Starting To Write

Even-though I had an excellent story and all the necessary support material, I didn't have the confidence or experience of writing a book. For the past fifteen years I was a technical writer but writing operational procedures is much different than producing a fictional novel.

In technical writing you deal with only the step-by-step procedure and limit your vocabulary to a fifth grade level. The use of descriptive words is very limited, which is the complete opposite when writing a book.

So I considered hiring a ghost-writer. One contacted me after I was on The Story, with Dick Gordon. I contacted him and we talked and arranged a time to meet. He had been a sports writer and decided to offer his writing expertise to those who want to write their family history (sort of like an autobiography but written by someone else) He had written a couple of books, included one about the plane that landed on the Hudson River.

We was impressed with the amount of writing I had already done and lowered his fee for writing a book proposal to submit to a literary agent. Another option he tabled was writing the story and I would self-publish it. However, he thought it would be wise to try and get a publisher interested and if that failed we could fall back on the other option.

I gave him a down payment for writing the proposal and he suggested that I try to make myself known by speaking to groups about WWI and establishing a website to attract an audience. Since I was an unknown writer, the only way an agent would be interested would be if I could proved to him that I already had potential customers.

Public speaking is not something I have experience in and I know that I don't think well on my feet therefore a question / answer format wouldn't work. I knew from my research that there were several WWI websites and many very good ones. I created my own site to promote the one-hundred year anniversary of WWI and it wasn't half bad. It drew some interest, but not the numbers the writer had in mind.

From all the WWI forums that I had joined to help me find information, especially the ones I posted some of the journal excerpts, I had a good number of people interested.

The writer and I differed on the theme of the book. He thought that it should be based my story of trying to keep my grandfather's promise with the journal secondary. I knew from my postings, that everyone who read the excerpts thanked me for posting them. They wanted more! So I was certain that the strength of the novel would be the journal and my involvement would be secondary.

Long story short, I decided to self publish. My wife is an excellent writer, even though she hasn't written a book, and she would help me with the flow and grammar.

Using the Internet I researched different self-publishing sites and decided on Create Space. They had the best program and they were connected to Amazon.com.

There were concerns of sending out my manuscript without protection, so I submitted one of my earlier drafts to have the story copy written.

With everything in place I developed a basic outline of the chapters and then got down the work of writing. It was March of 2010 that I put pen to paper, or finger-tips to keyboard.

I underestimated the amount of work and rework writing required. Since I had a great deal already written, I thought that it would be the matter of weaving what I had together with new material. It wouldn't be until January of 2011 that I had a first draft.

Before I took the next step I wanted some of my family members to read the manuscript to obtain feed back and assurances that I was producing something worth while. From this experience I can highly recommend to those future writers not to depend on family members, or friends to proof read your material.  They said they would and I waited, and waited. It would have been more advantageous to pay someone.

The problem I faced was placing my three years of work out there to be critiqued. I didn't have confidence in my writing ability to have some stranger read it. I didn't want be be embarrassed. God, I couldn't even get my wife to read what I had written.

Undaunted I read and reread my manuscript and each time I would improve on it. By the end of the summer I felt ready to get my wife involved. She read it and while doing so she made changes and improved on my grammar.

In the fall I purchased one of the self-publishing packages from Create Space and when they asked when I thought I wanted to publish the book I said by the beginning of 2012. They believed that it wouldn't be a problem.

After creating an account on Create Space I uploaded my manuscript for the first stage of editing. They said that it would take up to three weeks. They were true to their word and before I went completely nuts they uploaded the edit for my approval or changes.

The editor provided many positive statements about the book along with some suggestions for improvement.
I went through each item that she changed and made the necessary alterations.

Satisfied with the changes, I unloaded it for the second edit, which again took three weeks. When I received the second edit I began to realize that like most experts in any field, they each have a viewpoint on a subject and even though their view differ, each expert can prove that their's is right. Case in point, the first editor believed that World War I should be spelled out, World War One. When I made the changes, the second editor said it should be World War I.