Blog to Book – Part 5: A book is not a blog

April 18th, 2008

Read the other parts of this series:

A book is not a blog

I had lots of experience writing a blog, but I had never written a book. I’d read lots of books, but mostly for pleasure or to earn 3 credit hours. I’d never taken a hard look at how a book is constructed, just like I’ve never looked too hard under the hood of my car. I just enjoy the ride. As I started writing my own memoir, I realized I didn’t know all the details of how to assemble it even though I had an outline. It was like knowing that spark plugs ignite fuel that explodes to turn pistons to make my car run, but having no idea how to actually build an engine. Did I need to include dialogue? If I did, I would literally be putting words in people’s mouths. That made me a little uncomfortable. Should I tell lots of stories or was it okay to write essays reflecting on certain issues? Should I only include stuff relating to weight-loss or would people want to know more about my personal life? Had I even read a memoir before?

Thankfully, I had read some memoirs and I read three more in January that had nothing to do with weight loss to see how other people did it. I banned myself from reading any weight-loss books until my books was done so I didn’t unintentionally imitate anyone else. This helped a little, but the best way to learn something is by doing it. As I wrote I figured out what was working and what wasn’t.

Tone: Blogging is a conversation. A book is a soliloquy.

When I write blog entries, I can directly address my audience, ask them questions, and carry on like I am chatting to a friend. I’m like a newscaster speaking directly to the camera. Writing a book is like performing a soliloquy or acting in a television show. I know people are out there watching, but I’m not necessarily going to speak directly to them. If I ask them what Pilates DVDs they like, I’m not going to get an answer unless they mail me after the book is published months later. My personality and sense of humor come through in both the book and the blog, but the tone of each is slightly different because of the medium I’m using.

Pacing

My blog entries are short. If a post is over two pages long in Word, I worry that people will become bored and won’t read the whole thing. People tend to sneak blogs at work or skim several blogs at once. They’re usually not sitting down in front of their computers to read a long essay. The advantage to writing short pieces is that they only have to make sense within themselves.

A book is obviously much longer than a blog post. While this allowed me to go into much farther detail than I do in a blog entry, I had to keep in mind that each chapter was part of a much bigger work. If you watch a movie that has one action sequence right after the next without any downtime, it becomes exhausting. As I was writing, I didn’t want to drag down the pace of the book by including too much introspection all at once without splitting it up with some action. I didn’t want to get too serious for too long without including some humor. I didn’t want to talk for so long about one aspect of my life that the momentum of the whole story slowed down. I wanted each chapter to be interesting in itself, but I also needed to keep things moving forward while injecting variety to keep readers interested.

This was really fucking hard.

It also meant I had to reread what I’d written constantly. When I work on images in PhotoShop, I have to zoom in to closely manipulate the pixels of an image. Then I have to zoom out again to see how this makes the picture look at actual size. As I was writing the book, I would sometimes spend an hour picking apart and rewriting a paragraph. Then I’d have to go back and read the chapter or even the entire book as a whole to see how it looked put together. If I discovered something wasn’t working, I couldn’t just rip it out to make it work, just like I can’t erase a spot of an image that doesn’t look right without leaving a gaping hole. I constantly had to massage the text around any changes to make it work in the book as a whole. Most of this work is stuff the reader will never know about or see. It’s hard to make writing look natural and fluid. In a book, any change I made set off a reaction that affected everything else, like a domino chain. If you do that in a blog entry, you knock over 1 or 2 dominoes. When you do it in a book, you knock over dozens of them.

Duplication

Have you ever had someone tell you the same story twice? It’s because they’ve told it so many times they can’t remember who they’ve told it to. The same thing happened to me with the book. As I worked on it over the course of 9 months, I forget if I’d written about certain things yet. Sometimes I knew I’d written about a topic on the blog, but I wasn’t sure if I’d put it in the book. Other times I knew I’d made a specific note to write about something and I’d thought out the phrasing in my head as I was driving to work, but I wasn’t sure if I’d actually typed it in my document yet. As I was writing, I was rereading my book constantly, so even if I did read something that I thought I might have written about in another chapter, I wasn’t sure which chapter it was and there was no easy way to check my suspicions without reading the whole thing again. This is one of the reasons it’s good to have an editor or to show the manuscript to a friend. They caught things on their first read-through that I had become blind to.

It was also strange keeping a blog at the same time I was writing the book. Occasionally I would write a blog entry and think, “Hey, this should go in the book!” This presented a conundrum because I didn’t want my book to just be a rehash of my blog. But if every blog entry I wrote went into the book, I’d have nothing to blog about. Ultimately, I tried to include only the most necessary and entertaining blog entries in the book.

Cutting the chaff

After I finished a draft, I started going through all the notes I’d scribbled in notebooks or typed into my wiki trying to include things I’d left out. Some parts of the book provided easy openings for me to add a sentence in here and there. Other times, I could not find an opening. Ultimately, I had to accept that I was not going to be able to cram every cute story or deep thought I had about weight loss into the book. I could only include the best stories, the most necessary ideas, and I had to cut anything that did not move the book along. All the rest of that stuff? Well, that’s what the blog is for. It’s like the deleted scenes on a DVD.

This was hard, because I had to let go of stories or ideas that I liked which just didn’t fit into the narrative. A creative writing teacher of mine once said, “To be a writer, you have to be able to kill your children.” Just call me Medea.

Technical details

I ran into a lot of boring yet maddening technical problems while writing the book. For instance, I wanted to mention a woman who worked down the hall from me who gave me a compliment. The book takes place in the past tense, so I used the phrase, “The woman who worked down the hall from me.” When I reread that, it sounded like she no longer worked down the hall from me because I was using the past tense. If she still worked there, like she did, shouldn’t I use the present tense? Except, no, that would be weird to suddenly jump to the present tense when the rest of the book is in the past tense.

Here’s another problem. If you are writing about yourself in the past, but your past self is speculating about an event that will take place in her future, but is still in the past in relation to the reader, what tense do you use? What tense do you use, hot shot?! Questions like these drove me a little crazy. I was glad I’d decided to write the whole thing in the first person past tense and didn’t try to get tricky by using something unusual like second person omniscient from a dog’s perspective.

Most of my blog entries take place in the present or the near past, so I don’t usually run into these issues.

The importance of accuracy or why I included footnotes

The final major difference between my blog and my book is that my book includes footnotes. Yes, I wrote a memoir with footnotes. It’s weird, I know. I always try to be accurate on my blog, but since it is like a conversation and I don’t pretend to be a journalist, I don’t cite all my sources. I’ll link to an article if its convenient, but that’s about it. Similarly, if I were at the water cooler at work (although my work doesn’t actually have a water cooler) chatting to someone, I might say, “I heard that yo-yo dieting might have a bad rap.” I don’t say, “According to Karen Collins’ article in a July 8, 2007 on MSNBC.com, yo-yo dieting might have a bad rap.” If I started talking like that I’d have to check what they were putting in that water cooler. I mention a couple scientific studies in my book, so it occurred to me that people might actually want to know what study I was talking about. Since a book is more permanent than a blog, I decided I needed to back up the statements I made about health, fitness, and weight loss. Thus, I sat in front of the computer for several evenings compiling references to scholarly works.

Essentially, I get to be lazier as a blogger than I did as a book writer.

Continued in Blog to Book – Part 6: Revising and editing

Summary

Writing a book made me take a closer look at how books are constructed
My blog is like a conversation, whereas my book was like a soliloquy
A book required attention to pacing that my blog has never required
I sometimes couldn’t remember if I’d already written about material in my book, my blog, in both, or just in my head
I had to cut things out of the book for the betterment of the work as a whole. These “deleted scenes” are the types of things I can cover in my blog.
Book writing required more attention to detail, such as punctuation and backing up the accuracy of material