I was a little under the weather yesterday, so I spent the day reading A Time for Mercy the latest Grisham novel.
John Grisham has sold over 300 million books.
He talked a small press into publishing 5,000 copies of his first book A Time to Kill. In his words, he couldn’t give it away.
Then Random House published his second novel The Firm. It became a bestseller and he eventually also sold millions of copies of A Time to Kill.
What does this mean to BC writers?
Maybe nothing. But I think his writing might provide insight for BC writers.
Grisham is not a great technical writer. I put an excerpt of A Time to Kill through Grammarly. In 1364 words, there were at least six misspellings. Grammarly gave his work a grade of 94, which is about the same grade I get when I put my work through their system.
However, he is a terrific storyteller.
New writers on BC seem to worry a lot about everything but basic storytelling.
Grisham has proven that not very many people care.
Jill
Comments
It does not take a lot
to run a spellchecker on your story before publishing.
We have all posted stuff with typos but a little care you can reduce them.
What is a problem for me is my Dsylexia. I often put words in the order wong. :)
Leave the story and come back to it a week or more later. Read it aloud and you will pick up more errors.
But... Importantly, Angela is one million percent right. Story, plot, characters, story all come before spelling, grammar and the rest.
As the saying goes, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
If there is a really, really good story people will forgive errors.
Samantha
Food for thought
I tend to write the story with only minimum concern as to spelling and punctuation. The first draft is simply to get the story out and onto the hard drive. (I was going to say "paper" but occurs to me that I've not put anything on paper since I got out of school.)
Then I try to let it sit for a couple of weeks before I read it with my editors hat on. First thing I do is run it through spell checker to catch the typos (OK so some of them are misspellings. I never have been great at spelling.) Then I read it for continuity and keeping names straight. A second pass goes to clarity. Did I say it so the reader can readily understand what I wanted to say.
Then it goes back on the shelf to simmer for a week or two. I read it again, this time with my readers hat on. I'm looking to see if the reader can get engaged in the story, or is it boring tripe that ought to be deleted.
Once I'm satisfied that someone might enjoy it and that I've told the story in the best way I can, then I publish it.
What with all that time spent on the shelf, can you see why I'm not a very prolific writer? You might say, why don't you work on something else in meantime?
Answer, when I was young, I would tend to space out a bit and let my mind wander when in school. It wasn't really ADD or anything like that. It was the teachers always seemed follow the formula for giving speeches.
That is: in a thirty minute speech you should spend the first ten minutes telling people what you're going to tell them; in the next ten minutes you should tell them what you want to tell them; in the last ten minutes you should tell them what you told them.
Well, I got the message on the first go round. When they started the second section, I spaced them out and found something more interesting to think about. As a result, it was drilled into me to focus. To keep my mind on the thing that I was doing or listening to. So multitasking doesn't work for me, unless all the multi-tasks are related to the project I'm focused on.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin ein femininer Mann
I spend
most of my 'writing' time sorting out plot elements, my stories are set in the real world so I like to make sure they largely reflect reality, the first draft can look pretty appalling from a grammar/spelling point of view.
The time for worrying about that stuff is when you are ready to publish, be it here on BC, Kindle or if you are really lucky with a publishing house. At that point I have to re read wot I rote, missed words, duplicates, spelling, bad word flow, capitalisation etc get sorted out but that doesn't mean I catch everything although it should read and look okay. Effectively every published work is a full on edit of the original manuscript, a second edit may catch more but even then not be 100%.
I read a lot, not all the time but my physical library has a fair number of books that have been read and reread over and over. Its not just that I like those stories but also the flow of the writing, the very craft of putting together sentences, paragraphs, chapters and I try to emulate those writers in my works. Writing a good story isn't just about having a plot, its about more than words, more than repeating information verbatim in a string of digital diarrhea. I can't make any claims as to my writing, some like it, some don't but I like to think I'd score okay in an essay exam.
For me then, reading is an important part of writing, having a good story is not enough, it needs to be crafted from the rough draft of he said, she did, they went etc into a flowing sequence, it doesn't have to be as florid as Shakespeare but it is fiction we are writing, not a technical manual. There are some excellent story tellers here on BC but equally there are many with good plots that fail to make it as good stories, not through grammar or punctuation but from an absence of understanding the very basics of writing fiction, form. flow, construction, heck, even conversation.
You can be terrible at spelling and still be a good storyteller, but its no good being semi colon perfect if your work reads like a recipe for chicken soup!
Madeline Anafrid Bell
I agree with Jill,
A good story holds you, you begin to care about the characters because you love or hate them. Once you get to that stage you are hooked and will forgive everything but a rubbish ending. Good raconteurs, like Hemmingway, Donna Leon, Robert Harris and so on, hit all the positives because they tell a cracking yarn that you interact emotionally with. I know that if I am really into a book, I sometimes have difficulty returning back to my own time and place - when that happens, the story is well told.
Angharad