Writing Tip #7: I Should Probably Write That Down

As you all know, I work as a freelance editor to support my career as a full-time writer. One of my most recent jobs was a copy- and content edit of the first novel in a trilogy. The editor asked me, in addition to the in-document edits and comments, to create a “series guide” for the trilogy—because whether I edit the other two books in the series or not, whoever does it is going to need to know what was established in the first book about the characters (their physical attributes, ages, likes/dislikes, backstories, quirks, etc.), the setting (geography, town names, store names, area layout, who lives where, and so on), the timeline of the story (if someone says in book 1, in May, she’s six weeks pregnant, she can’t have the baby in book 3, which takes place from August to October), and so on.

Which brings me to today’s writing tip.

Writing Tip #7. Make lists.
Something every successful con artist or pathological liar knows—you have to keep track of the details; you have to know whom you told what and when. Since those of us who call ourselves writers know that what we’re doing is basically telling lies for fun and fortune (okay, maybe not so much fortune as farthings), we need to remember what we’ve made up.

But there are a lot of other things we want to remember also. For example:
Potential Character Names (some of mine are: Elaine, Stephen, Montgomery, Elisa, Joycelyn, Brandon, Kyle, Dacia, Liane, Neal, Ryan, Shaun (F), Alexander, Deborah, Grace)

Interesting Words (synonyms for loud: forte, fortissimo, sonorous, deafening, ear-rending, thunderous, crashing, booming, full-throated, trumpet-voiced, clangorous, clamorous, blaring; synonyms for do act, serve, practice, take action, proceed, go ahead, run with it, make it so, get on with it, have a go, effect, bring about, deliver)

Possible Titles (The Wooing of Mrs. Paroo, House Mother, The Thirty-Five Guarantee, There Is Nothing Lost, Your Right to Remain Wrong, The Very Thought of You)

Interesting Things Overheard (At a restaurant: “As soon as we get back to the office, we need to put a kill order in on McCall.” Guy on the phone at Panera: “How do you feel about widows?” Heard on ESPN: “Cooler than the flip side of the pillow.”)

There are also business/industry things we need to keep track of:
Networking Contacts (Agents/editors met at conferences; authors met at conferences; authors, publicists, book sellers met at book signings; librarians, book buyers, writing teachers)

Blogs (those to read daily, weekly, or occasionally—Google Reader is great for this)

Reading Lists (books to read for fun; books in my genre for critical reading/study; research books; craft books; nonfiction; devotionals)

Research Resources (contacts for interviews, websites, books, museums)

And so on.

These can be kept hand-written in notebooks or you can use my old method of various sizes and colors of Post-it Notes stuck to the sides of the computer and the wall. Or you can type them in and keep them electronically.

But even more important than these are continuity lists and style sheets.

Continuity Tracking
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, one of the main components I have to edit for, especially with the series (a series with continuing characters and storylines written by several different authors) I edit each month is continuity. To try to keep these multiple authors up to date with what all the other authors have done in the volumes they’ve written is to have created a Series Guide—a way of trying to ensure continuity from book to book to book.

But it isn’t just from book to book that we need to ensure continuity. It’s within the same book. Because we’re writing them over an extended period of time, we may not remember certain details—a character’s eye color or a minor character’s first name.

Obviously, when creating a series guide or continuity lists, that others (co-authors, editors) will be using, it’s usually done as text, with possibly a few images appended. But when you’re doing this for yourself, you can be as creative and visual as you’d like.

Microsoft has a new program that came with Office 2007 called One Note, which acts like a virtual three-ring binder. Here are some screen captures of how I used it to track continuity in Love Remains:

And, as I was writing Love Remains, I tracked details I would need for characters in The Art of Romance and Turnabout Is Fair Play:

That way, I’m not having to recreate the wheel (or the descriptions/lives of my characters). I try to write these types of details down as I’m writing, but most of the time, it’s easier to do in the revision process.

Of course, sometimes the old-fashioned way works just fine:

Style Sheets
More often than not, style sheets are kept by editors. For example, here’s the house style sheet (the decisions made amongst the editorial staff that applied to everything we worked on) that I developed when I was working at Ideals Publications.

If you’re writing something that includes unusual names (such as Cajun, foreign, or otherworldly/supernatural), it would be a good idea to make a style sheet so that once your manuscript is acquired and sent to copy editing, you can make things easier for the copy editor by sending along a document showing how things are spelled, punctuated, capitalized, etc. For example, I should have done this on Ransome’s Honor, because port admiralty shouldn’t have been capitalized but the Admiralty (referring to the group that oversaw the entire Royal Navy in London) should have been capitalized. And I didn’t realize how much I needed it to help out my editor when I was writing Ransome’s Crossing because I wrote things differently in RC than I did in RH (in RH I had poop deck and Aye, aye, sir; but when writing RC I wrote them as poop-deck and aye-aye, sir, so she had to go in and correct all the little details like that).

I know certain multi-published authors have personal style sheets that their publishing house gives to all of their copy editors who work on that author’s books (with instructions such as “don’t use semicolons”).

So that, little ones, is why we need to write things down.