There is absolutely no way to get out of doing research for your book. It’s simply not an option. The choice you do have as a writer is to determine the method of research you use. Do you go to the library? Use the internet? Chat up folks you know and/or interview professionals? Sure, you’re a writer and a big part of writing fiction is making stuff up but there are certain things you can’t just make up. As a writer you need to decide your book’s setting; the country or state, city, urban or rural. What year is the story taking place? What type of house do your characters live in? The year/make/model of the car they drive, the style of clothes they wear, the fast-food they eat. What model phone do they have? What programs do your characters watch on TV? What movies are they going to? What music do they listen to? And on and on.

Book one of The Heart’s Journey Home takes place during summer vacation, 2009. That meant I couldn’t incorporate anything into the story that occurred after that timing. No post-2009 phones, iPod, tablets, computers, TVs, cars, movies, music or TV shows. Because the book ends around August, AJ can’t see the movie Avatar until December, which will be in book two. As a writer you owe it to your characters to fully develop them. The main character Tori is part Lakota which means her Tribe has a specific Reservation, where? Since I don’t speak Lakota and she does I had to research a few words and phrases. Her father is part Norse so his Viking background had to be researched. The live-in girlfriend is Jewish, my roots are Black Baptist so that had to be researched. AJ lost a leg to juvenile cancer so that had to be researched. Yes, as a writer I’m taking the reader on a make-believe journey but for the story to be real to the reader I had to incorporate some real, factual details – things the reader knows and is familiar with. Things the reader will catch if you’re sloppy and don’t want to do the research.

Bing defines continuity as – the maintenance of continuous action and self-consistent detail in the various scenes of a movie or broadcast. I’d like to add – or book. For a writer continuity means consistent detail to the work as a whole. You owe it to the reader to do the proper research but you also owe it to the work itself, and to the craft. Why are you a writer in the first place? I hope it’s for the same reason I write – I straight up love it. I’m possessed by writing. I don’t want to do anything else with my life. Writing is the dream of my dreams. Then don’t I owe something to that? Don’t I owe the best of me to that? To my dream?

The last thing you as a writer should want is for the reader to catch a slip – something out of time or sequence. That’s distracting enough to yank the reader right out of the land of the story and plant them right back home in the present, the very place they were using your book to escape from for a few hours.

Research doesn’t have to be boring or tedious, it can actually be fun. And it’s the greatest muse because it puts your writer head further into the story. Test it for yourself. You’ve run into writer’s block? Pick something in the story to research and see if that doesn’t get your juices flowing again.

Invest in the book. Invest in the reader. Do the research.

I love Wikipedia’s opening line concerning writing, they say – 

“A writer is a person who uses written words in various styles and techniques to communicate ideas. Writers produce various forms of literary art and creative writing such as novels, short stories, poetry, plays, screenplays…”

By this definition alone a lot of us would be writers wouldn’t we? But there are many who don’t hold to this definition alone.  Many believe a writer is a person whose book has been published by, and only by, a traditional publishing house.  If that’s the definition at heart than all of us independently published (i.e. Indie) writers wouldn’t be considered real writers at all would we?

I remember back in the day there was a term called ‘vanity press’. This term was used to describe someone who paid to have their book published. Back in the day vanity press authors weren’t considered to be ‘real’ writers.  As a matter of fact the feeling was quite the opposite – they were people who either weren’t serious enough about writing to shop their book around to the various publishing houses or they were people who couldn’t get their book published having been rejected by numerous publishing houses.  The people who fit in either category paid a vanity press to have a few copies of their book made and they sold them to their family and friends. These ‘vanity’ writers weren’t considered to be real writers – just dreamers who were satisfied with selling that one book in their gut to loved ones and friends and then putting a copy on their bookshelf and moving on cause that one itch in life had been scratched.

How grateful I am that for the most part that attitude’s changed. Gone is the old stigma of vanity presses, and self-publishing has become a respectable option for authors like me.

People choose to self-publish for a variety of reasons; content control, the immediacy of the book being available as opposed to waiting a year if it’s with a traditional publishing house, being able to keep a larger portion of the royalties, and tons of other reasons. Independent publishing has advanced to the point where many indie publishing companies put out finished products that rival what you find coming out of a traditional publishing house, and there are marketing companies out there whose sole purpose is to help the indie writer market their books to independent bookstores and the reading public at large.

Being an ‘indie writer’ is a hard and arduous endeavor, but it is no less fulfilling. The sale of my first book – The Heart’s Journey Home was respectable.  I feel I can honestly say I have a bit of a following. Those folks who have spoken to me about the book love it and can’t wait for the next book in the series.  The second book of the series – A Layover in Doppelganger-ville is with the publisher now and I look forward to it being available on Amazon, Barnes & Nobel and iTunes within the next few weeks.

I’m a writer. When that first person I wasn’t related to, or married to, or friends with, went to Amazon and purchased my book, that day I became a writer, for real and for true.  I have high hopes.  I hope to one day get an agent and publish a book through a traditional publishing house.  I hope to make the New York Times bestseller’s list.  Shoot, I hope to one day win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature.  I guess at the end of the day I want the enviable careers of the likes of J.K Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Green, James Patterson, and Steven King.  I want to one day retire from my 9-5 job and write for a living – a real good living.

For now? I want to write words in “various styles and techniques to communicate ideas.” I want to “produce various forms of literary art and creative writing such as novels, short stories, poetry, plays, screenplays…”

At the end of the day I want to grow in the craft I’ve loved since forever and make friends and a flollowing along the way.

I’m a writer, and this is what we writers do and dream.

 

 

Family and friends teased me at the size of my book, more than 700 pages – which sounds like a lot (okay it is a lot but it’s a fast read believe me), yet the majority of the teasing was because they determined that I write the way I speak, using many words. Admittedly I do talk long; if I’m telling a story it’s a long story.  But then if I’m answering a question or weighing in with a comment, that’s likely to be long too.  And no, we writers don’t like to hear ourselves talk, I think we simply love words.  We like to speak them as well as write them.

We writers love the way words sound, we love how they roll off our tongues or out of the ink of our pens. We love how they tweak the imagination painting illustrative pictures we use to convey information and concepts and yes our own opinions.  Words gives flavor and seasoning to our world – both real and imagined.  Words provide light and shadow and depth and color.  We love how words roll off our tongues and how they dance and box during engaging conversations.  We writers love the emotion that words both evoke and convey – laughter, anger, shock, tears, passion, commitment, patience, love, solidarity, alarm, retrospect, peace.  Words can incite a riot and quiet a fussy baby.  Words can lead men in the most heinous acts of genocide, or quell a mounting storm bringing peace.  Words.

I’ve been around for a while (my gray hair can attest to that) and I’ve seen what words can do. That’s why I respect the craft and the responsibility that goes along with it.  I’m not a casual writer, I’m a serious writer.   With that I recognize I’m responsible for every word I ever publish.  I owe it to humanity to pour out good, to do no evil, and I also owe it to humanity to call it out if it’s wrong – to point, if not lead, the way to change.  All of this is simply me being responsible and true to the craft I love.

So what’s the reader’s responsibility? Simply to keep the writer honest.  Honest and true to the craft.  Your job is to kick the writers you know and follow in the seat of their pants if they ever get lazy and start turning out work that’s subpar, less than you know they can produce.  Your job is to call trash trash and throw it where it belongs.  Your job is to support your favorite writers with encouragement, nice reviews and by continuing to buy their books.  In reality, your job is to inspire us.  A real writer is writing for the reader.  Sure, The Heart’s Journey Home is a story (a series really) that had been rolling around in my gut for a while and I simply had to get it out, but every sentence and paragraph and chapter I wrote, I wrote with you in mind.  I want you to love my teen characters as much as I’ve come to know and love them.  I want you to care about what’s bugging them.  I want you to feel their joy and anguish and be surprised right along with them when the unexpected happens.  I want you to be entertained.  I wrote the book for you.

I feel the relationship between the writer and the reader is simply sweet. Making friends with people all over the world, people you likely will never meet, but through the written word you make a connection.  I’m old enough to be everybody’s mama, I’m Black, female, and I live in the Metro-Detroit area USA, but through this one book we can be friends.  Now that’s special.  This is why I write.  Sure I want everybody to buy my book, but I want you to enjoy reading it.  I want you, wherever you are, to simply get to know me.  A wordsmith.