Whole words, whole sight

If you stop by what was “Whole words, Whole Sight,” you’ll notice the site now looks quite different. I’ve decided to move the blog proper inside - you can find it via the TIPS BLOG link in the menu.

That leaves the home page free to explain more of what I do as a book doctor for nonfiction authors. I’ve also created a new Services page that expands on this theme & includes what I am gingerly calling an introductory offer for those who want to try me out. Onward, commerce! Onward, good nonfiction writing!

If you do stop by for a look, let me know what you think - you can back-channel me at or just put a comment under this post.

Around this time last year, I had the pleasure of working for several months with nonprofit consultant, trainer, and fundraising specialist Andrea Kihlstedt on the third edition of her book, Capital Campaigns: Strategies That Work.

When we first got together, Andrea showed me a copy of the second edition. Being familiar from visits to the Foundation Center in New York City with the existing literature on fundraising, I knew at once the book was good: unusually authoritative, and also unusually practical. Andrea told me she didn’t want to just update the content - she wanted to make it more readable as well. She’d surveyed clients who relied on the book, and the only negatives they had reported were that some of the chapters seemed long, and the prose a little intimidating.

Andrea had gotten her publisher to agree to a friendlier, more modern layout for the new edition. That by itself would be a help. She also hoped to make chapters shorter by passing drafts to me as she completed them, so that I could recommend cuts. Beyond that, she asked, did I have any other suggestions to improve readability? In fact I did. Based on a close analysis of several chapters, I came up with some simple recommendations she could use while revising.

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If you’re writing a memoir, you must decide from the outset: do you want to be a camera, or a person?

If you’re a camera, you’ll see everything that happened and relay it to your readers in great detail - but you’ll feel nothing and admit nothing. This will allow you to make your version of events and people as crazy as you like, without taking responsibility for your own involvement, either back then or now.

If you’re a person, on the other hand, you’ll have to admit that yes, you participated actively in your life: you not only saw what went on, but you made decisions, you had choices. This will apply not only to the story of back then, but to the here-and-now, where you as the flesh-and-blood writer have feelings and thoughts and opinions about what you’re telling us.

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I’ve just read an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, ostensibly about golf, that I think raises some neat ideas about mastering any pursuit, most definitely writing included.

The article, by columnist John Paul Newport, is sardonically titled “Mastery, Just 10,000 Hours Away.” It explores research by cognitive scientists into the actual rather than apocryphal differences that distinguish prodigies from duffers, then segues into advice from such top golf instructors as Pia Nilsson, who works with Annika Sörenstam. From a writer’s perspective, here are the most salient comparisons:

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I mentioned in an earlier post on this blog that a couple of years ago, I worked as a book doctor and writing coach with Robert Plotkin, a Boston-based patent attorney. At the time he contacted me, Robert had been working for several years on an idea for a book about a new breed of software applications, which he dubbed “genies.”

Prototype genies were already in use at NASA and in the consumer products industry; the wishes they’d made come true included everything from other computer programs to radically enhanced satellite antennas and toothbrushes. Based on interviews with the computer scientists who’d come up with the genie concept, Robert estimated the eventual impact on society would be staggering. Genies can come up with designs a human being working alone could never even conceive of, and can work far faster as well. It may sound like, well, a fairy tale - but one of Robert’s predictions is that someday you and I will have access to consumer versions of genies. In which case, we’ll be able to find out for ourselves.

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No matter what it is we’re writing, from a book chapter to a letter to a friend, there’s one mistake we’re more likely to make than any other. And it’s a bad mistake, too - a source of confusion and misunderstanding in our readers, a defilement that if we knew of it would seem as gross as a blotted mosquito or coffee spill on the page. Yet for all this, we no more see the damn thing than we can see a molecule of air! It’s as if a hypnotist had seduced us into adding nonsense words to our prose, which everyone can see but us.

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