I don’t believe you

I was asked last weekend to explain the different needs for accuracy in fiction novels when dealing with those gray areas between fact and fiction.

The most important thing is that your reader must believe the story. You can have blue people, three purple moons and red and white striped flowers in your world, as long as they’re consistent and logical. Those people/flowers/moons must stay the same, or be logically different (the moons can set) throughout the book.

I have mentioned before in a previous blog about an author who won a major literary award for her semi-autobiographical story about how she escaped from a country by walking across the border. The problem was that the country she said she escaped to, does not share a border with the country she left. The editors, publisher, and judges all missed that point but the readers didn’t. They stopped believing her and the award was withdrawn. If only she’d made a country name up, no one would have had a problem with her story. They’d have thought she was protecting the people who helped her, not telling a lie. It turned out later after investigation the entire book was made up. Again, this would not have been a problem if she’d used imaginary place names and said it was fiction. She then would have deserved the award she won so briefly.

Which takes us back to the key point. The reader has to believe what you’re telling them. If your villain is using an automatic rifle and doesn’t hit the escaping-on-foot heroine, the villain needs to be a very bad shot, half-blind, or distracted, or all of the above. And if that heroine is running barefoot through the woods at midnight how can she see where she’s going, why doesn’t she cut her feet on rocks and what was she doing there in the first place?

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Things I learned from reading romance books

A sheik/squillionaire/CEO of a multinational corporation will have had dozens of mistresses and girlfriends, but that sweet, innocent virgin daughter of a friend/secretary/nanny/nurse will cause him to have a one-night stand with her, with no condom in sight, and she will inevitably get pregnant and decide to raise the child alone, in dire poverty, rather than tell him about the baby.
Should he happen to find out about the child, he will refuse to believe it’s his and he never demands DNA testing to prove his case. He’d rather just trust his feelings. After all that’s how he got to be a squillionnaire.
The virgin never asks him to use a condom. Of course she knows of his dozens of mistresses, but she also “knows” he’d never give her a sexually transmitted disease. (He never does either. Just a baby).
No heroine ever has a headache and no hero ever rolls over in bed and goes straight to sleep. Neither of them snore or drool in their sleep either.
No one anywhere ever goes to the toilet. Ever.
Whenever the heroine is invited unexpectedly to a party/ball/wedding no matter how poor she is, or where she comes from, she always has the perfect dress to wear to the occasion.
When the hero and heroine are running away from the bad guy, no matter how far they travel or how long the pursuit lasts for, they never run out of clean underwear or need to do a load of laundry.

And do you know why this is so?

Because it’s a romance story. It’s fiction. Fantasy. If the virgin caught genital warts from the CEO, and the hero had erectile dysfunction it’d be real life! And no one wants to read about that!

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Writing Fast

Back in the old days, creating a book was a long, slow process. Originally they were written by hand, the labor of a life-time with decorated, painted borders on each page, and embellished capital letters, each of which was like a tiny painting in itself. Even when printing was invented each letter was a miniscule piece of metal that had to be physically placed in a tray, by hand, to make every word.
Times have changed, but the attitudes of some people have not. They feel that unless a book takes a very long time it can’t be of value. They forget that many famous authors actually wrote their books chapter by chapter to be published in weekly newspapers. Charles Dickens pioneered this with “The Pickwick Papers” but it became the “normal” way most popular books were written.
In other words, the huge time gap was not in the creation process by the author (he was writing a chapter a week, minimum) it was in the length of time actual physical publication took.
The “one book a year” model was also needed for the production process in many of the traditional print publishers last century. Even when the actual physical printing became faster and easier, the publisher had added many more layers and stages the book needed to pass through—cover art, marketing and more.
Some writers assumed that if they could write more than one book a year their work simply couldn’t be good enough. They wrote and rewrote, edited and reedited or lost their self confidence and stopped writing all together.
But if a reader takes a critical approach to a book, they will be unable to know which chapter an author sat down and wrote in a day and which chapter was agonized over for a month.
Today a self publishing author can line up her cover artist, her editor, her book formatter, and her marketing team, so that the moment she types, “The end” those people are ready to do their part. The book can be written in a few months, edited in a week, and ready for purchase on a dozen third party sellers forty-eight hours after that.
It is for the reader to decide if a book is what they want to read or not. The length of time taken from the author typing the final sentence until the book is available for sale is not a guide to the excellence of the writing. Some authors simply are prolific.
Besides, just as Charles Dickens changed a few things between when his books were serialized in the newspapers, and before they were published as books, so, too, the twenty-first century author can make changes and digitally republish their books overnight if a lot of readers don’t like something or - gasp - find an error.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Review of Ken and Barbie book cover doll set

This is hysterically funny although decidedly irreverent. Warning. Do not attempt to eat or drink while reading this “book cover” review.

http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/blog/barbie-the-raider-the-washboard-and-me

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

25 signs you’re addicted to books

How many are true of you?
http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/signs-youre-addicted-to-books-reading



Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

How Reading Books Fosters Language Development around the World

This is a long, heavy, scholarly article about reading development worldwide.
Let me give you just a few interesting points from it.

The years from birth to age three are very important to later literacy. That’s when babies learn about language so reading to preschoolers is vital. Language teaches children how to categorize things – how to organize their world so they understand it.

Using gestures with children not yet able to talk helps them learn.

Kids will learn words much faster if they’re interested in the item or topic under discussion, and they learn faster when an adult responds to them.

Children learn grammar as they learn vocabulary. This is why reading books together helps so much. They learn sentences, they are with an adult and the story is usually interesting to them.

The frequency of reading is more accurate at showing children’s educational success than socio-economic status.

Giving kids an exciting book to read is a great start. Reading it with them is even better.

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cdr/2012/602807/

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Ten Fascinating Obsolete Words

Sillily: In a silly manner; foolishly.
- Rev. John Boag's Imperial Lexicon, c. 1850

Groak: To silently watch someone while they are eating, hoping to be invited to join them –www.ObsoleteWord.Blogspot.com

Stiricide: n 1656 -1656 falling of icicles from a house

Jirble: To pour out (a liquid) with an unsteady hand: as, he jirbles out a dram —www.Wordnik.com

Vocabulation: The use or choice of words.
- William Craigie's New English Dictionary, 1928

Curglaff: The shock felt in swimming when one first plunges into the cold water — John Jamieson’s Etymological Scottish Dictionary, 1808

Uglyography: n 804 -1834 bad handwriting; poor spelling
Your uglyography conceals the cogency and brilliance of your ideas.

Englishable: That which may be rendered into English — John Ogilvie’s “Comprehensive English Dictionary”, 1865

Unthew: A bad habit or custom; a vice [c. 900-1400];unthewed, ill-mannered, unruly, wanton [1200- late 1300s], unthewful, unmannerly, unseemly [c. 1050-early 1300s]. - William Craigie's New English Dictionary, 1926

Resistentialism: The seemingly spiteful behavior shown by inanimate objects —www.ObsoleteWord.Blogspot.com


Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.