An Explanation of This Book
Some people are music nerds: They can identify every variation of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” and the genesis of every song on the White Album. Some people are science nerds: They like nothing better than reading about the workings of the heart or the possible composition of dark matter. Some people are sports nerds, and they can spend hours and hours debating Ruth vs. Musial, Kobe vs. Michael, Billie Jean King vs. Venus Williams.
I am a narrative nerd. I love reading stories, taking them apart and seeing how they work, then putting them back together with each piece polished and gleaming. I love thinking about how a character grows through action and talking with a writer about how to sharpen or open up a plot. I love the process of line-editing, considering every word’s contribution to the whole. And I am incredibly fortunate to have a job in which I get to do all those things every day, the better to make great books that children, teenagers, and discerning adults will love.
This book, Second Sight, is a collection of much of my thinking on these narrative and writing topics between 2003 and 2010, as expressed in talks delivered at writers’ conferences and posts on my blog and website. The title refers to the service I try to provide my authors — a second, independent look at their work — and to what I hope this book might teach in turn: some methods or principles through which writers can get a “second sight” of their work, to help evaluate and revise their manuscripts and develop their craft as a whole.
The talks themselves are arranged in the order I wrote and delivered them, culminating in four interconnected lectures on point, character, plot, and voice, and the practical “Twenty-Five Revision Techniques,” which draws from all the preceding material. Because the talks were written to be delivered orally, their texts sometimes come off a little choppy, as I made automatic transitions when speaking by ad-libbing or varying my tone of voice. Moreover, because each talk was delivered to a different group of people in a different far-flung section of the country, I borrowed liberally from myself in writing each new speech, and thus, for instance, examples from “The Art of Detection” show up again in “Quartet: Voice,” and the endings of several talks are more or less identical. And while I think the core principles remain the same throughout, you can see my thoughts on all these subjects developing over time, so ideas in some later talks may repeat or modify ideas from earlier talks. I trust readers will forgive these foibles in print form.
The blog posts and manifests have been placed to try to complement the themes of the talks they precede or follow. I’m using the term“manifest” for the practical-application worksheets here because of the neat double meaning in the word: They will ideally help you create a physical manifest of your book — that is, a list or invoice of its plot or character cargo, so you can see the dimensions and weight of the choices that have been made. And then they should assist in making manifest places where you might forge new connections or round out those that already exist. I hope that these tools, and the other ideas throughout this book, will be of use or interest to you in your own writing. Questions, comments, and conversation are welcome via e-mail: asterisk.bks@gmail.com.
Thank you very much for your kind attention and support.
With best wishes,
Cheryl Klein
February 2011