How Do You Read?

 

My novel To Be Frank, is going through the editing process with my publisher’s team; essential to releasing a book. I love writing and enjoy the editing of content and organisation, but I do find the detailed grammar and presentation aspects challenging. Having no qualifications in English Language or Literature, since O levels in 1970, it’s easy to feel inadequate. My medical degrees, scientific background and years of writing healthcare notes don’t seem to help.

     I’ve always read a lot but am a relatively slow reader, over-using the technique of sub-vocalisation I suspect, which commonly achieves about 250 words per minute. Visual reading, at approximately 700 words per minute, is at the other extreme. Apparently, proficient readers are able to read at 280-350 words per minute without compromising comprehension. When editing one surely has to slow read and going through an 88,000 manuscript takes time. 

             

    As a result of rereading To Be Frank so many times in recent weeks, I am aware that it is common to read what you think you’ve written rather than what is actually on the page. From a neuroscience point of view, proficient readers don’t read one word at a time and the human mind doesn’t normally read every letter by itself but reads the word as a whole. In proofreading, that idea flies out of the window.

    During my research into ways of reading, I went off piste and, leaving the editing process behind, I discovered so many styles of reading I’d never thought about in specific terms. Here are just a few snippets:

    The concept of ‘speed reading’ began in the late 1950s and can involve skimming and searching sentences for clues, or scanning where one looks for information in a sentence with the use of a mind map to organise it in a visually hierarchical manner. Meta-guiding is another technique, involving the visual guiding of the eye using a finger or a pointer.

    The other end of the spectrum is ‘slow reading’, which is the intentional reduction in the speed of reading to increase comprehension and pleasure. It originated in the study of philosophy and literature and there’s been an increase in interest in slow reading as a result of the ‘slow movement’ and its focus on a deceleration of the pace of modern life. (Close reading or deep reading is the use of slow reading in literary criticism). Sven Birkerts, an American essayist and literary critic, says in The Gutenberg Elegies (1994) that “Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms”.

    Typoglycemia, incidentally, is the ability to read jumbled words. It is thought that to see the first and last letters of a word, in the right place, is all that matters and that’s why we can so often solve the puzzles posted on social media, for example ‘I bte yuo cn rd ths sntnc’ or ‘do oyu fnid this smilpe to raed?’. Maybe that’s also why we can’t always see our own mistakes?

    So, I’m voting for slow reading, with an occasional bit of skimming and a dose of typoglycemia when I next read a novel, and meanwhile I give thanks to my editors for helping with the hard grind and time consuming work of copy-editing and proofreading.

Sue Dawes' self-editing checklist for prose fiction

Based on my experience as a writer and my experience working as a part-time editor for 'The Writers' Company', I have put together a self-editing checklist for beginners. This is based on the things I look for when I edit a manuscript and from reading widely around the subject.

Characters      

 

·      Is it clear to the reader what your characters look like? E.g. height, weight, clothing, hair colour, monster qualities (if applicable).
·      Do we know what motivates them to act - what drives them?
·      Do we know what they fear and love?
·      Do they have a tic or habit when nervous? E.g. pushing their hair behind an ear.
·      Can each character be easily distinguished, or will the reader be muddled?
·      Perhaps they are a bit flat? What could you add to fully realise them? 
·      Have you avoided stereotypes and other, over-used descriptions (golden hair, twinkling blue eyes etc)?
·      Is there consistency? Does Fred suddenly start wearing glasses halfway through the story?
 
Dialogue
 
·      Is your dialogue authentic in terms of the diction and dialect of your character? Is it age appropriate?
·      Does it say what it needs to without over-explaining?
·      Have you remembered to remove anything the character already knows? E.g. a child talking to their parent would not say ‘I am your son’ - find a different way to show this information.
·      If you strip the dialogue from the text, is your character’s voice recognisable without relying on speech tags? 
·      Have you used contractions within speech (‘they’ve’ rather than ‘they have’)?
·      Is there a good balance of dialogue and description?
 
Point of View 
 
·      Have you chosen the best way to tell your story? E.g. might switching ‘I’ to ‘he/she/they’ give you more distance from your character?
·      Is the right (or most interesting) character telling the story? 
·      Is your point of view consistent throughout the story?
·      Have you checked (if you have chosen close third or first person) that you are not jumping into other character’s head and explaining how they feel?
 
Setting
 
·      Is the setting recognisable to someone who is unfamiliar with it?
·      Have you used metaphor and other imagery to describe it?
·      Have you focused in on the detail?
·      Does the sense of place add to the conflict/ atmosphere of the story? Might a different setting work harder?
·      Does your character interact with the setting? How?
·      If your character moves around, is it clear to the reader that the setting has changed?
 
Language
 
·      Watch out for cliché!
·      Have you used all the senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch?
·      Have you checked that you’ve used appropriate imagery without overusing or mixing your metaphors? E.g. her coat was as green as the Kale smoothies she liked but it smelt like the inside of a shoe and rotting seaweed that pops like blisters. 
·      Have you overwritten any passages that might be simplified?
·      Are there sections that might benefit from more detail?
·      Have you checked for duplications in your descriptions? E.g. the narrow road was thin (where narrow and thin mean the same thing)
·      Have you checked your spelling and grammar?
 
Structure
 
·      Do you need your first paragraph or is it backstory? Could it be cut?
·      Is there an inciting incident near the beginning that triggers the character to act?
·      Is there a good balance of conflict and action (emotional or otherwise) to draw the reader in and keep their attention?
·      Have you thought about the different types of conflict you might include within your story (with the self, with others, environmental etc)?
·      Does your story slow down too much in the middle – do you need to add something to lift it (an incident or a chance meeting with another character perhaps)?
·      Do you have an ‘all is lost’ moment?
·      Have you used the best narrative style to tell your story?  E.g. chronological or non-linear.
·      Is the plot convincing?
·      Is there a resolution? Has your character or their circumstance changed by the end?
·      Does your title work hard enough?

Here is an example of a simple character arc using the story of Cinderella.  You might find using a table like this useful for your characters.

 

Name	What do they want?	What stops them	Who helps them	All is lost when …	But is it?	Do they succeed?
Cinderella	To escape from servitude	Their sisters, stepmother & their circumstance	Fairy godmother	They meet the handsome prince, but the clock strikes 12	They have tiny feet which works in their favour	They wed the prince and escape their family.
Ugly sister	To find a husband/ marry royalty	Their looks and personality	Their mother	A beautiful stranger rocks up at the ball and the prince is besotted.	Yes. Feet are too lumpy to fit in the magic shoe	No. Karma!

 

Layout

 

·      Is your layout as per the requirements for submission? Always check the guidance. 
·      Have you used a standard font for ease of reading?
·      Have you checked your word count?
 
And lastly, the very best things you can do before you submit are to read your manuscript out loud (or use a narration tool) - this will highlight duplicate words, and also find a reader to give you honest feedback. If you decide to give feedback to a friend, remember - be positive!
 
·      Let them know what works well
·      Let them know if there is anything that confuses you
·      Discuss a solution or creative idea.

 

 Further reading

On Writing by Stephen King
Writing fiction by Linda Anderson & Derek Neale
Story by Robert McKee

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Timeline of Lawn House Blues

 Lawn House Blues by Philippa Hawley

With just 2 weeks until the official launch of my new book, Lawn House Blues, I recently emailed a writing friend, Kathy who lives in America, to tell her the news. In my email I commented the book had taken two years to write and she replied, ‘Two years really isn’t bad for getting out a novel. I think James Joyce took ten’.

     I worried that, having promised myself I wouldn’t, perhaps I had rushed it (because looking back I knew I had hurried my last novel). This set me thinking about the timeline of this book’s creation.

November 2014 – first ideas about the novel; working title The Treehouse.

May 2016 – first chapters saved on to my computer after months of thinking, planning and making notes.

July 2016 – early manuscript sent to professional editor through Writers Workshop (much too early as it happened). One certainly learns by one’s mistakes - she was not impressed.

August - December 2016  - manuscript put away in a drawer!

***

December 2016 – The real Lawn House Blues began. I removed it from the drawer, took a deep breath and started a major re-write, with a new beginning and a change of point of view.

     Wivenhoe Writers (wivenhoewriters.blogspot.co.uk) were a great help at this time and have been ever since. We had fun finding a new name and eventually settled on Lawn House Blues.

May 2017 – I attended a symposium on ‘Finding an Agent’ run by Writers Workshop (now called Jericho Writers at jerichowriters.com) after which my sister and my husband graciously took on the roles of copy-editors and beta readers to help me prepare for the next stage ...

  

August 2107 - I submitted the manuscript to numerous literary agents in batches of ten. Each individual required research into their requirements, a personalised letter, a synopsis and a different number of words to be sent. This took months.

     I also entered three novel competitions, run by Lucy Cavendish College, Retreat West, and Good Housekeeping respectively. The competitions brought no success but it seemed a good exercise at the time. Most of the agents did reply after 8-12 weeks, with a kind ‘no thanks’ rejection letter. A couple were quite positive but said it wasn’t for them and wished me luck. One even forwarded the manuscript to a colleague she thought might like it, but still no plan emerged during a long and frustrating winter.

January 2018 – I was summoned to an afternoon of tea, cake and critique by the Wivenhoe Writers. That afternoon they picked the novel apart, allowing me to rebuild it for the third time, over the following weeks.

April 2018 – I approached Spiffing Covers(spiffingcovers.com.) who agreed to help me self-publish. One of their freelance editors, Kimberley Humphreys performed the final edit and the manuscript was finalised, while Stefan Proudfoot created a beautiful and relevant book cover.

July 2018 - All I had to do was produce the back page bumpf and an ISBN while Spiffing Covers sorted the typesetting, ebook conversion and distribution, ready for the official launch date of 21 September 2018. That's a total of 2 years and 8 months.

My Story - Memoir and writing from life

My Story 

A 6 week course with www.wordafterword.org.uk

Taking Word After Word’s course, ‘My Story – Memoir and writing from life’ has been my first sortie into this genre, apart from a little travel writing, and it has been both interesting and revealing. I realised early on that I hadn’t read many memoirs or biographies and therefore had a lot to learn. I signed up to the course with the idea of getting started on a new project I was planning, to write about the life of my maternal grandmother Lucy (1898-1982). Fiona, our tutor, had other ideas and I soon found I was writing about myself.

     Initially it felt self-indulgent to repeatedly use the words ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’ but it became easier with practice. It was liberating to be encouraged to do personal, free-writing exercises, where the words just flowed on to a page. Here we were encouraged not to edit or re-read, but to allow the stream of thoughts and memories, arising from suitable prompts, to develop without interruption. These could be private words, not necessarily to be shared, though with an option to do so if we wished. As the small group of students got to know each other we felt braver and more able to share our personal stories and it became therapeutic, even cathartic, to read out our stories in this safe environment. It could almost have been a counselling session (life-writing often being used in the counselling process) and as we wrote about our lives, our insightful tutor supported us with skilful professionalism.

         So what did I learn from the course? What did I gain?

 Th      The course was an opportunity to stay connected with people and the wider world, and I realise that is one of the reasons I write. Although the process of writing can be isolating, writers can through their work connect with others, in writing groups and communities (alongside the many online forums that also exist).

  

    I learned to value the concept of bearing witness, when writers ask readers to support or endorse an experience, so both writer and reader might reach a new level of understanding.

     I learned that truth can have many aspects; the truth (for sure), the truth as we see it (feasible), and the truth we tell others (fiction).

  

    I acknowledged the benefit of using all the senses; to try to ‘show and not tell’; to be true to myself and find my voice; and (as always) to be careful with point of view.

     I hope I will keep by me the list of opening ingredients for a story, be it fiction or memoir:

-a character

-a question

-a clear voice

-a vivid setting

-and an action.

     I will hang on to the good advice Fiona gave us at the end of ‘My Story’ about editing – to get the words down, then rest, leave them and come back refreshed, with some distance and new objectivity.

     I was reminded to try to write something every day if possible and to regularly exercise my writing muscles.

          I feel better prepared to get on with writing about my grandmother’s life, but might approach it slightly differently now. I hope I will be more respectful of whose story I am telling and considerate about how I might mix fact and fiction. It could be an interesting piece of social history, but I will write it primarily for my family to appreciate. They will be my audience and the first to bear witness but who knows where it might go from there.

Philippa Hawley