Category: this writing life

First published on the Centre for Youth Literature website, Inside A Dog, in 2012.

7. Admire Your Finished Book

Okay, this is the only step to writing a historical novel that is ACTUALLY easy. I may not have been totally accurate when I said you could write a historical novel in seven EASY steps. But hey, I’m a novelist. I’m allowed to make up some things.

Anyway, after this step, there are many other things that go on, to do with sales and marketing and publicity, so that people will actually buy the book. I’m not really an expert in any of that, but if you want to ask a question, leave a comment below and if I can’t answer it myself, I’ll see if I can find someone who does.

Next: Planning vs Not Planning

First published on the Centre for Youth Literature website, Inside A Dog, in 2012.

6. Gaze Upon the Efforts of the Designer and Typesetter

This is one of the easiest stages for authors, because it mostly consists of us watching other people work really hard.

Firstly, there’s the cover design to admire. In the case of the Australian edition of The FitzOsbornes at War, the designer had already come up with beautiful designs for the first two books in the Montmaray Journals series, which looked like this:

NOT that creating those two covers was a quick and easy process. The designer came up with FOURTEEN possible covers for the first two books. Some were hand-drawn portraits, some were based on photos. Each had its own individual design for the title of the book, the title of the series and the author name. Then a lot of people at Random House Australia sat down to discuss which covers would best show what the book was about and would most appeal to readers. I also added my opinions, and my publishers were polite enough to listen (in general, authors don’t get much say in how their book covers look). Then my editor wrote the blurb on the back, and organised for legal permission to use the photographs, and looked for some flattering review quotes to add to the cover.

By the way, all the cover photographs for the Australian editions of The Montmaray Journals were taken by an extremely talented teenager, Nikoline Rasmussen.

Anyhow, as you can see, the third book cover used the same model as the first two books, with a different background. The cover designer made some changes to the original photograph to add colour to the sky, so that it would look a bit more cheerful (and, as it happens, to fit a scene in the book more closely). If you click on the Nikoline Rasmussen link above, you’ll also see the original photograph that was used for the cover of A Brief History of Montmaray. (And if you’ve read the book, you can probably figure out why the cover designer made some changes to the image.)

Meanwhile, the typesetters had turned my Word document into five hundred pages of typeset book pages, using a special font and chapter heading designs to match the first two books in the series. But mistakes happen during typesetting. There are weird typos. The spacing looks wrong in some places. And authors, being the contrary creatures they are, often have last-minute changes they need to make. (Especially when they’ve just finished copy-editing the American edition of their book and their American copy-editor has pointed out a glaring historical error. Cough. Not that that would happen to me or anything.)

This is why proofreading is really important. In the case of The FitzOsbornes at War, the typeset pages (called proofs, or galleys, or first pages, depending on whom you ask) were read by a proofreader who hadn’t seen the manuscript, plus an editor who was familiar with the first two books, as well as by myself. (You can see a tiny section of my typeset manuscript below, with some of my corrections.) Then my editor had a long meeting with me at the Random House Sydney office and we went through all the combined changes and argued about commas again. But it was polite arguing.

By the way, if you’ve heard about ‘ARCs’ (or ‘bound proofs’ or ‘galleys’) and wondered what they are – they’re the typeset pages bound into book form, with a rough version of the cover art. That is, they are the book BEFORE it’s been proofread, complete with weird typos, factual errors, etc. So if you read an ARC, you’re not reading the final book. You’re reading a very early, flawed version of the book. ARCs are only printed so that people reviewing the book can read it and write their review before the book is published – although they need to check the final version of the book if they’re going to use quotes from the book or complain about ‘errors’ in the book.

Next: The finished book

First published on the Centre for Youth Literature website, Inside A Dog, in 2012.

5. Edit, Edit, Edit

I tend to edit as I write. (This may be why I’m the slowest writer in the universe.) I started each day of writing by looking over the previous day’s work and making whatever changes were necessary. Sometimes, this meant going back even further, to previous chapters. My months of planning, plus my rewrite-as-I-go strategy, meant that by the time I finished the ‘first draft’ of The FitzOsbornes at War, the manuscript looked okay. It was nowhere near perfect, but it was pretty close to the final shape of the novel. I checked my facts and corrected any spelling and grammar errors I could find. Then I sent the whole thing off to my two editors, one in Sydney and one in New York, and told them to be ruthless with it.

They were.

But they were also very tactful. The editors I’ve worked with have all been super nice and very good at their jobs. They tend to use the sandwich method when they give feedback – that is, they sandwich their harshest criticisms in thick slabs of praise, so it’s easy to digest.

When I get an editing letter from them, it usually says something like this:

“This is your BEST BOOK EVER. I love it! Here are some of the things I loved about it [insert half a page of examples of clever/funny things that they found in manuscript].

Now, there are just a few tiny things we think you could change to make this book even more perfect [insert five pages of things that didn’t work so well, with suggestions for fixing them]

Overall, though, you are a genius writer! This book is going to be brilliant!!!”

Don’t you wish teachers would give that sort of feedback on assignments? (Maybe your teachers do. Mine didn’t.)

Here are examples of things my editors said about The FitzOsbornes at War manuscript:

“Could you explain in more detail about Toby’s plan to [do mysterious thing]?”

and

“It would be good if there was a scene that actually SHOWED Sophie [doing important thing], instead of her merely talking about it, three months later.”

and

“It’s great that Toby tells Sophie all about [shockingly awful thing], but how come she never mentions it in her journal ever again?”

I tend to agree wholeheartedly with about 90% of my editors’ suggestions. A further 5% has me going, “Mmm, you’ve got a point about that, but if I change it, then this part won’t make sense . . .” In those cases, I usually come up with some sort of compromise solution. Then there’s another 5% where I put my foot down and say, “NO WAY am I changing that!” (I say this in my head. My editors aren’t actually there when I’m rewriting the manuscript. Thank goodness.)

The sort of editing I’ve talked about so far is usually called the structural edit. It’s about fixing the plot so that the story makes sense. The next stage is the copy edit, which looks at individual words and sentences, checks facts, ensures spellings are consistent throughout the series, that sort of thing. (We tend to argue about commas A LOT at this stage.) In practice, the structural and copy editing blurred together a bit for The FitzOsbornes at War. Finally, the editing was done and the whole thing was sent off to the typesetters.

Next: Book design and typesetting

First published on the Centre for Youth Literature website, Inside A Dog, in 2012.

4. Write Lots of Words

In the case of The FitzOsbornes at War, I had to write about 136,000 words. Luckily, I didn’t know how ridiculously long the story was going to be when I started typing, otherwise I’d have been too intimidated even to begin the book. As it was, I simply sat down at my computer every day, looked at my stack of index cards and told myself, ‘Okay. Today, I’ll try to get through two cards.’ Then, after I incorporated each bit of information from an index card into my story, I’d put a tick next to the information on the card (as you can see in yesterday’s index card photo). It was very satisfying to end a day with a couple of ticks, but that didn’t happen very often. Sometimes it would take me weeks to get through a single card. Sometimes I’d decide that a particular fascinating fact was never going to fit comfortably into my story, no matter what I did. Regardless, I plodded on.

I wrote the book in its correct order, from the first chapter to the last, so I wouldn’t get confused. This also helped motivate me (‘Okay, today I have to write that boring yet necessary bit about Churchill, but as soon as that’s done, I get to write that funny story about Henry!’). Yes, writers are weird.

After about a year and a half, I had a whole lot of words printed on paper:

Don’t even ask how many pages that is. TOO MANY. That’s why it needed to be edited.

Next: Editing