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Category: self-publishing

  • Self-Publishing: Research and Note Taking


    Since I’m thinking chronologically about this topic, once I have brainstormed an idea, done a bunch of free-writing, learned about my characters, and built an index of chapters, I generally start with the actual writing on the computer. This is typically the point where I start to suspect that my knowledge of the setting falls far short of the character’s knowledge!

    Research!

    At the point where I become humbled about my weak knowledge of the location, the timeframe, significant people in the era, behavioral norms, etc., of my project, I become a dedicated researcher. Here are some thoughts on this:

    1. Capture Lists of Research Needs. As “Research Needs” pop up, I write them in my spiral notebook. This allows me to build a decent workflow of things I need to look into. Then I can set research goals (maybe something like, research two of the topics on my list every day?). Sometimes I will free-write about my research too. If the setting is in the distant past, I might create dialogue between characters in that time about subjects that are unusual. For instance, what might two shepherds five-hundred years ago discuss about a shooting star they just saw? Sometimes really interesting material comes out of this.
    2. Common Research Subjects. When I’m writing about a time or culture that I’m not personally experienced with, I usually spend time researching foods they ate, customs, ceremonies, flora and fauna of the region, etc. These basics seem to show up in descriptive paragraphs a lot. Perhaps readers won’t know, but if I think something in one of my books is inaccurate, it bugs me. Now the above refers primarily to fiction writing. Most of my work has been in novels and collections of short stories, but I imagine that this advice applies to non-fiction too. If you want to communicate a non-fiction topic well enough to convince people of your expertise, you are probably going to need to understand many, many different dimensions of your topic and then connect them all in your book. Mapping these different directions of research out early will also aid your writing (writers block, to me, comes from lack of confidence in what to say).
    3. Organize the Research Free-Writings. I categorize my research “writings” by their label and I try to keep related labels close together in my spiral notebook. This seems like the best method I’ve used… Notecards were hard to organize and typing the notes into a computer (a spreadsheet maybe?) seemed too left-brained. Sometimes when I go through my spiral notebook (it comes with me to sports practices, coffee shops, church, etc.) I have cool ideas that I attribute to being written on paper.
    4. Don’t be afraid to conduct “just in time” research. Very often while I’m writing I find myself unsatisfied with how I’ve explained some technical detail and this drives me back to researching that specific topic. This often arises when trying to fill in some “color” in the story by describing small but very visual events. Often I want to make sure that I’m very accurate on the details of this “visual insert”. You might understand what I’m talking about if you’ve ever seen the “Lord of the Rings” movies. The wizard Gandalf is trapped by his adversary on the top of a tall tower and is in great peril, but suddenly the camera zooms in on a small moth and we see it flying in great, beautiful detail for a few seconds until Gandalf traps it with a quick movement, speaks some instructions to it, and lets it fly away. See here for a YouTube video of this. Peter Jackson uses this moment of seemingly-unrelated beauty to create some mystery, relieve some tension, or just refocus the viewer’s brains momentarily. The Harry Potter movies use this type of visual inserts quite frequently too. I try to do this in my books from time to time too. Therefore, if you use this element in your writing, ensuring that you have mastered the details is important for pulling it off!

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  • Self-Publishing: Project Inspiration and Organization

    It probably goes without saying that this topic is the most important one for someone who is interested in publishing their own work. How do you get started? Here are a few quick rules of thumb that come from my own experience.

    1. Be receptive! I had been trying to write novels for years, starting even with my time in college. Many manuscripts had been started and pushed forward, only to be abandoned as I grew uninterested in the characters and skeptical of my ability to recreate the setting well enough. THEN, one night as I was telling a story to my son at bedtime, it struck me that the story I had been telling him (Scheherazade-style, for one must maintain a set of stories for bedtime!) was growing interesting to me. What to that point I had not recognized became quite clear! I needed to organize and capture these stories as a gift, both to him, but also to others struggling to come up with bedtime stories for their demanding child. Maybe this sounds silly, but my response to this unexpected inspiration helped push me through the many hours of writing and illustrating my first book, The Incredible Adventures of Pirate Zach.
    2. Seek Inspiration and Don’t Judge it. It’s hard to write about something that doesn’t interest you. I have started writing projects about subjects where I found myself curious about the details behind an event that I’ve read about in the newspaper, found in an old book, or even speculated about in my head. The writing of the book becomes the mechanism for “learning” the motivations, discouragements, manipulation, and loves that lie behind some “headline” event. Free-writing is something I did a lot in college (perhaps a professor had inspired this? I can’t recall) when something came to me that was interesting. Free-writing is essentially (to me) trying to capture thoughts about a fascinating subject without any organizational or structural restrictions. Why is this thing interesting? What might have happened to inspire this thing? How many people knew about it? And so on. I think there are two keys to this, though. a) Don’t be judgmental of your free-writing! Let it flow unimpeded by your inner librarian. b) Be disciplined with daily writing. Even at the free-writing phase I set small goals like one notebook page of material per day. Then, it’s a pretty small barrier to sit down and do it. And MAYBE I’ll write ten pages once I force myself to start.
    3. Brainstorming on the Written Page seems to Unlock Insights. This sounds complicated, but I have found that brainstorming during an initial phase of planning on a new idea for a book is much more impactful if I write it on paper instead of capturing it on a computer. Perhaps this is because my mind is less creative when it’s looking at a computer screen (indeed, I do quite a lot of this!) or maybe there’s some other reason. I find that this is where I “learn” about my characters. I try to describe their passions, their deep motivations, what they need to learn, why they’re annoying, and whether they are receptive to growth and redemption. I also can use these hand-writing sessions to unfold why the character is interesting, what in their life is worthy of being captured in a book, etc. Just like during my “writing phase”, I put some sort of daily goal on these sessions and generally fill up a spiral notebook, often before I start actually writing.
    4. Notecards help with Organization. One thing that I tend to like to do is create a high level table of contents before I start writing. Eventually, I will capture this in the Lyx typesetting software I use, but the first thing I tend to do is create one notecard for each chapter. Then on that notecard I come up with a stab at a chapter name, and below that I capture why this chapter is important to the book. Then sometimes I sort the order of the chapters until I get something that has about the right flow that I’m looking for. Only at that point do I go through and type in all the chapter names in Lyx.
    5. Start writing in Lyx. This is my typesetting tool and I think it’s amazing. It’s also free and is available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. I’ll talk more about this later, but Lyx is the backbone around the bulk of my writing phase. If, however, I haven’t done the above steps to get myself enthused, the writing doesn’t flow.
    File:Power-of-words-by-antonio-litterio-creative-commons-attribution-share-alike-3-0.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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  • New Blog Series – The Ins-and-Outs of Self-Publishing

    As I have shared with a few people, I’m rapidly nearing the end of the writing and editing portion of my next novel. As I was working on this today, it struck me that I have learned quite a lot about the self-publishing journey and that perhaps this knowledge could be useful to others. So here’s my goal.

    Goal: Lay out the process for self-publishing from the bottoms-up to provide lift for folks who might be thinking about taking this journey on for themselves. I’ll use my current project and some past projects to provide examples but only when absolutely necessary. Below are what I plan to write about, in some order:

    Why? Well, I don’t find a lot of good discussion on the tips and tricks (and motivational techniques) for the complete end-to-end self-publishing journey. As I have gone down this path multiple times in the past and it is fresh in my mind due to my upcoming book, I hope that my notes may be helpful to others who might suspect that this is too difficult or expensive. Hint, it’s not. It just takes time, thoughtfulness, and discipline to complete.

    Outline: