provided fodder for all the negativity towards Jane Austen that she convincingly spews—especially from the protagonist, Georgina.  Of course most of it came from ignorance, as Georgina eventually discovers, though her obstinate resistance to all-things-Austen disappears so suddenly that I wonder if the editor sliced out the transition. For Georgina to go to such lengths to avoid Jane Austen and then to hardly remark on her shift to Austen-worshipper left me bewildered.  Where was the chagrin?  Where was the surprise?  I liked the spin at the end, which salvaged a situation I couldn’t see being concluded satisfactorily, though I would have liked for it to be foreshadowed a bit more, perhaps. 

Having read Jane Austen’s novels long ago, I appreciated learning about the Jane Austen tours in Bath and a few details about her life. Sometimes, I’m afraid, unexpected characters seemed to randomly know far more than expected about Jane Austen, as if everyone were an authority on Jane Austen but Georgina. I could see where it fit in the conversation, but they seemed the wrong ones to tell it. However, despite my issues with this novel, the characters were colorful, and it was a fun, light-hearted read—while still managing to teach me a bit about the incomparable Jane Austen. Ms. Aston’s love for Jane Austen shines through, and that, along with the book’s charm, makes me willing to file her book right next to my Jane Austen collection on the bookshelf—which I suppose is exactly what the author intended with a pen name like Aston.

[Oh goodness, I just looked her up online to verify that it was actually a pen name, and it seems Elizabeth Edmonson (AKA Elizabeth Aston) passed away in 2016, only six years after the publication in 2010 of this delightful read for Jane Austen fans. RIP, Elizabeth.]   

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

 

Delia Owens’ debut novel draws you into the marsh and the swamplands with its lyrical, exquisite prose. The main character, Kya, is supposedly in the coastal marsh of North Carolina, but it seemed to me like we could have been right here in Southeast Georgia. The girl ends up living alone in the marsh, abandoned by her family, evading the truant officers. We follow her as she grows up. Her skittishness and sensitivity are endearing, and I cried for her a number of times. Owens even includes an epilogue filling us in on the rest of Kya’s life, which leaves one richly satisfied, as if all the loose ends were tied up that possibly could be. All that said, I’ll admit that I began the book four different times before I was able to stay focused. Not sure why…but I wanted to throw that out there to encourage other readers who might not have the urge to continue past the first chapter. It really is worth it.

Three Sisters, Three Queens by Philippa Gregory

Three Sisters, Three Queens starts off in the sour tongue of a petty, jealous Margaret Tudor, eldest sister of the notorious King Henry VIII.  I kept expecting the point-of-view character to change to one of the other queens in the title, but it remained in the voice of Margaret Tudor. I'm a big fan of Philippa Gregory, but I kept wondering, "Why would she choose to write about someone she obviously doesn't like?"  I assume she was trying to show her writing chops, not only illustrating a character's progression and improvement but demonstrating her own flexibility in writing from a different perspective. By the end of the book, thank goodness, I began to like Margaret more.  I'm not sure I've ever had that experience of not liking the protagonist of a Philippa Gregory book, and that's saying something, as I even liked the delusional zealot Margaret Beaufort (this Margaret Tudor's grandmother) in The Red Queen (which actually might be my favorite Philippa Gregory book of all!). 

[Spoiler Alert. You may want to stop reading here!]

Margaret Tudor became a queen when she married King James IV of Scotland, who died at the Battle of Flodden when his son James was still a toddler. Gregory then goes along with the rumors of the day in assuming it's a romantic match when Margaret remarries to Archibald Douglas, 6th earl of Angus, but given how he treated her and his obvious power-grabs, I question whether she had much say (much as I'm convinced Mary Queen of Scots was strong-armed into marrying the earl of Bothwell).  Margaret's story is quite long and convoluted, but after following her through so many difficulties, you're as happy as she is when things finally work out well for her in the end.  She finally has a good husband in Henry Stewart, 1st Lord Methven, and her son's on the throne.  Meanwhile, her sister Mary is dying, and her sister-in-law Katherine of Aragon has had her crown stripped from her and is spurned by her husband.  We're happy for Margaret and relieved she isn't overtly gloating!  

While I enjoyed the end of the book, and of course I liked her rich descriptions of court life, I also had issues with Margaret's inexplicable inconsistencies.  I suppose Philippa Gregory was going with 'less is more' and thought it obvious enough that Margaret was being disingenuous or fickle with her communications towards her sisters, but I really needed her to give me Margaret's motive, to clue me in if she was being falsely warm in her letters, or if she'd gotten the angst out of her beforehand and then felt a flood of real affection when she was actually writing.  It was hard to tell. I listened to the audiobook version read by Bianca Amato, and she read the letters as if they were sincere, which added to my confusion.  I suppose it's possible that Philippa Gregory meant for us to read them in a wry tone, so maybe I wouldn't have been as confused if I'd simply read the book.  It wasn't just with the letters, though. Margaret flip-flopped somewhat whimsically in her affections and opinions so much mid-book that I was feeling quite grumpy about it all!  Perhaps Philippa Gregory was simply trying to depict the course of events and allowing her to be a 'flawed character', but even flawed characters have reasons for what they're doing, why they're changing. I'd have like to have heard Margaret's thoughts in those shift periods a bit more.

All that said, if you make it all the way through the novel, you may find yourself like me, inexplicably pleased with the scale of the work--and with Margaret's improvement.  I'm assuming it was improvement, and not merely that she wasn't as jealous once she was doing better than the others...