How to Know Your Book Is a Success

I came across this while looking for something else:

A successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies.

A successful nonfiction book sells 7,500 copies.

(Source: Authors Guild, www.authorsguild.org)

Essays: The Long & Short of It

Wondering how long an essay should be? Depends on your market.

Want a longer answer than that? Ohhhhhhhhhhh.

Various consumer magazines take short personal essays. Woman's Day, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, and Washingtonian, off the top of my head, use pieces of about 1,200 words to 600 words, and they can be formulaic or a true narrative.

A faculty member at Goucher once offended me by dismissing essays this short as "columns." I like to think that she was referring only to the formulaic pieces. Often they consist of an anecdote, some rumination, and then an epiphany (which I think of as a "zinger wrap-up"). I believe lovely literary pieces can be short. There are whole books of examples of these, darn it! (In Short, In Brief, Brief Takes).

In short pieces, you must paste across the top of your computer screen: SHOW, DON'T TELL. It's all too easy to tell the reader what brought you to a flash of insight that we may safely call the "Aha" moment. As in, "Aha! I've figured out what something means!" It is far harder, but so much stronger, to guide them into the story emotionally so that they can feel that Aha with you. They should be able to discern your message without your telling them in so many words.

Go Long
When I read a piece where everything is "tell, tell, tell," I now see it as a clear signal that the essay should be longer. Often, much longer. I had a hard time learning this lesson. I was a journalist when I went off to get my MFA in creative nonfiction. I had been starting to write short essays, 500-600 words. My first assignment was to write a 5,000-word piece on crying (I mentioned in class that I hate to cry), and just the words "five thousand" made feel that someone had whacked me between the eyes with an unabridged dictionary. First, I listed anecdotes with some sections about science and psychology larded in. Then I figured out how to connect these bits with a narrative string that ran through all of them.

Long essays can be sold to consumer magazines, but a more likely home for them is in a literary journal.

Booking It
Long essays can end up as chapters in a memoir, such as Lauren Slater's first book, Welcome to My Country. But can a long essay be transformed to make a saleable one-page essay? To do so, abandon the need to tell all the details. It rarely works to hack a longer piece down to meet the word count; the message, what the essay is really about (e.g., "Love endures," "honesty," "fear"), has to be distilled from a longer piece.

An essay that will be a chapter in a memoir must stand on its own, apart from the book. It must have a story arc. It must be a cobblestone--tough, independent--in the road that the whole book takes a reader on.

category: craft

Truth vs. Accuracy

Can a statement be accurate but not true?

In clearing one of the many paper-burdened horizontal surfaces in my house, I opened my February-March 2005 issue of Copy Editor, a newsletter I have loved for many years as an editor. In the column where readers send in questions, someone inquires about the "strict difference" between the words accurate and true.

The answer, provided by Barbara Wallraff, captures a point vital to writing narrative nonfiction. In the movie Absence of Malice, a reporter writes a page-one story about a businessman. The information was accurate, but she presented it in such a way that led readers to jump to the wrong conclusions. This treatment qualifies as "accurate but not true." Wallraff continues with another example. Say that two police officers stopped at her house and asked if she wanted to buy tickets to their annual party. It would be accurate to say that "Police officers questioned Wallraff at her home." But that statement would not be true. Wallraff concludes, "An accurate statement is factually correct; a true statement, besides being accurate, should mean what it seems to mean."

Frey's Effects on My Daughter

My daughter's sixth-grade class has been writing memoirs. My daughter has been protesting for weeks that she is only 11, that nothing satisfies her teacher's demand for a "life-changing" event. At home, we've considered her first break-up with a boy (Did it make her think differently about boys, love, disappointment?); she didn't think it was that big of a deal and, besides, her writing partner is a boy she currently likes. It would be too embarrassing a topic.

Next, she wanted to write about moving from Massachusetts. I nixed that because she was making it sound as if she grew up in Massachusetts instead of just spending the summer there while we had our house in our home state renovated. "No!" I said to her "You're misrepresenting the facts." I suggested different angles on how the displacement for seven months (involving three moves and four storage units) might have affected her life. She sounded OK with one.

On the morning the body of the memoir was due, she presented me with a copy. It was a very readable piece about how she had life-threatening, suicide-attempt-causing anorexia when she was 8. I believe I let out an inarticulate shriek.

"I know it's not what happened," she said serenely, "but this story came together and none of the others did."

"You can't do that!" I said, continuing to hurriedly put her lunch in her backpack, sign and stow her homework notebook, pull my coat on, and grab my keys. "If it's a memoir, you can't turn in fiction. I have to talk to your teacher and let her know this isn't true."

In the car, I told her that writers can't palm off untrue stories as real. "But look at A Million Little Pieces," she said. "That guy made millions of dollars." Curse James Frey! Trying to show it's not just about money, I pointed out that he also got embarrassed in front of millions on Oprah, had to print an apology in his books, and is in trouble with publishers in general.

The discussion--and I'll confess that I was pretty heated in pressing the point--continued after school as I drove my daughter and high school freshman son 45 minutes to an archery lesson. I told my daughter that her teacher had e-mailed me a response after I left a message about Nora's faux life. (Nora doesn't seem to be the only middle-schooler who fictionalized a life.)

Much wailing ensued. I had ruined her life! She would flunk English! I told her firmly that she had chosen what she wrote; therefore, she was responsible for whatever dire consquences rained down on her.

How many people have exaggerated or embellished because they thought an agent or editor would demand something more "exciting"?

Researching Your Memoir
I tried again to think of incidents that held drama and long-term significance. "What about the time you and Dad got stung in the water by a jellyfish? It made you afraid of the ocean--isn't that a life change?"

She protested that the teacher wanted details and she didn't remember anything about that time. I could barely believe it. The kids had chanted a line about it--"Dad ripped the tentacles off his arm"--thousands of times because it grossed me out so much.

She gave me the perfect setup to talking about research for memoirs. She could talk with her father, who was with her, and her brother, who had come fishing with me, about what the day was like, what order things happened in. She could check the records to see what the weather had been like that day in Boca Raton. I probably wrote about it in my diary.

She could include details about the kinds of things she imagined about to harm her--like the man-o-war jellyfish. Just because it's a memoir doesn't mean you can't educate the reader about all sorts of things!

And once she focused on the jellyfish incident, I bet that she would be surprised at how much she remembered. As we spoke, details were bubbling up for me and my son--blue bits in the sand, the lifeguard helping, etc.

We didn't resolve what she would write. The next day brought another e-mail from her teacher telling me she had talked about ethics in class and my daughter had approached her after class for help. "Ethics begins in middle school," the teacher wrote in part.

Yeah. I just hope they stick so that my daughter--my own flesh and blood!--doesn't take the lazy way out when it comes to memoir.