Ways to Make a Good Book Better

Preface

Last week, I met my friend, Jon, at Forza for coffee. For those of you who don't live in Denver or haven't heard of Forza, it's a nice local coffee shop Jon showed me when we first started hanging out about a year ago. They have this great drink called a Ventian Late. Sadly, I have no idea what's in it, but it's really good. I tried their Holy Spumoni once, and it was so sweet I almost wanted ice cream to calm down the flavor. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it was very sweet, so make sure you're in the mood before you try it. It's located on 104th street just west of Federal, if you decide to look it up.

Having said that, we had a great meeting. Jon is a pretty good author and has been writing for a lot longer than me. He's never actually published anything and is pretty shy about letting people read his work, but ever since I started this project, he's been a great motivation. For some reason, the little icon that shows he's following me says "Keoni Keller." Why is that anyway?

Anyway, to get back to the story, he had a lot of ideas on how I could continue to improve on what I'm doing, so I wanted to share them with you here. I didn't take notes, but I think I remembered most of them, so I'll do as best as I can. If I forget something, feel free to leave a comment, Jon.

Before I write the methods of making a good book better, I want to pass on the warning Jon gave me. Don't ever stop writing to edit your book until you're done with the book. He told me not to apply any of these ideas to stuff I've already written. He says that when I finish my entire book, I should then go back and fix it all at once. I am going to start applying these ideas from here forward though.

Watch the Grammar

I personally hate grammar. I never liked diagramming things in school, and I still can't tell you what an indirect object does. I usually try to forget about grammar, and I'd much rather write like I talk than like some sort of school paper. Despite all that, Jon gave me some great reasons having good grammar helps make your book better.

1) Punctuation changes the meaning of a sentence:

Proper punctuation can clear up a lot of confusion. Jon showed me a wikipedia entry about the serial comma versus the Oxford comma: Serial comma entry. The point wasn't the article itself but some of the examples that show how you use a comma can change a sentence completely. The first example right under the "Unresolved Ambiguity" heading was my favorite.  I won't give any examples here for the sake of keeping things simple, but feel free to look at it for yourself.

2)Simplicity:

A sentence makes a lot more sense and is a lot more simple when all of the words are correct and match the sentence. For example, affect versus effect. I still don't know the difference between these. Jon and I spent a while talking about the difference, but he also told me to look on Grammar Girl to clarify when I don't know which one to use. When someone with a good vocabulary read my work, they need to be able to tell exactly what I'm saying.

--Addendum on grammar:

There is a thing called a hanging participle. Apparently I use these all the time. A hanging participle is when you have an "-ing" verb that should be related to a noun but is somewhere else in the sentence.... Now that I read that, I have no idea what I was trying to say. Let me give an example:

        Jim went to the store expecting to find a book.

In this example, the word expecting modifies the noun it's next to. So, the store is expecting to find a book, no Jim. In order for this to be correct, the sentence should read:

      Expecting to find a book, Jim went to the store.

I would never talk like that, but Jon showed me how it can create a lot of confusion if you don't do it correctly. I had never heard of a participle, much less a hanging one (reminds me of a hang nail), but I am going to watch for them from now on.

Keep the narration voice consistent

Jon pointed out several areas that I go from an archaic voice to a more modern voice. In the earlier chapters that I showed Jon before posting them, he pointed out that some characters spoke with "ye" instead of "you," but they didn't stay consistent in the accent otherwise. It's important to make sure you have a single narration voice and all your characters are consistent or the reader will become lost in what is happening. It's easy for the reader to loose focus if you don't maintain something consistent for them to hold on to.

Keep the characters separate from one another

Apparently a lot of people, myself included, tend to speak in their own voice when they write, but when you have a book with multiple characters, especially when you are writing from multiple points of view, it's easy to mix and blend the character voices, but it's important to keep them separate. The more distinct you can keep the character voices, the easier it is for the reader to follow and the more fun it is for them to get involved in. Characters become more real when they are more distinct. Try to imagine going to a movie where every character looked and sounded the same. Would that be fun or confusing?

Look at things from the character's point of view when writing

Here's one that I've realized going back over my book, when I write, I see the falls in the Netherworld and hear the sound of the river rushing by. I feel Natalie's adrenaline when the armies of the Korgar come by and Kaelon's pain as he's beaten to the ground. As the reader, you only feel what I describe to you. You only see the vistas I explain. When I write, I should have been writing with more description, seeing these things as the character sees them.

I should also describe them like the character would describe them, and not like I would describe them. The characters should all see the same thing in slightly different ways, and it should be described differently. This will give the reader a better sense of reality. I really want to go back and describe some areas more, but Jon encouraged me to keep writing until I was done, no matter what.

Don't rush the story

It's not about getting to the end of the book and being able to say, "I wrote a book." It's about telling a story and a journey. I've really been trying to get through the book because I want to be able to tell people about my book. I want to know what happens myself. When I play games, I rush through the main story and forget the side ones because I'm so interested on what's going to happen.

In real life, there are a lot of side stories that contribute to the main story. When we think about the Battle at Thermopylae, most of us think about the main story, the 300 Spartans who fought an army, but few of us think about what got them to that point or why those men were fighting or why they held off and fought until the last man was dead. If you think about it though, a story about just the battle would be short and fairly dull. It's the lives of the people who contributed that makes things interesting. Think of the movie "300." The battle that the movie was based on takes several minutes out of a couple-hour film. Don't rush the story. Stop to see the world sometimes.

Always have Jedi ^_^

 This one is actually a joke. Jon and I have been playing SWTOR together a lot recently, so he said "no task is impossible when you have a Jedi around."