Snippet Sunday

[wayfaringwordhack]

I did a few more lions this week but didn't take photos of them.  I mostly worked on writing text for my book. I've made a lot of progress after realizing that I have to write the humorous lead in bits before the non-fiction facts so that they will flow seamlessly together. Seems obvious, I know, but I made the silly mistake of not approaching it more like a story.  The info will naturally work better for kids if there is some semblance of flow, even if the entries are not explicity related one to the other.

As I was telling frigg, this is coming hard to me, despite my silly remarks long ago that "it shouldn't be too hard" to write nonfiction.  It still has to be entertaining, informative, and accessible.  Tricky for one of my convoluted tendencies. 

Comments

[frigg.livejournal.com]

I never found non-fiction easier than fiction if that's any consolation. :p

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

It does make me feel better. :P

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I want to hear more about your convoluted tendencies :-)

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

How weird. I know I answered this comment, and yet there is no reply. :-/

In a nutshell, just said that I almost always make things more complicated than they need to be.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

This sounds as if you had a breakthrough: congratulations!

I think almost all writing has a point where the author says 'well, this is my style. Like it or lump it.' In fiction, particularly adult fiction, particularly literary genres, you can draw that line a long way out: you're trying to speak to readers who like the sort of book you want to write, and if that's poetic, with a convoluted plot structure, with bits of another language, untranslated, scattered throughout the text or drawing from an arbitrary subset of language (only Anglo-Saxon roots, banning the letter 'e') then that's ok. It might lose you readers, but others will love the book _because_ it's out of the ordinary.

But in nonfiction you're not just there to entertain (though I think you still are - people learn better when they're relaxed) you're also trying to convey facts in as transparent and accurate manner as possible.

Quite honestly, that sounds harder to me. When you get to advanced academese, you can more or less express yourself as you want; until that point, you need to keep the reader in mind.
Well, that's always the case, but when I edit graduate level texts, I pick something else in the field, ask myself 'would readers of this understand the current text' and unless my author is an outlier, I grind my teeth and say 'yes'. (Some fields have... interesting conventions. Which become totally transparent when you're immersed in them, and by the end of a book project I'm usually not seeing them, either.)

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was great (and a bit forehead-slapping worthy) to realize that I needed to approach this in a more linear, story-like fashion.

(though I think you still are - people learn better when they're relaxed)

This is so true.

Which become totally transparent when you're immersed in them, and by the end of a book project I'm usually not seeing them, either.

This too. With the shorter format I'm constrained to, I'm going to have to find readers to make sure that I'm not writing in a way that "takes time to get used to." Kids (or editors) won't truck with time taking, methinks. :P