Category: Writing

Coauthors have a problem.

How do you speak about yourselves in a book or article? Who is the “I” in your piece? Do you always use “we”? But what if you are telling a story of one author but not the other? Do you always say “I (Andy) once . . .”? But that can be awkward and intrusive.

In an appendix to Write Better I offer four options for how to handle this perennial problem. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. A recently coauthored book by Randy Richards and Richard James, Misreading Scripture Through Individualistic Eyes, offers a creative fifth option: Use “I” throughout and never identify which author this refers to.

The advantages are many. Readers don’t trip over the “I (Andy) once . . .” formula. Each author can freely tell their own stories in first person. This is also less awkward than one author using first person and the other being referred to in third person (“Once Andy . . .”). It likewise avoids the oddly impersonal option of both using third person.

But doesn’t Richard’s and James’s solution create confusion? How can you mix two different lives as if they were one? Because of that, this solution won’t work for many coauthored books. But it works in this case for a couple reasons they mention in the preface.

First, in this book half the chapters were not written by one author and the rest by the other. Rather the two were constantly sending all the chapters back and forth, drafting, adding, deleting, revising, reworking.

Second, and I think this is key, the stories they each tell are in a narrow range. They only have to do with their cross-cultural experiences—not about their children, marriages, early life, and so forth. And understanding other cultures is the focus of the book. In addition, they tell us that stories from the Middle East usually originated with Rich, and those from eastern Asia usually started with Randy.

Where coauthors tell stories from very different life histories, this won’t be a feasible solution. But these colleagues make it work.

Recently a friend asked an interesting question after reading my blog on writer’s block. He wrote:

Andy,

I wonder if I need some writer’s block. I don’t have a problem with getting started. Rather, as I jokingly tell students, I’ve never met a word count I couldn’t exceed. I am working on my first solo, non-academic book for a Christian audience. In each chapter, I’ve stuffed in all sorts of things that I think are useful to know about the topic. That is giving me 4000-6000 word chapters, which I’m told is much too long. I need a tool for discerning what pieces I can safely leave out without losing my authorial voice. Any recommendations for that??? Thanks.

Prolific in Pittsburgh

It’s a great question. I have met a few other authors with “reverse writer’s block.” They know they should write less (or have been told to write less by an editor) but can’t seem to stop or keep the word count down.

Normally I don’t suggest self-editing before we start drafting. That can often shut down our flow. Unless you usually find yourself writing 3,000 words for every 1,000 assigned, it’s best to cut afterward. But how? A few things come to mind.

First, expect cutting to be painful. It will hurt because you believe in all your content. Don’t think you can do it without some anguish. If you don’t feel pain you probably aren’t cutting enough. Don’t expect to achieve what you want by deleting a word here or there. Whole sentences and paragraphs will have to go. Probably whole sections.

Second, save what you cut in a separate file. Maybe you can use it later for some other purpose. That could ease the pain a bit, knowing that your hard work is not forever banished to a digital netherworld. Remember: You don’t have to put everything possible into a piece. You can always write another book or article.

Third, when in doubt, throw it out. If the thought crosses your mind, “I wonder if this should go,” that is a likely candidate. Highlight it and everything else you think could be cut. Then see how many words you have left. If you are under the target word count, then you can reinstate some of your gems.

Fourth, in nonfiction you will often have main points. Sometimes you’ll have subpoints as well. But if you find you have sub-subpoints, those are likely candidates to ax.

Fifth, get a neutral party or two to give you input on what to cut. It should be people you trust and will listen to. It’s not fair to have them spend time reading your draft only to have you ignore most of what they say.

Two kinds of readers can be helpful. One is a person with significant writing or editing experience. Another type is someone in the target audience—your average reader. Have such people mark where their attention lagged or what they skipped over.

Finally, remember that after you make your cuts, your piece will almost always be better. Readers will remember more, and your prose will be stronger. Believe it. It’s true.

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credits: Pixabay stevepb (axe); Pixabay lograstudio (sleeping)

One way or another we all fall victim to writer’s block. But it can come in many forms. It is not just a blank screen that sits forever mocking our lack of output. Sometimes it means we just move at a very slow pace. Our perfectionism kicks in so we fuss over every sentence before moving on. Or we fear someone will think we are shallow or just borderline literate.

If that’s you, you are in good company. The good news is there are very practical things we can do to get us moving. Let me just reiterate a few ideas that might help.

1. Get The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and practice Morning Pages as she describes them. Writing thirty minutes a day without self-editing or correction about anything at all can help us form new habits that can get us writing more on a regular basis. If you think thirty minutes a day is a lot to commit to, think of how much time you’ve wasted staring at a screen getting nowhere. Highly recommended.

2. Read Betty Flowers whom I reference in Write Better. In just a page she gives us a great image. We all need our Judge and need to assure ourselves that the Judge will indeed have her say. But not till the end of the process—not at the beginning and not in the middle.

3. Do some writing exercises regularly. You can find sentence completion and other options on websites such as these:

Writing Exercises

Creative Writing Exercises

10 Best Creative Writing Exercises

Doing these show us and remind us that we can indeed write on demand.

4. Play Balderdash. This box game in which we create phony definitions is great fun in a group, especially when you let your imagination run wild and other people can spur you on. Getting a group together will be easier, we trust, in the near future. The fun in this game is the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of writing without overthinking go down easily.

Finally, Paul Silvia in How to Write A Lot tells us that people who were required to write daily wrote 3.5 time more pages and had twice as many creative ideas as those who waited for inspiration.* Being productive (such as with Morning Pages), can—even if our writing is flawed, wordy, or logically suspect—get us into a rhythm of writing which allows an opportunity for creativity.

Remember: We always can (and should) fix it later.

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*Thanks, Marcia Bosscher, for highlighting this for me.

When we write, starting with an outline is almost impossible.

That’s the case I make in Write Better (chapter 3, if you are interested). First comes observing, thinking, questioning, reading, researching, discussing, jotting notes, and maybe drafting paragraphs. Somewhere in the middle we start organizing our ideas.

New York Times columnist David Brooks describes how he does exactly this.

I am always collecting strings on about seven or eight columns. I’ve got piles of paper for gun control, immigration – whatever the issue of the day is – and then some intellectual things or cultural things. I’m collecting that string and I have a column due every three and a half days. . . . Based on what happens on the day before it’s due or the day it’s due, I’ll decide “Okay, I’m gonna do this one.” I have all this paper, documentation, notes I’ve taken from interviews, and I think geographically.

I lay it out on the floor of my office in piles of paper. Every pile is a paragraph. I pick up a pile. Write that paragraph. Throw that pile of paper in the garbage. And then repeat for all the piles. By the time I start writing, the column is already 80 percent done. It’s the organizing of the piles that’s the key process.

That’s how I wrote Write Better. My research and doodling consisted of forty years of editing and speaking about writing, and twelve years of blogging about writing and editing. Those were my rough notes and research. Then I took those “piles” of material and started sorting.

I initially had at thirty or forty groups which I consolidated into about twenty. As I did so, I noticed they fell into four large categories—the craft, the art, and the spirituality of writing plus practical things writers need to know about publishing.

When I started seriously drafting the book, I continued to rework the arrangement of chapters. Then I got input from a dozen readers on my full draft who gave many suggestions for more reorganization. Once more I shifted chapters around.

Order and structure are essential in helping readers understand what we have to communicate. As I say in Write Better, we shouldn’t try to start with an outline. But we had better end with one.

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paper image credit: Pixabay myrfa