Intro to More True Stories

      Does it seem like almost everyone you talk to is writing a book? It’s hard not to feel like an underachiever in the presence of such intentional greatness, right? Dare to dream big, always and forevermore, but more often than not what’s really happening is a whole lot of talking and not so much writing.

      The reality is writing a book is hard, even for writers.

      This reporter-turned-columnist already knew that: a writer does not an author make. A world of words separates a writer from an author. In my case, about 40,000 of them! Enter editor Victoria Hanley, who is also a real author. Victoria took my behemoth of a manuscript—a full ream of paper, 500 pages, one-sided, 110,000 words, double-spaced—and helped me see what I didn’t know I didn’t know.

      “Brenda.” Victoria said gently but in a British accent because she’d heard the very same thing from her editor of English from England before her first book The Seer and the Sword was published in 2000. “What you’ve done here, my dear, is written two books. Your job now is to separate them.

      ”Nooo! This reluctant author-to-be whose forte is non-fiction was crestfallen. I’m not sure I could salvage a saleable story to save my life, and now I’ve got to go back to the drawing-this-out-some-more board?

      Thanks to Victoria’s deftly wielded pencil, which left marks that were encouraging and insightful, I was able to see she was right. “Yours is a story about the lives of three people: Bob, Nick, and Paul. The backstories, the tangents, the dreams, the signs are all well-written, but they get in the way of the story arc. Who did you write this book for?”

      “Um…the ‘principles?’” I stammered, meaning Principal Alicia Durand, Bob’s widow Cindy, and Nick and Paul’s ladies Tammy and Whitney.“You wrote it for The Reader.”

      “Oh. Yeah. I guess I did.”

      “Consider the reader; consider the story arc,” Victoria advised. “You can always rescue the chapters you cut, and put them on a website."

      So here we are together again, Dear Reader. Freshly picked from the proverbial cutting room floor, here are a few more pieces I hope light you up.