Professional Looking Books the Easy Way

When I wrote The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing to help readers begin writing their lifestories, I knew that some readers would eventually be ready to publish story albums – collections of short stories – or full-length memoirs. To help them produce professional looking volumes, I included instructions for assembling and preparing the documents to take advantage of free Print-On-Demand services like CreateSpace.com. I gave detailed instructions for using Styles to simplify formatting and ensure uniform results. I explained how and why to adjust line spacing for easier reading and suggested a number of reader-friendly fonts readily available for free download. I gave instructions for setting custom page size and effective margin settings. You’ll find everything there that you need to know to create a “real” book that doesn’t scream BEGINNER BOOK!

But, I admit it, there is a learning curve, and it’s more effort than many people want to invest. Until now, if you didn’t feel up to the challenge, have the time to try, or have a friend or relative you could cajole into helping, you could either settle for the home-made look or write a big check to a book designer or layout service.

I have great news: Joel Friedlander, veteran book designer, publisher of The Book Designer.com  and author of over 700 helpful articles for self-publishers, just launched a new service offering affordable, professionally designed templates that allow you to produce a polished book project with Microsoft Word. These templates relieve you of all decisions about line spacing, margin settings, header arrangement, font choices and more.

All you need to do is to write, edit and polish your manuscript, paste it into the template, and follow the comprehensive set of instructions to add header information, apply body text and title styles, fill in publication information and so forth. Add a cover and upload to CreateSpace and you’ll amaze everyone with your stunning results.

You may be wondering if I’ve used one of these templates. No, I have not, and I’m not getting a commission or any other incentive from this recommendation, but I know a good thing when I see it. I have used the same process they did to create templates (I even tell you how to create your own templates in my book), so I know how they work. It may be a little tedious, even stressful at first, but it isn’t rocket science, and it’s way easier than starting from scratch. You’ll also find templates for producing eBooks that coordinate with the look of your print project. That alone is worth the cost of the template.

If you are even thinking of someday publishing a volume for your family or the world at large, pay a visit to Joel’s sites. Look through the wealth of general information at The Book Designer.com and download a copy of his free eBook, Ten Things You Need to Know About Self-Publishing. Then click on over to Book Design Templates.com and check out the selections. While you are there, look for the Guides link on the menu bar where you can download copies of his free Book Construction Blueprint and  Template Formatting Guide eBooks. They are “must read” material, even if you don’t plan to use his templates.

As powerful as they are, current Book Design Templates don’t currently include one key element you’ll probably want: automated magic for inserting photos. Fortunately you can find step-by-step instructions for doing this beginning on page 264 in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

You put an enormous amount of time and thought into writing your stories. You owe it to yourself and your stories to make them look as good as they sound.

Write now: take a break from writing and read Joel’s free e-Books, then watch a few YouTube video tutorials on using Styles to ease your way whether you use his templates, the instructions in my book, or wing it on your own.

The Writer’s Path

Although 99% of my writing is stored electronically in several places, I have a  filing cabinet in my office, with drawers 24" deep. The back of of them is hard to access. That’s where my oldest stories are stored, the ones I wrote in 1979 on my old Smith Corona electric at the beginning of my journey along my Writer’s Path.

Every few years I pull those stories out and am reminded again how utterly pitiful they are. True, they were fiction. Sort of. I didn’t know about lifestory writing yet, and would not have been brave enough to write openly anyway. Although some content is touching, descriptions were flat as Kansas, dialogue stilted and contrived. They jumped around. And they were preachy. I had an agenda when I wrote those stories and it wasn’t hidden. They were a start.

Twenty-five years ago, I knew nothing of creative writing classes or writing groups, and never thought to look for books on how to write. I was shooting from the finger tips, buoyed by A’s on research papers.

I fared a bit better when I became contributing editor for a local women’s magazine, getting favorable remarks on my stories from casual acquaintances. When my first book, Meetings: Do’s, Don’ts and Donuts, was published in 1997, I was horrified by the first round of editing. That red ink looked like blood in a war zone.  Humiliation rapidly morphed into hope and excitement at the prospect of learning to be a serious writer. That experience was a cram course in writing.

Since then I’ve taken writing courses. I’ve read stacks and piles of books on how to write, spent hundreds of hours reading websites and listening to webinars and podcasts. But even more, I’ve written and written, and I’ve edited hundreds of stories for students. I have written for at least those 10,000 hours presumably required for mastery, though I don’t claim any titles as such. I’m great at description, but I still have much to learn. My path continues to go up and down, rising overall.

Looking back at those early stories, even at early blog posts, I can see that yes, I have learned, slowly at first, then more rapidly as I climbed along that path. I have grown as a writer, and I hope I continue to do so as long as my fingers move. I still can’t crank out a masterpiece on the first try. I edit my own work, sometimes going back months later when it feels like a stranger wrote it. And I continue to rely on feedback from others for points of view I would never, ever think of.

New writers, take heart. While it’s true that some people are born with a gift for eloquence, even they have a learning curve – they just learn faster. Some people are born with an eye for painting, others with the right legs for running. We each have a gift. But even those without “the gift” can learn to produce respectable results.

With practice.
With guidance.
With collaboration.

Take classes. Read, both how-to-write books and memoir or fiction. Join a writing group. Above all, keep writing. You’ll see results much sooner than I did, because it took me forever to find people to help me along the path. You don’t have to wait. Please join our growing community of life writers on the Life Writers Forum on YahooGroups. Sign up for the mailing list of the National Association of Memoir Writers and participate in the free monthly teleseminar roundtables. And keep writing! Climb that writer’s path, one story at a time.

Write now: write a story about your earliest memory if you’ve never written before. Pull out the oldest story you can find if you’ve been writing for awhile and look for ways to improve it. If you don’t see any, show it to a writing buddy and ask for feedback. If you still can’t find any, congratulations. You are ready for publication!

Write for Emotional Impact

In 2007 I wrote two posts, “Color Me Obsessive,” Part 1 and Part 2, about a collaborative effort to compile a comprehensive list of terms describing emotions and feelings. With the help of classes I later taught, that list has grown to include 1100 words.

Many other posts here and on my Writing for the Health of It blog cover the physical and emotional health benefits of labeling and expressing emotion. But there’s a lot more to it. It’s not just for and about you.

Feelings and emotions are a corner stone of connecting with readers. Readers want to know what is going on in a character’s mind and heart. In the case of writing memoir, the only character you can speak directly for is yourself. That doesn’t mean that other people are restricted to the role of paper dolls. You can tell readers what you observe, assume, and hear them say.

The most obvious way of conveying these emotions is to express them directly as adjectives or verbs, but that’s limiting, and tends to keep a story glued flat to the page. In The Emotion Thesaurus Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman explain:

Readers have high expectations. They don’t want to be told how a character feels; they want to experience the emotion for themselves.

In previous posts I’ve urged you to practice tuning in to your own non-verbal cues when you are in various states of emotion, and to closely observe these cues in others. Keeping a journal of your observations gives you golden nuggets to use as you write, helping you satisfy those reader expectations.

However, if you are writing now, you need a huge database now, and you don’t have time to spend a few years observing yourself and others to develop a strong vocabulary for adding this element to your stories, and even if you did, you probably don’t know how to go about it. I didn’t. Fortunately, Puglisi and Ackerman explain:

To convey feelings well, a writer must also utilize nonverbal communication, which can be broken down into three elements: physical signals (body language and actions), internal sensations (visceral reactions) and mental responses (thoughts).

The book goes on to give you tools for doing just that. It begins with a brief section overviewing the three elements, demonstrating how to use them, and describing how to avoid common problems like telling, clichéd emotions, melodrama, over-reliance on dialogue, and more.

Over 90% of the book is devoted to an in-depth analysis of 75 key emotions ranging from adoration to worry. Each word entry begins with a definition, then moves on to exhaustive lists of physical signals, internal sensations, mental responses, cues of acute or long-term (name of emotion), what it may escalate to, cues of suppressed (name of emotion), and a writer’s tip.

When I finally got around to buying this book a few months ago, my heart beat a little faster as I realized that I’d struck gold, perhaps more than they realized when they wrote it. This material will definitely punch up my writing, but it’s also helping me become more perceptive of others and more accurately assess what they may be feeling. Some fortunate people seem to have been born with an innate sense of this. Others of us need all the help we can get to emerge from the “clueless” state.

You may wonder how to reconcile the 1100 emotions on the list I developed with the relatively paltry sum of 75 they assess. As I scan the longer list, I can easily cluster the terms as synonyms for the 75 core emotions in the book, so you can take the long list and reduce any of the other 1025 terms to its nearest core word and go from there. But even if you limit your emotional vocabulary to the 75 and use them in the masterful ways you’ll learn in this book, nobody is going to miss the more elaborate terms.

If you are serious about putting wings on your words, this is a book you’ll want to keep at your fingertips.

Write now: using the words angry, sad and happy, practice writing sentences or paragraphs that express those emotions through body signals – language, actions, or appearance. Write two sets of these, one from your point of view and also as you observe them in somebody else. Then from  your own point of view write about visceral sensations and inner monologue for each of the three emotions. Then look at a few old stories and look for opportunities to add impact by incorporating these additional modes.

A Picture Requires a Thousand Words

You know the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” That may be true if you already know what the picture is about. Otherwise a picture is a prompt for you to write a story, if only a fleeting one, in your mind.

Consider the picture above. Two things are obvious: A woman wearing a fancy white dress and gloves is holding a lacy white parasol. Anything beyond that is pure conjecture. Right now I invite you to join an experiment. Skip down to the comment section and spend a minute or two writing a mini story about what you see in this picture. Write your own before you check to see what others have written. Check back later to keep track.

I guarantee that no two readers will write the same story. With a dozen responses, three or four may be similar, but even those will differ in detail. I’ve used this exercise with various pictures countless times in classes, workshops and writing groups, and I never cease to be amazed at the variety of stories that pour out, especially when the pictures are more complex.

Nobody is surprised when different stories emerge from the same picture. You almost expect that, and after you hear the additional stories, you can see them too. But do you realize that the same thing happens with stories? Each reader reads a slightly different story, colored by personal experience. If it matters to you that readers clearly understand your point of view, it’s important to explain details with the most vivid description you can muster.

Including action and emotion in those descriptions builds strong connections with readers. Although my understanding of them is foggy, our brains have mirror neurons that cause us to have a sense of following along and doing or feeling what we observe others do or feel.

Observe feelings? Even when we don’t articulate feelings verbally, they tend to leak out the edges with subliminal hints others pick up. Become a sleuth and develop a writing vocabulary to describe how bodies and faces betray emotions and use these in your writing to elicit empathy from readers. These descriptions are especially valuable in portraying emotion in others when you are writing lifestory or memoir, because when you write in first person, you can’t report what’s going on in someone else’s mind – you can only write what you observe or they tell you.

Paint your word picture with vivid, finely tuned details and description, then pair it with a graphic. The combination of story plus graphic will double the value of each.

Write now: write a story in a comment about the woman in the picture. Include details of what she’s thinking, how she’s feeling, what she's about to do, and anything else you can think of. Then find a picture of some event or place from your past and write a story about that, including more details from your memory. Don’t skimp on feelings, reflections and action. Whether or not it activates mirror neurons, that’s what draws readers in.

Documentary Memoir

When I first began writing lifestories and teaching workshops to help others do the same, my emphasis was on preserving family memories and creating a legacy of personal and family history for future generations. That picture gradually enlarged to include documenting your way of life in what will soon be times gone by.

In spite of a growing emphasis on transformational, healing and confessional memoir, historical documentation still serves a valid and important purpose, one that should not get lost in the scramble to bare more psychological skin. Well-written documentary memoir can be both fascinating and thrilling.

British author Ian Mathie is remarkably skilled at this. I read each of his four  engrossing volumes of memoir straight through. I was unable to tear my eyes from the page as I read about his experiences during the 1970s in various parts of northern Africa where he worked as a water engineer for an unspecified British Foreign Service agency. Rather than commuting from cities, he preferred to live in remote villages among the people while teaching them to dig reliable wells with natural filtering systems to provide a sustainable, safe water supply. He began schools with native teachers to spread these skills to other areas.

At times he was in the jungle. Other times he was in one desert or another, and occasionally he did live in cities. He encountered witch doctors, tribal chiefs, and ordinary villagers. He was invited to dinner by four different presidents, including Mobutu. He drove all over in Land Rovers, rode trains and camels, and often relied on his small Cessna. He was a genius at working the system.

But these are not books about “The Further Adventures of Ian Mathie.” Despite the fact that his life was indeed filled with constant adventure, the emphasis in his stories is on the people he encountered, the people he came to care so deeply for, his friends for life — which unfortunately wasn't long. Most of those people and cultures were victims of one revolution or another.

The books document lifestyles of people who had highly evolved cultures, ideally adapted to an environment which was already endangered when he lived among them. My understanding and respect for the wisdom of prewestern, native cultures soared, and I expect enthralled anthropology students will be citing Mathie’s accounts in piles of research papers for decades.

Few of us have stories as inherently exotic and powerful as Mathie’s, but even ordinary life can be described in compelling ways and may seem exotic to your offspring  in fifty or one hundred years. Imagine how fascinating it would be to read the details of your great-great-grandparents’ lives more than 100 years ago. Even if all mine did was haul in the harvest and milk the cows, I’d love to know how they went about it.

Each of Mathie’s volumes has a different structure, so each has a lesson to teach on how to write as a bonus beyond the amazing content. All four of his volumes are available in print on Amazon. The first, Bride Price, is now also available in all eBook formats as well as text documents on Smashwords, and the other titles will soon follow.

Write now: write a description of your day today (or a recent one of your choosing). Rather than simply listing things calendar style, describe how you did them. Pretend you are writing for someone from 200 years ago and explain what a dishwasher is and how it works. What sort of blankets are on your bed. What does your house look like? What did you do at work if you went there? Fill them in, and tell how you felt about each activity. You may find your days are more interesting than you’d realized!

Breathe Life Into Stories

Your story seems flat. You knew that even before writing group members confirmed your suspicion. You’ve been working on descriptions. You’ve double-checked details to be sure give readers have a clear picture of the situation.

You’ve scattered plenty of sensory description through your story, without clumping it or making it sound like you used a checklist. It still seems flat and shallow. How can you make it pop off the page? What magic will breathe life into it and connect with readers?

A clue to a solution lies in this excerpt from a scene in Dinty Moore’s memoir, The Accidental Buddhist, where Moore is being exposed to the ancient art of meditation in a Buddhist monastery:

… I turn out to have a particularly unrelenting monkey. He not only swings from tree to tree, he rips off big green leaves and chatters at the top of his monkey lungs, an angry baboon somehow set loose in an espresso bar.

Zen students will immediately recognize this monkey as a metaphor for the state of Moore’s mind. That metaphor brings mental chaos into focus as something tangible, something we can see and hear, and at least imagine touching and smelling.

Moore’s static image of  sitting zazen on a zafu* snaps to life with this metaphor. I hope he will forgive me for taking the liberty of publicly imagining how he might have initially written the thought in that paragraph:

… I have a terrible case of monkey mind. I can’t stay focused on anything for longer than a second….

That simple statement would suffice to describe the situation, but it leaves me yawning and my monkey mind swings into another tree, maybe to find coconuts to lob at his. In the completed version, his napkin sketch image has become a mind movie with depth and dimension as the monkey swings from tree to tree, rips leaves and chatters.

Some simpler examples:

Her eyes were lively.	Her eyes sparkled.
The scene was picturesque.	Hundred-foot oaks and maples stood guard behind the cabin, wildflowers dotted the meadow, and …
The scent of wild roses was in the air.	Wild roses wafted scent through the air.

The first two examples above use a form of “to be” to link to an adjective describing the subject. In the third example, “in the air” is an participial phrase that tells where the scent was. Don’t worry about remembering that term. The important thing is that functionally the phrase gives additional information about the subject without imparting any sense of vitality.

Using a “be” verb this way is grammatically correct and adds variety in sentence structure, but this wording has a calming effect. Switching to an active verb, as the second column shows, is one of the many ways to liven up your language.

Keep an eye out for was, were, and related forms that link to subject modifiers, and replace them with stronger verbs and additional details when appropriate.

Write now: Review a story you wrote and underline each place you use a verb that links to an adjective or other subject modifier. Circle each active linking verb (smells, feels, proves …). Rewrite the other sentences to include some motion or sense of action.

*Standard usage puts foreign words in italics. Adding the English translation immediately after the italicized term is optional. Whichever form you choose, be consistent throughout your story.

Writerly Resolutions for 2013

Writers benefit from New Year Resolutions as much or more than anyone. I realize we are already four days into the year, and for many, thoughts of resolutions last about as long as ice cubes in New Year’s Eve drinks.

But it's not too late. Durable, productive resolutions take time to craft. Besides, you need to do more than write two or five words about an outcome. You need to use your writerly skills to flesh out that description. Tell yourself or the world what it will look like, taste like, feel like (both tactile feel and emotional), and so forth. Then draft at least a rudimentary plan of getting from here to there, so you can track your progress.

I have two goals I’ll mention here. One is relatively new. In November I featured a guest post by Elizabeth Kim, who wrote about her experience publishing two Kindle Short eBooks, Dancing In the Rain and What My Mother Didn’t Know. Each of her books is what I refer to as a story album. Each is comprised of six or seven poignant and touching short stories that focus on a common theme.

This was not a new idea to me – I include instructions for compiling story albums in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing – but I have not, to date, published one of my own. Now that it’s become easy to do this in eBook format, it’s time to get the show on the road. I already had four stories about my adventures as a chilihead (someone addicted to the endorphin rush that follows hot chili intake and considers a day without chili rather like a day without sunshine). I have resolved to finish three more and publish this eBook story album by … April?

Process: finish drafting one story, then draft the other two on the list. Edit all three. Compile all seven stories into a single document, format, upload to Kindle and Smashwords. Celebrate.

I’d be more specific about dates, but my second goal may nudge this one aside. I have firmly resolved that this is the year I will finally finish the book on sensory description that I began a couple of years ago. Delays have made the content richer, and now it’s time to finish it and send it out to the world.

Surely you’re curious about this second project. I hope so! I’m working on finalizing the content, and will be announcing the title shortly with the advent of a Facebook page for it. You’ll be hearing more about it here, and I’ll be having book-related events. Stay tuned for details and excerpts! Subscribe to the blog if you haven’t already so you won’t  miss a post about it.

Write Now: Set at least one writerly goal you want to accomplish by the end of 2013. This may be a goal to write twelve stories, one a month. It might be to finish the draft of a memoir. It might be to journal at least five times a week through the year, or complete a story album of two dozen stories. Whatever it is, be sure you do believe you can complete it. Then write a description of the completed project, as discussed above, and create a simple outline of steps to get from here to there.