While thinking in terms of novel development playing out in three acts, now let’s discuss the opening act of your drama.

Usually this is the easiest for writers to effect. Creativity is soaring (or you wouldn’t be sitting there writing in the first place), your characters are vivid in your mind, and you know where they’re going (at least for now!). Hopefully you’re banging out paragraph after scene after chapter, and smiling once you’re done.

But what, exactly, does this opening act need to convey? How do you fashion this so that the middle section (which trips up virtually everybody) flows smoothly and keeps moving your tale along? Because how a book author sets up this first act will dictate the story’s movement, and whether one hits those dreaded sagging middles or breezes right through.

First off, we have The Entrance. This is “real life” for the character, as it is now. Although we’ve opened the book with some event, we need to know through it or immediately after what regular life is like for our hero, before the cataclysm hits (whether this cataclysm is physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual, or hopefully, many of the above!). This is where we weave in some character background, and the people and conflicts with which he begins. In Lonesome Dove, we literally meet our heroes doing what they’ve been doing since their glory days ended: Gus drinking whiskey and Call working and both finding what excitement they can by stealing horses and cattle in Mexico. Inertia has waylaid our guys, and it appears that their heydays are well past them.

Then, we have some sort of Call to Adventure, whether this is internal or external (or again, hopefully both!). This “Call” is what propels our hero out of his comfort zone, and is and will forever be the “Story Question.” You have already established right off the bat what the Story Question is to begin the first scene of the book, and now, with the combined understanding of what Hero’s life was like before, as well as his conflicts, we get the bigger picture. This is your main point of the story. Throughout the entirety of the book, each scene has to have a piece of this main Story Question. With our cowboys, this Call to Adventure is a literal one: Enter Jack Spoon with a crazy notion of the land of milk and honey, which is Montana, and a scheme to make big bucks via a cattle drive to establish a ranch there.

But of course, as in any good story, our hero doesn’t want to take the bait! He Refuses the Call. Your character will give a laundry list of excuses as to why he can’t accept the job. This brings up the polarity, the duality, of the character, and raises the question of whether the hero can actually master this test. You want to leave doubt in the reader’s mind at this point. Is he up to the task? Our guys here are split; Cap’n Call is right ready to load up. Gus, on the other hand, always the voice of reason, is quite content to stay. As Call says to him, “All you want to do is sit on the porch and drink whiskey.” This brings up an interesting conundrum to our theory, as Gus and Call are opposite sides of the same coin, the duality playing through as they interact. And Gus senses that Call’s vision will not end well.

Just about the time we’re thinking our intrepid hero is way out of his league, we have the build up to our first major plot point. In other words, Hero gets some help! At this point, he meets the mentor. Here some wise voice comes in–the wise old woman archetype, etc., although we can also learn from fools, and it can even be the intuition. This speaks clearly, with no ego in the way. It gets Hero’s own ego out of the way so that God’s voice (or however you perceive a higher power) can speak to him. In other words, we have given him an offer he cannot refuse. In our model, our cowboys are a bit long in the tooth for such an adventure, no matter how adept they were in their Rangering days. But Call has the fever. And when he nudges Gus with promises of a still-wild country, with no bankers or lawyers, Gus can’t help but load up for the drive north. Wouldn’t you?

Which leads into our first major plot point: The hero Crosses the Threshold to a new world. He’s committed to the journey—whatever that journey may be. Our Western heroes here head north toward Paradise, and into the unknown.

This is the end of Act I. It fashions the transition from one world to another. In myth and metaphor, the character would go through an actual gate, often with a guardian in front of it, and have to pass some test to do so. The hero is stepping into the brink of the unknown, and some have to be kicked through it! As Gus, Call, the hands, and the cattle begin driving northward, they cross the Red River—their threshold to the new world. But it’s not without great cost—they lose one of the hands, setting the tone for the rest of the trip. As Gus says (in the film version) once this is done, “I-god, Woodrow, but this is a bad start.”

Once you successfully navigate through Act 1, you’re left with a dizzying amount of possible conflicts and trials, which will play into our poor hero’s Achilles’ Heel, and keep your momentum going well through Act II. As with our Lonesome Dove travelers, crossing that river allows the real story to begin, and our plot to thicken. Hopefully you, at this point as the writer (or with help from your writing coach), have set up your story so that readers have a sense of where we’re going and how we’re going to get there; whether this will go well, badly, or all of the above.

And in the end, everything weaves back to this beginning. Call’s final words in the film version, after all that he’s lost, to a reporter’s question about their famous drive, is “Helluva vision.” And we know exactly what he meant.

Every story has to be someone’s. If Earth blew up and neither you nor anyone you knew and loved were on it, would you care? Would you even know? But if a friend were stuck on a small island and the sea were rising around it, wouldn’t you panic?

The characters in your story have to be so real, so visceral, that when they’re in peril, when one dies, your reader reacts as if to a loved-one’s passing. And to accomplish that takes great skill from the writer.

You, as that book author, must know everything about anything that has ever happened to your characters. Not at the outset, of course—many authors write from discovery, getting to know their characters as they go. But in the end, know them they must. And then in revision go back and add textures, layers, nuances, in order to breathe life into the skeletons on the page. The more important someone is in the story, the more depth you must evoke.

Say you’re writing a moral-twist tale about a thirty-something woman running for Congress. She truly believes in her agenda, rather than politics for power’s sake (suspend all disbelief here—this IS fiction), and of course, is forced into a box at some point (pick a topic as to what), a la Willie Stark. How will she react? Do you, the author in charge of novel development, know how she responds to not only backing into a car in the parking lot when no one sees, but also what she does when her best friend comes to her with a shocking revelation? Does she deem it more morally right to turn in the friend (whether national security is at risk or not), or to hold to the confidence?

To know these answers, you must know our trusty heroine well. Otherwise, she’ll come across the page as contrived. Even though our story takes place with her in her thirties, what was she like as a child? A teenager? What happened on her first day of school? Did she get along with her brother? Is she a classic Leo, always bossing everyone around? Did she cry for days when her pet Springer Spaniel died? Or did she conduct the funeral for her friend’s cat?

Go back and write a short story that takes place during her childhood. Write another when she reached adolescence, and another revolving around her first sexual experience or college days. Get to know her through all stages of her life. None of these are to be included in the book—they’re for your benefit, as the author. And ultimately, your readers. Because the nuances you learn about your hero through this process will serve to bring subtle character traits to the surface as the story progresses.

Do this to a lesser degree with the supporting players. Another major problem I often see is too large of a cast of characters, the number of which precludes any from really being fully fleshed-out. Pare down your cast. Only a handful can ever really be formed into fully functioning folks with much depth. The rest need to step back a hair. You can have a lot of people with bit parts—it’s the handful of main ones I’m talking about here. Just know that it’s often more difficult to make a bit player come alive than the hero, with whom you have much more time to spend.

This brings us, as always, around to viewpoint. Giving a character a viewpoint signals to the reader that this person is hugely important. Again, each one has to have his own arc in the story, her own piece of the story question. Strictly limiting this will help you keep close tabs on each one, and how each fits into the plot.

Plot and characters cannot be divorced, and we’ll talk soon about the Story Question, and how characters propel that along.

Writers tend to give their people traits in laundry-list fashion. Again, this is GREAT—for you, as the author. But your reader is trusting you to tell her only that which is truly important to these characters in this story, and then to create and evoke it, rather than telling her about it. The reader should get a sense of the Protagonist from the get-go, but then you shade and deepen her as the story goes—in the exact same fashion that you get to know a real human. As a manuscript editor, I strongly encourage my writers to keep notebooks or lists or flashcards (whatever works for you) of each character’s physical descriptions, mannerisms, major and minor traits, etc. That way you can always flip through and remember, which imprints the information on your subconscious mind and brings it to the surface at the exact time you need it.

A lot goes into fashioning great characters. You can’t just “think ‘em up.” That may be how it begins, and indeed, these exercises help with that, but the depth, the nuances, the intangible points that make folks in books seem real bubble up from the author’s deeper self. You have to get quiet and listen to your people talk and think and move and be.

Willie Stark, so the story goes, was based on the Louisiana political figure Huey Long. I never knew that man. But I do know ol’ Willie. And I’d be willing to bet he took off under Penn Warren’s hand in a way that the real politician never could have. Now, that’s great characterization.

So, now let’s say you’ve written that bang up first line, and now let’s focus on the rest of the book’s beginning—the first fifty pages.

Isn’t that just the hardest part? I hear from so many writers struggling with where to start, how much to convey up front, and how active page one needs to be, etc., etc. And the answers vary—a lot. Depending upon in what genre you’re writing, for one thing. A Thriller must begin very differently from a Western or Category Romance or even a Cozy Mystery. But as far as novel development is concerned, the inherent factors remain the same.

The best way to begin a novel is just to begin it. In other words, quit obsessing and write. If you’re serious about the process, no one will ever see the first draft anyway. And even if you’re of the sort who specifically outlines from alpha to omega, much will change once you get to that initial “The End.” At which point, you’ll always go into revisions by rewriting the beginning. Often, many times.

All right, so the original creation process is finished, and you’re into revisions—the actual book editing. What do you want to accomplish with your opening? HOW you do this, again, will vary by genre. But WHAT you want to get done in the beginning crosses them all.

By far the biggest glitch I see is that the novel really begins about fifty pages in. Writers, especially before finding their sea legs (no matter how long they’ve been at it—learning to write is not a matter of time so much as it is of willingness, dedication, and application), ramble along for a good way before finding the track of their stories. Even seasoned writers do this, especially those who write from “discovery”—not knowing exactly how to get where they’re going until it opens before them. The difference is, professionals then go back to cut and begin again, and aren’t afraid of killing their own words to do so. Your editing arm will learn to point out where the pacing lags, or how much ancillary material needs slicing because much of that was necessary for you, the writer, to know, but not for the reader. Remember: Your reader is trusting you to convey to him ONLY those things that pertain to these specific characters in this specific story. The rest is just background material for you, the book author (and is merely noise for the reader).

The next problem I see has to do with the book’s hook. Now, entire volumes have been published regarding this subject, so I’m not going to delve into it deeply. In fact, I really believe too much has been made of it, in that now writers are so sensitive to setting hooks that their books’ beginnings are often contrived. Settle down here. Yeah, your book needs a good hook, which is no more than a reason for me to keep reading. And yeah, I need a sense of where the book is heading and who the main folks are from the get go. But I don’t need a crash course in the characters’ histories, or an intricate foreknowledge of what’s to come. That produces the opposite effect of what you seek—turning off your reader with so much detail that he spits out your lure and swims back into the bookstore’s sea.

A hook can be nothing more than a quirky character about whom I want to know more (unless, of course, this is a Suspense Thriller!). Or a bizarre event that tweaks my interest. And yeah, it needs to come in early enough to catch my curiosity so I keep going. Rule of Thumb in Murder Mysteries is that the killing should occur on page one. If you can’t hook ‘em with some sort of unique slaying, you need to pick another genre in which to write. In all categories of Romance, my heart should stir in Chapter One. In Mainstream, I should find a character compelling enough to cause me to want more. And in Literary, the writing needs to take my breath—at least for moments, on page one.
My very favorite opening to any book goes thusly:

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of the great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”

I would have followed that author to the ends of the Earth. And did.

Here as well is where you establish the Protagonist—the person with whom your reader is to travel the course of this novel. And, you must give a sense of his/her conflicts—even if the catalyst for the conflict (be it man or beast, internal or external, supernatural or drought) isn’t itself in evidence. The point of the conflict on the main character is the important thing, not the conflict itself. We have to move our hero out of his comfort zone—to begin the novel.

You must also firmly set the tone. If this is to be a Murder Mystery of some sort, someone gets killed straight out of the gate, thereby setting an ominous tone (if it’s well done). If the book’s a Literary one, the writing itself must effect the resonance that you seek.

On page one, we must find the Story Question, which we’ll talk about in the next installment of Structure. Because that Question will weave through each and every scene of your book.

Yep, a book’s beginning is tough to get right. But once you do, your reader has bought a ticket to ride your train—the first obstacle to overcome!

But like dieting resolutions, scaling back a hair will help you successfully meet them. So, let’s put our writing resolutions on a diet, so that we can put our power behind making our dreams come true, and focus on the crux of the issue.

Number One: Slow Down. Everyone wants to be published yesterday. That in itself isn’t a bad thing—it’s one of those goals that keep you slogging through the slough of despond, as John Bunyan would say. But I can promise you this is one of those instances where the tortoise beats the hare. The number-one thing I see that trips writers up is rushing. I always cringe when someone comes back to me with revisions quickly—because I know before seeing them that everything will have to be redone! Hurrying will leave cracks in the walls of your story’s structure someone will drive a Mack truth through. And it’s a true creativity killer.

Number Two: Take a Publishing-News Fast. Let’s face it—the news from publishing is mostly depressing. Major imprints closing down. Editors losing jobs all over the place. The latest news of print sales falling 9 percent last year makes your heart plummet, even though this slack and more has been taken up with e-book sales. Some of us have no choice but to follow the business end of things, but you don’t—you can take a nice long fast from this and let your creativity soar. Whenever I’m writing, I let publishing go take a long hike—in the opposite direction from the path I walk.

Number Three: Let your Creativity Soar! Write, write, write, and write. Don’t self-edit as you go, just tag along behind your characters and see where they take you. Follow every thread, no matter how whimsical it seems. In fact, the more fantastical in the creative phase, the better! Run with it. Laugh, play, dance with the drama. You will go into book editing and revision way on down the line (so you never have to worry that you’ll be embarrassed later about some bone-head move now). For now, be free!

Number Four: Damn the Naysayers. And those are legion! Let their lists of all the ways you can’t make it in publishing roll off your shoulders. Easier said than done? Nah. Just let them ramble on and as they’re doing so, say (silently), whether to your own demons or those of your mother-in-law: “You’re probably right. But at this minute, I’m immersed in novel development; I have a scene, chapter, story to write. I’ll get with you later.”

Number Five: Remember that Writing Well is a Journey. This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Our point isn’t to be published next week. Our point is to write beautiful stories with characters who leap off the page, and with whom we all want to tag along for their journeys. All we’re looking for is progress, growth, the ability to see that what you’ve written today was better than yesterday, or last week, or last year . . . And I can absolutely guarantee that if you write, if you read and study your craft, and write again, you will get better.

And one day, maybe even in 2012, you will look up and realize: I am a writer!

You can excel in all areas of writing, and still not wind up with a good or publishable piece. And when you don’t, provided you did indeed accomplish all your goals in the other areas, the problem lies with the overall form of your book; its structure, and most importantly in the end, its shape.

Many writers work from outlines, which is a great way to go. Then you always have the structure in front of you and can reshape as you write while still being cognizant of the form. But many writers, especially more Mainstream and Literary ones, don’t. They write from “discovery,” letting their characters drive the story and take them down avenues they never would have imagined at the start. It’s a freer form of writing, and one that allows for a greater range of creativity. But it also leaves you with a big blob of a first draft. Unfortunately, it’s this craft of sculpting away, of reshaping and refashioning, of book development that’s being lost in today’s world of publishing (the reasons for which could fill volumes and we’ll discuss later!).

Once your first draft is finished and you’ve taken some time away from it, then begins the process of revision. And of course, revision isn’t polish but rather a complete reworking of what you have. Here is where you must see both the forest AND the trees—a difficult proposition at best—and one of the greatest challenges in editing books. Here’s where those beautiful words come into jeopardy of being axed by the hand of a jealous god (you), and where you must learn not only to find clarity of sight, but also have the courage to kill your story’s lesser aspects. Or, as Hemingway once said, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

Begin by taking a hard look at the overall shape of your book. What is belabored? What is missing? I.e., what needs cutting away and what, additional attention? Map out the arc of your storyline, and the trials and tribulations your main character goes through. Do you have a sagging middle? Does our hero learn and grow through these trials, ultimately mastering the one thing, the final piece, so that he can save the day?

Next, be certain that what remains is absolutely necessary. Does a scene sort of further the plot? Does a section spend too much time on a character who doesn’t really have much impact on the story? Do all avenues lead back into the main stream, or have you spent too much time describing a dry creek that while beautiful to look at, really doesn’t mean squat to the river as a whole? (In fact, may bog it into muck, from which you, as the writer, can’t extricate yourself.)

Focus is part of shape, rather than the other way around. It’s a tool to make certain the form of your story has symmetry and function. Anyone who’s ever seriously raised dogs or horses or cattle or any other animal understands very well how form relates to function. You can have a dog with a gorgeous front and powerful hindquarters, but if it doesn’t fit together correctly, the dog can’t move worth a flip. In animals, we call this “balance.” And it’s no different here. You can write a grabber opening, a cohesive middle, and a bang-up conclusion and if the front doesn’t flow into the end correctly, well, you just have a big non-moving mess.

Structure is a huge part of this as well. It’s the infrastructure upon and around which you weave your story. Structure revolves around Plot Points—where they must come in, among other things. Yet, shape is still more. Structure is part of shape, but not the whole animal. Structure gives you the skeleton around which you add the muscles and tendons and ligaments and bone. But you can take two dogs (or humans) with almost identical skeletal form, sending them in opposite directions, and they’ll come back looking very different indeed based on lifestyle (other genetic factors not withstanding).

To effectively shape a book, you have to combine all of these factors and indeed, ALL of the ones about which we’ve been talking, into one well-fashioned form. Again, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to pull off. And until one finds his sea legs, the task can be overwhelming. It takes time, practice, and lots of good instruction and book editing.

What Michelangelo said of finding David in the marble holds true for writing as well. David was there all along, the sculptor said, he just had to carve away enough stone to find him. Sometimes I do think his job was a hair easier in that what he chipped away were pieces of rock, and often what we as writers must carve out are sentences and sections and passages that contain our very best words. Haven’t you had this happen? You know, where you’ve written something that takes at least your own breath away, only to discover that it no longer fits the finished book? Oh, how we hold to those passages, defending them for no discernible reason except that of course, we love them. And that’s the rub in playing God—you gotta know when to let go, and have the fortitude to do so. In the end, that’s what separates the amateurs from the pros.

Now, a disclaimer here: If you’re already a famous celebrity, then your autobiography (and I term it that, as most hot celebrities these days aren’t old enough to write memoirs. And, of course, the book is not written by them anyway, but by an actual book author!) will sell a lot of copies. So, this doesn’t pertain to you.

But if you’re someone who’s seen a bit of life and wants to tell your life story, then you need to understand clearly what a memoir is all about.

So first, let’s talk some about what it’s not. A memoir is not a diary. It is not a journal of this happened and then that and then finally, this. It is not a calendar of the events of your life, and a listing of friends/relatives in it. Even if you believe that the sageness of your years brings wisdom to impart, you still don’t have a viable book.

A memoir, to be commercial, is not a family history, or a scrapbook of family lineage. The commercial market doesn’t care if Uncle Joseph married Aunt Irene and had fourteen kids, five of whom died in childbirth with one succumbing to scarlet fever in his teens. Now, YOUR family might care. And if that’s your final market—i.e., you’re self-publishing a genealogy for your family alone—then that’s fine. But if you want to sell this to the public, unless Joseph’s family had real impact on the point of the memoir (i.e., this is a family of cops, and one of the siblings became a serial killer), then all of that backstory pretty much needs to be left out.

And there’s the crux: a memoir, as with any full-length book, has to have a point. Although I stop short of Fran Lebowitz’s take: “Your life story will not make a good book. Trust me,” some truth does exist there. We all have stories to tell. If you want the general public to read yours, it must run the same gamut as in novel development.

Just that you survived being molested as a child is not enough. Just that you fled oppression from a third-world country to settle in freedom is not enough. Just that your ship turned over in the choppy Atlantic and everyone died but you, really isn’t enough. Of course, if you then ate the other folks . . . now we’re getting somewhere. Or if you survived being molested and lobbied successfully to enhance victims’ rights’ laws. Or, if you fled that third-world country and became a brilliant scientist, discovering the cure to the disease du jour . . .

Sounds suspiciously as though I’m back to the disclaimer, right?

Well, yes and no.

A huge recent success in this genre is of course Eat, Pray, Love. What did it do? Told a tale of universal truths, beautifully. And what is still one of the most successful books of all time is Angela’s Ashes. And you know, McCourt didn’t really have a terribly unique tale. But here is what he did do:
1). He honed in on his story. In other words, he found a theme, stuck to it, and developed it beautifully.
2). The writing itself is spectacular. In other words, he honed his craft for decades before penning the book.
3). His characters were as compelling as those in finely crafted fiction. In other words, he learned the skills to write real people onto the page.

The big three—those elements that make up a good book, whether we’re talking Mystery, Fantasy, Women’s Fiction, Memoir . . . well, you get the picture. Again, you have to HAVE a story to tell. One that has meaning. One that ties into a larger theme. I was the book editor for a wonderful family memoir called In the Boat with LBJ. John Bullion had a story to tell. But rest assured—this WAS a family memoir. He just tied it into a much larger story of Lyndon Johnson’s rise to and fall from power. And the writing is spectacular. And the characters jump off the pages. And the book has done quite well.

So, if you aspire to write your memoirs, and believe they will enrich mankind, by all means—do so. But find the theme. Focus sharply upon that. Hone your writing skills so the prose sings. And learn to create vivid characters. Develop the book into something real.

Sounds suspiciously like all the good writing of which I know, which is, of course, Rocket Science!

But they exist for a reason. And that reason is truly not to satisfy grammar and composition teachers, but to help the writer get the most from her word buck, and to give the reader the very best reading experience possible—a clear and clean and well-written book allows him to zip through the action segments, heart pounding, puzzle over the mysteries, mind clicking, and ponder those parts that the author intended. In short, writing is all about communication, whether we’re talking fiction or non. You, as the author, are trying to convey something to your reader. This runs the gamut from how to make a better guacamole dip to solving the perfect murder to contemplating/understanding the secrets of the Universe (or just one slice of it). And the way in which you write your book, the rules you use, the ones you break, all add up to whether the whole package works. I.e., getting your intent across in the manner that best facilities this book.

And that’s the point, no? The rules are there for your benefit, as the author, to use at your discretion to fashion the best possible read for your audience. Period. And conversely, the ones you break can make your book.

First off, however, you must know the rules. So, you study and learn, understand and use them. Once you’re familiar with them inside and out, then and only then can you begin to break rules effectively. And then, only for specific reasons. In other words, you must be able to justify to me (or another novel editor or agent) exactly why you broke this or that one, and what you sought to accomplish through it. Most manuscripts I see where the rules are broken, the writer doesn’t know he’s doing so. Plus, that excuse of: “Well, that famous author did this in his last book,” begs the question: did it work? Did the author achieve a special effect by doing so, and can you tell me what that was? Or was it just sloppy writing?

As an example, viewpoint shifts are rampant in new writers’ works. Ninety-nine percent of the time, these writers don’t understand viewpoint in the first place, and must learn to work in Point of View correctly, which takes a lot of study (and often a lot of screaming to boot!). And then I’ll recommend a book that breaks the rules effectively (and extremely) to give a broader understanding. Carlos Fuentes’ Gringo Viejo shifts viewpoints not only during scenes, not even just in paragraphs, but often within a single sentence. Told in stream-of-consciousness, the read is quite difficult. But it fits the subject matter perfectly—which too, is very ethereal and obtuse. On the outside, the story is action/adventure, which one would think should lend itself to straightforward telling. In actuality, however, the themes are much deeper, much more complex, and speak to the human psyche—which is, in itself, a rather difficult read. Rest assured, however, Fuentes, a master at novel development, knew he was breaking the rules, why he was doing so, and I’d wager was quite happy with his results.

So, the point here is that as a storyteller, your job is to use what works. That’s the bottom line, and the only thing that truly matters. In order to use what works, however, you must thoroughly understand why one is correct and what it brings to your story, why another is an infraction and what it takes away from your book, and then come to fully grasp the nuances underlying each. Only then do broken rules work.

How do you know if to break or not break a rule is effective? You know. That’s the paradox of this sort of creation. Once you’ve put in the blood, sweat, and tears to really learn your craft, that other side of the brain kicks in and you “feel” your path, having an internal sense of the right one. Esoteric, yes. But then, this is a creative endeavor, no?

Writing well is a long, long process. There is so incredibly much to learn. As I say all the time: Writing really IS rocket science.

As with all true gems of knowledge, inspiration, even Truth (and isn’t this why all writers write? To convey some bit, no matter how big or small, of something learned along the way), the success lies in the telling.

Now, I’m not here to proselytize for or against any religion, spiritual bent, or path, but rather as a writing coach to help writers fashion their works into true and viable books. Often the lessons along the way seem quite difficult, and oddly, the “spiritual writer” seems to have the most conflict with accepting criticism and revision, as if to do so would mar the pristine nature of the work.

All writers have that fear to some extent. The spiritually based ones tend to take it to the extreme. After all, if the inspiration came from God, Spirit, The Universe, whatever you may call it in your belief system, the idea is “who am I to question?” I may have missed something, but I never heard God say, “To edit is of Satan.” Although, of course, many writers would attest to that in general! But in fact, the editing itself can be as creative a process as the initial inspiration. It’s all in how you go about it.

This mindset, although seemingly mundane, is the point of creating a work that readers can grasp and utilize. Remember—you yourself are not your only audience. Yes, you are a vital one to please (that is a lot of why we write). But if you want someone else to actually read it, you must bring the work into a recognizable form, and one which others can grasp.

As a book editor, I see a ton of such works that go all over the map. In other words, the organization is off. Many need a much narrower focus. The ideas, while they may indeed be unique, go from Texas to Nebraska and back without ever crossing the Red River. E.g., you can’t follow their path to save your danged life. Without a sharp focus and tight organization, the reader is catapulted all over the pages, unable to find the thread of the theme around which everything about the book must be weaved. Each chapter must build upon the previous, so that your reader’s understanding and knowledge begin to grow from within. And that holds true for fiction and nonfiction.

I edited a wonderful book by Gerald Morton, Never Alone in the Back, which is a collection of stories from an EMT about emergency calls he’s worked. It also weaves his personal spiritual path, and its evolution, through these stories, the inner mirroring the outer, if you will, just as in a beautiful novel. It was tricky making this work, but Morton is a brilliant writer (he’s had both fiction and non published by Traditional houses), and he never misses a beat. Nowhere is the reader confused as to how these stories relate to each other and the broader theme.

When Randy Mitchell wrote Sons in the Clouds, he didn’t shy away from the work I gave him. We focused on novel development and the elements of great fiction. He plunged in, and revised and revised, producing a beautiful book that fires on all cylinders, and which just happens to have an underlying Godly theme. Is it spiritual fiction? Yes. But first and foremost, it’s a great read. And that novel has just been nominated for Global e-book award.

While I’m not in the habit of touting writing how-to books, a great resource exists for a more in-depth study of this. Spiritual Writing>, by Deborah Levine Herman with Cynthia Black, discusses some of these points, as well as the marketing end of things—i.e., the various genres within the spiritual market, where yours might fit, and how to identify it.