Writing Submission Materials for Kindle Scout

This post is about writing VERY short passages, inspired by Kindle Scout, a crowd-sourced contest in which the first few pages of unpublished novels are posted online and potential readers vote on which book(s) should receive a publishing contract. I entered my recently-completed novel, Pandora’s Promise (the third book in the Pandora’s Trilogy), and it was accepted right away. But it took me several days and much feedback from friends and colleagues to complete the entry.

                        

The two hardest parts of the submission process were writing a 45-character one-liner and a 500-character description of the book. Note that it is character, not word. Characters include punctuation and the blank spaces between words. You must write these minuscule passages in a way that will both explain what the book is about and entice potential readers to nominate it. The saving grace is that the one-liner, the description, and the cover should all work together to give a true picture of what readers will find in the book.

In any writing endeavor, be it an article, an email, or a novel, your prose will read better if you focus on what is truly important. With stringent space limitations, you can’t include all the main points, or even most of them. You’ll need to decide which ones best characterize the book and are most likely to interest potential readers.

In the case of Pandora’s Promise, there are so many important elements to the story it felt impossible to choose. It is a post-apocalyptic adventure with the fate of the human race in doubt. There are three main characters, each with her or his own story line. There are several important subplots, which seemingly have nothing to do with each other until all is tied up at the end. There are a number of hard-science fictional elements as well as subplots involving the emerging telepathic abilities of mutant animals. How could I possibly convey all this in only 45 characters? And how could I summarize such a complicated story in any number of words, let alone 500 characters?

As it turned out, having a tight space limitation was a good lesson for me in focusing on what was truly important in the novel.

Example: one of the most important subplots is the main hero’s interaction with a clan of telepathic elephants. This section, which had been read by several beta readers, was unanimously popular, so I felt it had to be included. Also, though the story is an action-packed adventure, it is also, at heart, a very intense love story, and I wanted to at least mention that. The fate of humanity, if not the world, is indeed in doubt due to a combination of genetic mutations and climate change. There are many other subplots and elements, including a section on how all these disasters came to be.

I decided right away that I wanted the one-liner to be a question: “Can X and Y save the world?” This gives a flavor of the importance of the stakes.  But what should I put in the blanks? These are some of the things I tried:

Can human love and ancient wisdom save the world? (49 characters)

Can courage and telepathy save the world? (41 characters)

Can human daring and sentient animals save the world? (53 characters)

Can love and telepathic animals save the world? (47 characters)

The only line that comes in under the cut-off is the second one, and to me it was too general: whose courage? What telepathy? Neither “human love” nor “love” conveys the idea of romance. Daring and courage give some hint of the action segments of the novel, but only a hint. I eventually realized that I was trying to put too many ideas in my one-liner, and should leave other ideas to the summary. I decided instead to focus on only two of the main ideas: the elephants, who are characters in their own right, and the love story, which, though it mostly remains in the background, is a strong motivating force for much of the action.

Thus I finally arrived at “Can true love and elephants save the world?” Which happens to be 43 characters.

The summary, in which I had the luxury of writing a 500-character passage, fills in many of the blanks. It implies that the elephants are sentient, and also offers a flavor of the action, as well as the hard-science fictional nature of the book, lest it be dismissed as fantasy. To see what I ended up with, go to my book’s page on Kindle Scout. If you do so before January 16, 2015, please also nominate my book. If I win publication, you will get a free advance copy of the e-book.

 

Technorati Tags: Kindle Scout,Pandora's Promise,Pandora's Trilogy,Simplifying writing,Writing to length

34. Revising Blog Posts

The other day when I told a friend I had to revise a blog post, he sounded surprised. “You mean you edit those posts?” he asked. “But they always seem so effortless--as if you just tossed them off.”

Exactly.

Clear writing should always appear effortless. Unfortunately for writers, however, the smoother writing appears, the more work it usually takes to produce. This is particularly true for short pieces of writing--like blog posts--where every word counts.

I asked the authors of two very different well-known blogs how much they revise. Here is what these successful bloggers told me.

Josh Fruhlinger is the creator of The Comics Curmudgeon, a funny and insightful look at the daily comics. Josh’s legion of followers leave comments by the hundreds each day.

                                Josh Fruhlinger                         

Josh admits that he doesn’t always have time to do enough re-reading to catch every typo, but:

I do edit my posts, though of course "editing" can span a lot of territory. The way I usually work is that I write my posts in a text editor and then cut and paste into the WordPress interface, then read it over in preview mode and make corrections and rewrites as I do so.  That's the process that I consider editing, though obviously I do also go back and look at what I've already written at various points during the initial writing process.

I've been doing this for almost eight years now and I have it down to something of a science.  A typical post (which could range from 250 words to 750) takes me somewhere between one and two hours to do, from beginning (reading the day's comics) to end.

Michelle Rafter, an author and editor, produces WordCount: Freelancing in the Digital Age, which covers the business of the writing business for freelancers, entrepreneurial journalists and bloggers. (See below for more information.)

 Michelle Rafter

Here is her take on revision:

I always edit my posts, some a little, some a lot. Sometimes I see or read something that inspires me and I write a post in a white heat. I save it in Draft mode and schedule it for the date and time I want it to run. Then when I have time allotted to working on the blog, I go in and rework it into a final draft, add an image, category, tags, etc., and either publish or put it in the queue.

Other times I start and finish a post in one sitting. When I do this, I edit as I go, checking a paragraph or two as I finish them to see how they read.

Either way, I always, always, always use WordPress' Preview mode to see what a finished post will look like published. I check spelling, grammar, and sentences that run on too long -- I usually write too much, so I'm constantly whittling down the word count.

Both Josh’s and Michelle’s revision processes are good models for any piece of writing, long or short. Among the things they have In common is that they are well-organized and self-aware as writers. They both know that “Less is More”  when it comes to good writing.

But how, you may wonder, do you become self-aware as a writer? How can you even begin to edit your own work? In the next post, we’ll take a look at this difficult but necessary task.

Note: WordCount, Michelle Rafter’s blog, covers topics including writing and blogging basics, tech tools for writers and media industry news. Rafter also hosts the #wclw writer chat the last Wednesday of the month @ 10 am Pacific, and the annual WordCount Blogathon, a community blogging challenge to post every day in May. WordCount is part of the BlogHer Publishing Network. See it at http://www.michellerafter.com.

Technorati Tags: Revision,writing blog posts,WordCount,The Comics Curmudgeon

26. Less is More: how to keep your writing clear and simple

In a guest post on The Writing Well, on May 14, I discussed showing (dramatizing) vs. telling (summarizing) in fiction writing. In order to dramatize without over-dramatizing, it helps to make your language as simple as possible. LESS wordiness almost always means MORE impact.

Be stingy with adjectives and adverbs. The fewer you use, the more powerful your writing. The trick is in choosing the one or two best modifiers.

He angrily slammed his fist on the bar. "Get out of here, you son of a bitch!" he snarled rabidly, his face contorted in rage.

                                      

See how much simpler—and more effective—this passage is if you get rid of some of the indicators of anger:

He slammed his fist on the bar. "Get out of here, you son of a bitch!"

Trust your readers... and trust yourself. Sometimes, as writers, we are unsure of our ability to convey strong emotions, so we tend to overdo it. With simple, clear writing, you only need to make your point once--you needn't beat your reader over the head with it. Compare these passages with their simplified revisions:

Her eyes filled with tears of joy. "Oh, Michael," she breathed softly, her face full of love. "It's... it's beautiful," she added, her voice trembling with emotion. Never had she felt such love.

Her eyes filled. "Oh, Michael," she breathed. "It's beautiful."

A sense of power surged strongly through him and he raised his fist in the air, pumping it three times. "Yes!" he cried triumphantly. He would make all the small, petty little people cringe and pay for what they had done to him.

A sense of power surged through him and he raised his fist. "Yes!" he cried. He would make them all pay.

Bear in mind that the context usually gives plenty of hints about what is going on. For example, in the first example above, we would know it is a love scene. In the second, we probably already know how he feels about the people he will "make pay"--and what he feels they have done to him.

Finally, a personal bugaboo, don’t EVER use the word “hysterically” in describing how someone weeps.

“Leave me alone!” she screamed, sobbing hysterically.

All you really need here is:

“Leave me alone!” she sobbed.

Tomorrow: Give yourself credit as a writer.

Technorati Tags: writing techniques,revision,simplifying writing