Researching For Your Writing

I worked for the county library for three years shortly after graduating high school. And while it didn't work out career-wise, I did learn a lot from the job. Strangely enough, I learned more about  research working at the library than I did writing reports for language arts. And I don't know whether it was because the things I was looking up were subjects I was interested in, or because I didn't have to finish a paper by a deadline, or if it's because we had to learn how to help patrons with their own research, but I got good at it. At any rate, there's different levels of research appropriate for different subjects, and all are good for different reasons.

How to Research

From Reference Checking to Deep Research

As a writer, you will need to look things up periodically. Sometimes, you just need a quick reference and then you can get back to writing. This is preferred in most cases, as getting bogged down in research can put a halt on your progress. But for some types of writing, digging deeper is a requirement (historical novels and nonfiction, for example). Here's some different levels of research and the ways I like to go about them, ranging from the quickest to the most time consuming:

1. Google-first-link, a.k.a. "ask Siri"

When most people say they "looked [subject] up," this is what they mean. This isn't research, this is reference checking. Reference checking is good for things like average snowfall and how many tablespoons are in a cup, but bad for complicated topics like genetic engineering and the affects of feudalism on European society. I'm not knocking it. If you have to fact check something for your writing this is the fastest way to do so and is reasonably accurate. You'll end up doing it a lot. But make no mistake, this is not research.

2. Web research

Okay, so the first thing (and often the only thing) people usually do when they research a subject is they google it. It's convenient, and there's a lot of information available. And it invariably also brings up Wikipedia. Do not fear Wikipedia. Embrace Wikipedia. Teachers hate Wikipedia because "anybody can edit it," but that argument is utter nonsense. Anybody can do anything with any source of media, especially now. Anybody can start a website. Anybody can publish a book. Experts are just amateurs who spent a lot of time on their chosen subject. Yes, Wikipedia is easier to edit and often the target of vandalism. But it also has a lot of fastidious people dedicated to accuracy and one advantage over the internet at large: it's organized and concise.

But don't make it your only source.

Many research papers I had to write in school started out with a quick perusal of the Wikipedia page to get an overview of the topic, and then I used their cited sources to start my own research and go deeper. This is the best way I've found to do internet research. Not just using a search engine, but following the sources. Doesn't even have to be Wikipedia. Any factual site worth its salt is going to cite their sources if they're not the primary source themselves. Keep following those citations. Eventually, you follow the rabbit hole long enough and you get to the primary sources, which is where your best and most accurate information resides.

3. Ask a librarian

Reference librarians are a rarity, probably becoming more and more scarce, but the ones who still exist are out there and they would love to help you. Call if you can't go to the library in person, but make sure you get someone good who will help answer some of your questions and point you in the right direction for the rest. As a Page, I was last on the ladder when it came to answering the phone (which suited me fine) but if I did answer, it meant absolutely everyone else was busy. Honestly, I ended up googling most of the things people asked. You can do that yourself, so make sure you get someone a little more, er, able to give you a lot of time (I had things to shelve, okay?). I put this suggestion at #3 because while your conversation may not be long, the amount of information they'll point you towards will take a while to chew through.

4. Ask the expert

One thing you may not have considered is just asking an expert on the really tricky questions you may have. Honestly, this isn't a requirement or anything, and some people prefer to research anonymously, but do remember: experts have spent a lot of time on their subjects of choice. They've already done all of the stages of research and continue to do more. They're going to have a pretty clear view of their subject, and multiple experts are going to have multiple angles to draw from. And, as long as you're polite, decent, straightforward, and don't attempt to monopolize their time, a lot of people are going to be pretty happy to talk about their favorite subject. Especially nowadays, with email and social media, it's really easy to connect and ask questions.

5. Read an actual book

Do you know how much time and effort it takes to write a book? Do you know how much time and effort it takes to, say, bang out a blog post by comparison? Books are powerful. They take a long time to put together. The people who write them write them with care and organization. They have to go past multiple levels of revisions and fact checking. Now, not all books are created equal, but one thing books will always have over the internet is their organization and credibility. The internet is chaos, a riot of information, and the very things which make it a powerful source of information are also its weaknesses (expedient, easy to edit and access, prolific). Do yourself a favor. If you really want to know a subject, really know it, read some books. It's an investment of time, but the picture will be far more complete.

6. Experience

Obviously, this one is last. Most people don't have the time or resources to test or experience everything for themselves. But if you can find a way to fit it into your life, it can be more rewarding and comprehensive than any other form of research. (Just, you know, use common sense. Don't do stupid or dangerous stuff.)

Even if you just dabble, and never become an expert yourself, experience will give you understanding. I never understood the weight of a backpack until I went backpacking. I've read so many books with archery in them, but I never understood how much strength it took until I pulled a bowstring back for myself. I never knew how moving a sunrise could be until I experienced a miserable night, and I didn't know exactly how sulphur smelled until I stood by the hot springs of Yellowstone. So if you can, and you really, really want to fully comprehend a subject, find a way to get a taste of it. Cook over an open fire. Go to a historical fair or museum. Make it part of your next vacation. Convert your yard shed into a lab. Sometimes, with all the knowledge at our fingertips, we forget that some of the best research consists of just physically trying and seeing things for ourselves.

Announcement: "The King and His Commitments" now finished!

Enormous milestone for me today. After years of wanting to, I have finally written a complete story and published it. There was a lot of times I didn't think it was going to happen; that I lacked the endurance and discipline to finish something so large, or that it wasn't going to be good enough. But I'm proud to say I have finished it. And I think it's pretty darn enjoyable, if I do say so myself.

This weekend (Friday 2/23 - Sunday 2/25) the ebook will be available for free on Amazon. Please check it out.

And thank you to everyone who helped me get it together and supported the getting there. It means an awful, awful lot.

May your creative endeavors be just as successful!

--C.T. Eiser

Editing: Making a Scene

Editing is a messy process. Writing a rough draft is messy, sure, but editing has to take that mess and turn it into something coherent. Frankly, it can be overwhelming. Which is why when I took the chaos that was my first draft I quickly had to figure out how to break it into something manageable. So, how to make editing manageable?

First, read through the whole thing just to see if it makes sense.

Make note of what areas are slow, what areas need elaborated on, retconned, etc. Start big, and look at your story arc as a whole. Fix the major plot problems. Don't make notes on individual sentences yet.

Then break it down by scenes.

Not chapters (an arbitrary division that should generally come at the end of a scene), but scenes. A story is nothing more than that-- a series of interconnected scenes. And every scene you go through, ask yourself these questions:

1. What is the purpose of this scene?

This is the most obvious and first question-- why did you write this scene in the first place? What does it do for the story?

2. Does it tell me more about the characters?

I personally prefer a character driven story over a plot driven, but I know tastes vary on that front. But ideally, as this a story about your characters, every scene they are in should tell us something about their personality. So does it do that?

3. Does it further the plot?

Even a character driven story needs a plot. If the answer to question #2 is no, then #3 needs to be a definite yes. If #3 is also a no, then your scene is probably nothing more than exposition and should be ruthlessly eliminated or reincorporated.

4. Can I do so more efficiently?

The best scenes are ones which further the plot and highlight your characters' personalities. If #2 is a yes, but #3 is a no, then your scene is likely just character fluff, and should be incorporated in a more efficient manner. Nobody's stories have got time for fluff. Tighten it up.

5. What are the consequences?

Of course, it's not enough to just have a series of good scenes. They have to flow. I call this the "action-reaction" mindset. If something happens in your story and there are no consequences from it, then what was the point of it happening? One thing needs to inevitably lead to the next.


And that's all there is to it. They're basic questions. There's no magic trick. Just a laying of scenes, brick by brick, to create the road which drives your story.

And these questions work for more than just scenes too-- the characters you add, dialogue, action, it all has to do something for the story, or else you're just going in circles, adding filler.

After you've looked at these (and after doing it a few hundred times it will become a natural process) then it's time to edit the nuts and bolts-- grammar and spelling, word choice, continuity, and character consistency. This is where you go after those sentences with a red pen. But huzzah! You've already broken your story down into scenes, so just go over each scene with a fine tooth comb, one at a time.

Editing is a massive undertaking that in some ways is just as difficult as writing. But you wrote the rough draft didn't you? And that was massive. So approach it the same way: one piece at a time.

A FINAL NOTE: if you're a real writing wizard, you can help ease the editing process by learning to do this as you go along with the rough draft. Now, you want to be careful to not get so bogged down in analysis that you don't write a rough draft to begin with, but I've figured out the best thing for me to do is write down, before I write a scene, what the scene needs to accomplish and a quick sketch of what happens. It makes editing so much easier, just as taking the time to type things correctly in the first place does (please do that too). As the old saying goes "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

Even More Photographs!

Photography is my second hobby. So here's some more I've captured over the years (and I'm definitely not procrastinating or anything):

Praying Mantis, gas station in Idaho

Erupting geyser, Yellowstone

Red Wolf, Point Defiance Zoo, Tacoma

Mountain Pass, unsure of location

Craters of the Moon, Idaho

Duck

The View Near My House

The Moon, shot through a telescope

Our Firepit

Poem: Anchor and Sail

Tell me a story, if you will,
Of the boy with the tempered tongue
And the girl who rode on the tempest,
Who sailed so far from home.

Tell me a story, if you please,
Of the way the wind did bite
When she wrecked alone in the sand and the foam
On the stormy Isle of Night.

And on this isle, there lived a boy,
And brave and kind was he.
He saved the girl and brought her home,
And in her eyes he saw the Sea.

“Please stay with me, girl from the gale,
And regale me with your tales.
My house is warm, my temper true,
You’d never lack nor need to look back
For I would look after you.”

But she shook her head and said,
“No. You would not want me if you knew.
My heart is a ragged sail,
And I am pushed by every wave and swell
To seek the strange and the new.”

He thought about this carefully,
And then he softly said:

“I see your point, and your fear,
For it is my own dread.
My heart has an anchor’s curse
And this island I’ve never left.

“I used to think it weighed me down,
And made my life so narrow.
But then you came, pouring like rain,
So where you go, I‘ll follow.

“And when the winds try to drive
You into their violent arms,
I’ll throw myself into the deep
To keep you from all harm.

“Don’t you see? Anchor and Sail,
Without both together, neither does well.
So please, please, sail with me,
We’ll travel into eternity,
And see the world anew.”

Formatting Your Manuscript For Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

Like a lot of people, I've always wanted to write and publish a book. Also like a lot of people, I shied away from it due to the competitive and complicated nature of traditional publishing. (Crafting query letters? Mounds of rejection slips? Other people editing my story? Choosing my cover? Pass.) Thankfully, with the proliferation of ebooks, the ease of internet access, and big companies like Amazon willing to take risks, self-publishing is not only possible but essentially free.

However, while self-publishing is possible and inexpensive, it is by no means free and painless.

For one thing, its a relatively new concept, so there's a lot of bugs still to be worked out. It is also very technical, and even with my background in computers and document formatting I still ended up doing a lot of work over.

So here's what you should know about the final formatting of your manuscript, things I learned through trial and error and wished I'd known before.

NOTE: for this article, when I refer to "publishing" or "self-publishing," I'm talking specifically about independent self-publishing with Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

1. Make sure you have the right tools at your disposal

Writing is simple. You need something to write on and something to write with. Self-publishing is not. You need the correct electronic tools to work with from the start. First of all you need a solid computer with access to internet. Nothing fancy, just reliable. You really need to have Microsoft Word. I know, I know, there's other processing programs like OpenOffice that generally do the trick. But for formatting you really want Word. For one thing, it's simply more standardized across the whole internet, and KDP has a downloadable add-on to help with formatting for ebooks and paperbacks. It's really useful.

Once you've got text down, the next hurdle is formatting images. If you're going to include them in your manuscript (and you need a cover image anyways if you don't want lame stock photos) you're going to need some sort of image manipulation program. I'm too poor to afford Photoshop (even if I could swallow a monthly subscription charge) so I tend to use ArtRage for simple painting and manipulation, along with my computer's stock editing program for things like cropping. I also use a scanner to upload my hand drawn images.

A PDF converter is the last digital tool you'll need. It's not a strict requirement, but if you want your paperback to have bleed (printing to the edge of the page) you'll need one. Adobe, of course, has a program, and I'm sure there are others available. Make certain whatever program you use does not compress your image size.

So to recap, before you even start writing with publishing in mind, make sure you have (in order of importance):

• A computer with internet access
• Microsoft Word
• A printer/scanner
• An image manipulation program
• A PDF converter program

2. Prep your manuscript

Now that you have all your tools and your big fat manuscript typed out and proofread, you can begin formatting. The first thing you're going to want to do is make sure you have a clean document to work with. This means a document with no formatting already applied to it. If you're unsure whether you already messed with something or not, you can simply highlight all (ctrl+a) and hit the button "clear formatting" (note, this will get rid of things such as italics and bold too, so be aware).

Now that you have a nice clean document, you want to create a backup save. This requires saving your formatted manuscript under a separate file name. You're going to leave your unformatted and complete manuscript untouched in case of disaster.

Turn on your formatting marks, download the KDP plug-in, and you're ready to go.

3. Make sure your images are high enough quality

This is the problem that ran me for the most loops. 300 dots per inch (dpi) is the required minimum image quality for print and sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of hurdles to overcome to get there. Firstly, make sure your images are good quality to begin with. I found out the hard way to scan my images at 400 dpi, just to be safe. (600 dpi tended to crash Microsoft Word.) Before you put your images into Word, make sure to turn "image compression" off. This will be in different places for different versions of Word, so you'll have to look up how to do so. The final hurdle (one I didn't have the tools to overcome) is keeping the quality up if you convert your file into a PDF. Make sure you've got a good converter program!

4. Be flexible and patient, and take it one step/problem at a time

Once you launch the KDP plug-in for Word and fire it up, it becomes a simple matter of following the preloaded steps to making a good looking manuscript. In theory. In actuality, there's going to be frustration involved, with a myriad of potential problems and creative solutions required.

For example, I had to create a cover for my poetry book. I had a charcoal drawing in mind to use as well as my title elements already figured out. It should have been a simple matter. But first, my image wasn't high enough quality. I fixed that, rescanning it. Then I ran into the problem with Amazon's program Cover Creator where the fonts available didn't go with my content, nor were the various title elements placed correctly for my picture. So I tried to make a cover from scratch and downloaded the template they provide. I wanted a specific font so I had to type out my title and name in Word, take a screenshot of it, then layer that on top of the background using ArtRage. But the only format KDP would accept for custom covers was a print ready PDF, and ArtRage could only save things as JPGs. So I saved a JPG and converted it to a PDF, but my PDF converter compressed image quality and the cover no longer met their quality guidelines. At this point I could have screamed. The cover should have taken an hour, tops, and it took me a whole day to put together. Eventually, I worked around the problem by uploading my completed cover (JPG) on Cover Creator as the background picture and left the additional fields blank. The saga wasn't over yet, I had to fix issues of bleed later, but you can see how quickly something small can become a big, time consuming problem.

Additionally, there's no way to check their guidelines without uploading the previewer first, which takes a long time. The preselected styles are narrow and defined, and changing them can be time consuming and frustrating. It may not turn out exactly how you pictured things. Even after you hit publish, you may have to fix some things before your book will appear on the marketplace. So be patient, adjust your expectations, and do your best to work with the program.



If you can manage all this, then congratulations! You've published a book. Take a moment to feel proud of yourself, because no matter what else, just finishing an entire book and putting it out there is an accomplishment.

January Update

January was the month of poetry and document formatting for me, and so much editing. An unbelievable amount of editing. The bright side to all this is that I now have a book of poetry live on Amazon and a novel soon to follow. It requires some more work still, but I did finish drawing a map and now need to create a suitable cover, which might even prove fun. Due to all this, I have some blog posts in the works about editing, formatting, and self-publishing, so look forward to that this month, as well as the release of my first novel, "The King and His Commitments."

Thanks,

--C.T. Eiser