Memoranda

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

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

3. Get Organised

As I researched, I took notes and I filed all my bits of paper in a big folder:

How did writers function before Post-It notes were invented? I used Post-Its as bookmarks, to label sections of my notes and to jot down bits of information that might come in handy later. As I was reading, I was constantly on the lookout for interesting trivia, funny anecdotes, outrageous people – anything that I could fit into my own story.

After about six months, my notes had outgrown my folder and my brain was about to explode with all my ideas, which meant it was time to move onto my index cards:

For The FitzOsbornes at War, I ended up with about two hundred palm-sized cards, each one containing notes about an important event of the war and/or a significant event for one of my characters. Each card also had a date at the top, and a number that showed where the card fitted into the storyline, as well as page references for my sources of information. For example, here’s card number 6:

If you can’t read my writing (and I don’t blame you if you can’t – even I have trouble reading it sometimes), it says, “mid Sept 1939 – S + V in London, farewell party for Kennedy children (Rosemary + Mr K stay in London) p. 67 Kathleen Kennedy – Lady B boasts about Cynthia doing war work –> Aunt C allows S + V to train in London”.

This tells me that in an early chapter, I need to move my two main characters, Sophie and Veronica, to London, re-introduce my readers to the Kennedy family and explain why Kathleen Kennedy leaves England. I also need to explain why their strict guardian, Aunt Charlotte, allows Sophie and Veronica to stay in London by themselves. And if I need to check any facts about this, I should look on page 67 of Kathleen Kennedy’s biography.

Organising all two hundred cards into some sort of logical order gave me a big, big headache, but when it was done, I could finally start writing. Yay!

Next: The actual writing bit

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

2. Do Lots of Research

The problem with doing research for a historical novel is that you don’t know what you need to know until you’ve actually finished writing the book. All you can do at the start is read as widely as possible. In my case, I began by reading general histories of the Second World War.

As you can see from my bookcase, I read about life in England during the war, and then started reading biographies and memoirs of significant people, including Winston Churchill (wartime Prime Minister), Kathleen Kennedy (yes, one of those Kennedys), Samuel Hoare (Ambassador to Spain) and Oswald Mosley (British Fascist). Then I searched the internet for newspaper articles, photos, film clips and other useful bits of information. It was like doing an enormous school assignment, but a lot more fun, because it was a topic that fascinated me AND I got to set my own questions.

The more I read, the more interesting story ideas popped into my head – which meant I needed to do even more research to find out whether those story ideas would fit into the real events of the war. I wasn’t writing a history textbook, but I did want to get the facts right. Unfortunately, even trying to find out something as simple as when a particular battle ended could turn up five different answers. Was it the day the first group of soldiers waved a white flag? Was it the next day, when their commanding officer ordered his men to lay down their arms, even though some of them kept on fighting? Was it the day a formal statement of surrender was signed on the battlefield? You get the idea.

I also needed to work out which sources were reliable. I found that books, newspaper articles and diaries written during the war were more likely to be biased, confusing and full of half-truths (or even flat-out lies) than later accounts of the war. This was partly because wartime censorship laws and military regulations made it impossible for people to write the truth while the war was happening. It wasn’t until the 1970s, for example, that the people who’d decrypted German codes at Bletchley Park were allowed to talk about their experiences. Ordinary civilians in wartime, relying on censored newspapers and radio broadcasts for their ‘facts’, often hadn’t a clue what was really going on in the wider world.

But even the Very Important People who DID know what was going on behind the scenes, and who wrote their memoirs AFTER the war, could still be unhelpful and unreliable. For example, one part of my plot involved a real event in Spain, in which the Nazis tried to kidnap a particular member of the British royal family. I’d read one version of the event, but I figured the memoirs of Sir Samuel Hoare, British Ambassador to Spain during the war, would be full of useful details. His book had never been published in Australia and was long out of print, but eventually I tracked down a second-hand copy in Adelaide via the internet. And when I read it, it turned out to be ABSOLUTELY HOPELESS. Not only did he fail to mention the kidnapping plot, he wrote a lot of self-important rubbish about what a wonderful Ambassador he’d been and how he’d single-handedly stopped Spain from helping the Nazis, which was TOTALLY NOT TRUE.

So, despite teachers often saying that books are more reliable than the internet, this is not always the case. For instance, I found lots of useful information on blogs and in official online archives when I was searching for details about fighter pilots in the Royal Air Force. The internet also came in handy when I needed to check lines of poetry or find out when particular newspaper articles had been published. It was all SO much easier than having to trek off to the library, which is what writers had to do in the Olden Days. Hooray for the internet!

Next: Getting all this research organised