Once you’ve made your book map, you may find that it reveals a gap or disconnect in the writing — a place where you’ve jumped from point A to Point D without explaining to the reader how you got there. Storybreaking can help you close that gap. Narrative gaps can happen …
Tag: Elements of Nonfiction
How to Use a Book Map
If you’ve read the last few posts, you may have decided to make a book map of your current project, whether it’s in progress or in editing. Great! But once you’ve built a book map, what do you do with it? You use it to examine the structure of your …
How to Make a Text-Based Book Map
There are lots of ways to build a book map, and once I describe my method, you may think of better ones. Whatever works for you will be the method to use. You can write your book map on paper as J.K. Rowling did, or you can get a little more …
Use Book Mapping to Examine Structure
A book map is a visual representation of a book’s contents. This allows for easy analysis of elements and can reveal gaps in the content of a nonfiction book or the storyline of a novel. You may have used a book map without even realizing that’s what you were doing. …
How to Know When You’re Done Editing
As I noted when talking about editing a novel, writers often fall into an endless editing trap. You could go over your manuscript an infinite number of times and still find things to improve—or at least change. A client and I once made two rounds of edits on his book. …
Identifying the Passive Voice
I’ve written before about When Passive Voice is Permissible. Strunk and White admit that “Use the active voice … does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.” But one of the biggest problems writers face in …
What Beta Readers Are and Why You Want Them
Once you have worked your way through the Elements of Nonfiction Editing Checklist, taking as many passes as needed to address the Personality, Presentation, Voice, Information, and Mechanics of your book, what next? The first thing many writers do is run their manuscript past some beta readers or critique partners. …
When To Outsource Your Grammar
When we talk about the mechanics of a manuscript, we are ultimately talking about details: grammar, spelling, punctuation, and the like. Style is also a component of mechanics, as is manuscript format. But remember that when I introduced the Elements of Nonfiction Editing Checklist I said it was in order of …
Using Words as Words
Often when we’re writing nonfiction we need to refer to words in such a way that the term being used is itself the subject of the discussion, rather than the concept the term describes. If I say “My Sunday school students have difficulty understanding the concept of propitiation,” it means …
What Semicolons Are For
An editor once excised the semicolons from my writing with the marginal note “Death to semicolons.” He changed every one of them to a period. Not every editor is so vehement about this much-maligned mark, but those who are may be provoked by the fact that so many writers don’t …