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Nink: Baby Talk ~ How To Write Kids’ Dialogue That Doesn’t Suck

This article, written by Marsha Zinberg is from the August 2021 edition of Nink, the monthly newsletter of Novelists, Inc.  (NINC). Nink, which is packed each month with informative articles for career novelists, is a benefit of NINC membership. 

I can still remember a marketing debrief from my early days at Harlequin, when the folks on the ninth floor discovered to their surprise that a romance novel with a toddler pictured alongside the heroine and hero on the cover had outsold most of the other books offered that quarter. Babies, it turned out, helped sell books.

These days, it’s a given that certain genres in popular fiction can benefit enormously from the inclusion of child characters, as they offer wonderful opportunities for creating subtext, irony and humor, and, of course, can do much to help reveal the character of the protagonists. And that’s why it’s so important to get these young characters to come across the page as authentically as possible—as fully realized people, rather than the cutesy, over-the-top stereotypes I’ve sometimes encountered.

Many authors are lucky enough to have a natural ear for dialogue, including knowing instinctively how young children speak. But even though they may be parents, some writers rely on memory that may be faulty or, worse yet, assume they can just make up how toddlers acquire and express language. But with a speech-language pathologist daughter to whom I’ve turned to authenticate children’s dialogue many times during my editing career, I’ve learned that language development is not random, and in fact usually follows a very predictable pattern. Understanding that pattern can be a terrific help in generating children’s dialogue that sounds accurate and natural.

Sound and vocabulary development
Let’s say Jessica and Mark are taking 18-month-old Amy to the zoo. The dialogue might go something like this:

“Look, Amy! Can you see the monkey?” Mark pointed to a tree branch at the top corner of the enclosure.
“Up, dada! Up!”
Mark obligingly hoisted the toddler onto his shoulders for a better view.
“Montey!” she shouted. “OOO! AHH!”
“Yes, it’s a monkey! He’s saying, ‘OOO-OOO AHH-AHH!’”

Amy’s dialogue is consistent with developmental milestones for her age. Here are a few to keep in mind:

  • Toddlers can understand many more words than they can say. At 16 months, a toddler may understand 100-200 words but may say fewer than 50.
  • The first consonant sounds to develop for English-speaking children are p, m, n, h, w, and b. These are followed by k, g, t, d, and ng. At this age, it would be unlikely for a child to use consonant clusters such as tr or sp. So at two, it’s most likely still an itsy bitsy pider.
  • The first categories of words they will use are usually content words like nouns, verbs, and adjectives. And those nouns will be concrete, like dog, rather than abstract, like joy.
  • First words are usually not more than two syllables in length.
  • For sentences, a good rule of thumb is: two-word sentences for two-year-olds, three-word sentences for three-year-olds, four- or more word sentences for four-year-olds.

By 18 months, toddlers begin to identify themselves by name. There is also a rapid vocabulary and sentence structure growth after this time; some precocious children (Aren’t the majority of fictional children precocious?) can have vocabularies of 500 words by their second birthday, and they will also start to use prepositions and pronouns, though not always correctly: Me go to the zoo! They are able to use their words for many purposes, from labeling their toys to asking where Mommy is, to wailing a protest at Grandpa.

Grammar and sentence structure
Amy is now about three and a half years old, and her dad, Mark, is totally stressed out because the babysitter didn’t show up. (Jessica is no longer on the scene, having disappeared under very mysterious circumstances!)

“Okay, kiddo, you’re going to stay with Grandma today,” Mark told his daughter as he bundled her awkwardly into her car seat.
“Daddy go to work?”
“Yup, Daddy’s going to work, and Daddy is late, and you’re going to Grandma’s.”
“No! I go to work too! I go with Daddy! No Grandma’s!”

Amy’s grammar and sentence structure has become a lot more sophisticated in a relatively short time frame. Some of this is due to a child’s ability to begin using auxiliary verbs, regular past tense forms, and some progressives and adverbs, which certainly makes writing dialogue a lot easier and more interesting.

Here are some grammar and sentence structure factors to keep in mind for a two- to three-year-old character:

  • Transitioning to longer word combinations may actually have some toddlers using three- and four-word combinations by 24 months: they may combine two two-word phrases, so that “baby eat” + “eat cookie” becomes “baby eat cookie,” or they will add information to shorter sentences that they already say, so they might add “big” to “eat cookie” to come up with “eat big cookie.”
  • They will also combine words to describe how objects or actions are located in space: “push me” at the playground or “doggie house” to describe where they stashed their baby sister’s blankie.
  • Because they are beginning to pretend in new ways, such as giving toys a voice, or acting out events they have heard of but never experienced (like being on a pirate ship), sentences become richer and more imaginative.
  • Irregular past tenses will continue to up the cuteness factor of toddlers’ speech sometimes all the way into their fifth or even sixth year: my four-year-old grandson told me proudly that he “writed with a cursor on the computer.” When his same-aged cousin was corrected for saying “I standed on the ladder,” he, still mixing up regular and irregular past tense, typical for children this age, altered his sentence to, “Okay. I stooded on the ladder.” This little guy understood his language needed to show something that had already happened, but despite this, children in preschool or even at early school age don’t have the same ability as adults to understand and describe time. Concrete markers, such as “two sleeps” or “one Paw Patrol” are much better understood and expressed than “three weeks ago,” “in the summer,” or “in half an hour.” Similarly, young children express time differently than adults. “Tomorrow’s tomorrow is more likely to be uttered by a child getting ready to start school than “two days from now.”

Theory of mind
Mark and Amy, now four and a half, are out shopping for a birthday present for her best friend.

“Okay, Amy, what should we get Lily for her birthday?”
“Slime. When I was at her house, we played with slime, and Lily really loves it! But I thought it was gross. For my birthday, I want new paint.”

I’ve found that one of the essential areas of child development that trips up writers relates to what psychologists term “theory of mind.” This is simply defined as the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, and knowledge—to ourselves and others. And the above piece of Amy’s dialogue demonstrates that she can now do this.

In fact, as children move toward the age of four, they continue to develop a deeper understanding of what goes on in their and others’ minds. They come to understand that people talk and act on the basis of the way they think the world is, even when their thoughts do not reflect reality. As a result, at this age, your child characters can now begin to lie, trick and joke with others—all of which makes them better able to communicate about individual experiences and a lot more fun to write!

When you are writing young children’s dialogue, don’t be tempted to jump the gun and create conversations out of step with the child’s typical stage of development. Spend some time with a child the age you want to portray, or take yourself off to the playground, sit down on a bench, and just listen to how kids speak and interact. It will be a win-win for your adult characters…as well as your readers!

Handy references

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Marsha Zinberg spent more than 30 years of her publishing career at Harlequin, where she served as executive editor of several romance lines, as well as men’s adventure and Worldwide mystery. These days, she regularly edits several NYT best-selling authors and specializes in developmental and line editing for both new and returning clients. You can check out her editorial services on her website, or contact her directly at marsha@writetouch.ca to discuss your publishing goals and how she can help you achieve them.

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Nink: Tips for Using Episodic Television Techniques in Your Novel

This article by Ines Johnson is from the July 2021 edition of Nink, the monthly newsletter of Novelists, Inc.  (NINC). Nink, which is packed each month with informative articles for career novelists, is a benefit of NINC membership. 

Since I was an adolescent watching Saturday morning cartoons and weekday Afterschool Specials, my storytelling brain has been primed for episodic structure, commercial breaks, and weekly cliffhangers. So, it’s no wonder that when I shifted my focus from writing short films, documentaries, and children’s media, I brought along many of those tools and techniques to keep my readers’ butts snug in their favorite recliners and turning pages.

In television we have to address the reality of hundreds of channels at the flick of a remote button. We also have to contend with commercial breaks in the middle of our story. Despite the proliferation of streaming channels now that allow viewers to binge watch shows without commercials, the weekly format that was ubiquitous in the past is still around. Because appetites can go unquenched for seven whole days before the viewer can watch the next installment, screenwriters and producers have had to develop tricks and tools to keep the audience engaged for those long and short periods of time.

Many of the tricks and tools from scriptwriting work amazingly well in novel writing. My favorite trick is using TV buttons to end a scene or a chapter. What’s a TV button? Read on...

I think Shonda Rhimes, and her writing roundtable, are some of the most skilled and prolific storytellers of our times. Yes, I said prolific, and I’m going to stand by such a big SAT word. Prolific actually means producing much fruit. I don’t know about you, but I love fruit. I can’t get enough of the juicy, sweet treats. From Grey’s Anatomy to Bridgerton, I am a devout follower of Shondaland. But where I felt Rhimes shined as a craftsperson was in her political thriller Scandal.

Here is a link to a free download of the pilot episode script so that you can follow along.

Where most screenwriters are taught to button up their acts, Rhimes plays fast and loose with that rule and goes so far as to button up her scenes. Like a period, exclamation point, or question mark, a button is a punctuation mark at the end of an act (or chapter in a book), or in Rhimes’s case, it’s the end of a scene.

When we think about punctuation marks, we most commonly think of, and use, the period. A period signifies the end, finality. You won’t find many period buttons in Rhimes’s scripts. You’ll most often find exclamation points, which indicate strong feelings and high volume. In fact, the exclamation point wasn’t introduced until the 1970s, and then only in comic books to indicate a gun bang or punch!

Button up your act
The pilot episode of Scandal is divided into five acts. Acts typically end at commercial breaks. The commercial break is a dangerous time for television writers because the audience now has a choice of getting up to use the facilities, grabbing a snack, or, worse, turning the channel. If you study the end of each act in Scandal (or Grey’s Anatomy), Rhimes buttons up each act-end by raising the stakes before the commercial breaks. The punctuation marks she places at each break serve to keep her audience pinned in their seats.

In “Sweet Baby,” Act One ends with a murder suspect walking into the office with blood literally on his hands. Act Two sees that murder investigation and raises us a POTUS (President of the United States) embroiled in a sex scandal. In Act Three, Olivia’s conservative-soldier client, the alleged murderer, gets arrested because he refuses to be “outted.” By the end of Act Four, Olivia “handles” the POTUS’s sex scandal by destroying the life of the president’s accuser/mistress who then tries to kill herself. In the middle of Act Five is where we learn the biggest scandal of them all: that Olivia and the president were having an affair. By the end of the show, the stakes are raised sky high when Olivia, feeling betrayed by her married ex-lover, takes the president’s mistress on as a client.

I strongly feel that these act ends are all exclamation points! They’re also a lot to cover, so this breakdown will only focus on the first act. The first act of a television show is known as the Setup. A Setup has three goals: to be immediate, quick, and grab attention.

Act I, scene 1: Exclamation button
The setup starts immediately with the first scene. We are introduced to newcomer Quinn, who’s trying to escape an undesired blind date. Rhimes grabs our attention with witty dialogue delivered by attractive individuals. Quinn believes Harrison is her date, whom she wants to ditch. Harrison is nonplussed by her attempts; instead he seems amused. We want to see how this ends, and then...surprise! It’s not the man that every woman dreams of getting set up with. No, it’s better. It’s a dream job, and, of course, every 21st century woman is going to jump at the chance of her dream job. Though Quinn doesn’t shout out loud at the prospect of working for Olivia Pope, strong feelings are written all over her face at Harrison’s offer. “I wanna be a gladiator in a suit” is said with wide eyes and quiet awe. The scene is quick in that it is fast-paced, giving viewers not a single bit of dialogue or action that lags.

Act I, scenes 2-4: Dash button
In the second scene, we meet the famous Olivia Pope and her dashing rogue of a colleague, Stephen. We meet them in the midst of a deal about to go wrong. Olivia momentarily halts the conversation with Stephen about engagements to smooth over the dilemma of two Russian bad guys pointing pistols at each other. Olivia comes off as badass, uber-confident and smart. With the deal settled, she and Stephen take their “package” and continue their banter about his impending nuptials as though no one was just in mortal peril.

The scene starts with Olivia and Stephen—then there’s a conflict, which is resolved—and the scene concludes with Olivia and Stephen continuing their banter. It’s a set of dashes. The dash is a handy device. It’s informal and essentially playful, telling the viewer/reader that the story is about to take off on a different track, but also that it’s still in some way connected with the present course. The playfulness comes across in the scene as Olivia and Stephen leave the danger giggling over how much they love this job.

Act I, scenes 5-7: Exclamation button/act end
Scene five starts with Quinn, our novice, coming into the extraordinary world of Olivia Pope and Associates. Through her, we begin to learn the rules of this new world. Olivia’s crew is introduced, along with their respective duties, and Quinn is quickly schooled that this is not a law firm but a firm of problem-solvers. We learn the package Olivia negotiated for was a kidnapped baby who is promptly picked up by its diplomat parents.

The Setup is complete by the end of scene five. Everything and everyone we need to know has been established. Now the story is about to get moving. A disabled, Iraq war hero appears in the office lobby with blood on his hands. “My girlfriend. She’s dead,” he says. “And the police think I killed her.” In a comic book, the exclamation point follows the BANG! In this scene, the gun has already gone off and we are seeing the effects of the aftermath. Harrison turns to Quinn and says, “Welcome to Pope and Associates!”

Early on in our grade school education, we are taught how to construct sentences in order to get our points across. Today most of our writing is peppered by the point of periods. Punctuation marks such as exclamation points, dashes, and even ellipses, we’re told to use sparingly. Rhimes and her team pay no heed to that grammar lesson. Their characters shout it out, are elliptically coy, and dash off with our hearts. And it has paid off for them episode and episode again!

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Lover of fairytales, folklore, and mythology, Ines Johnson spends her days reimagining the stories of old in a modern world. She writes books where damsels cause the distress, princesses wield swords, and moms save the world. Ines writes books for strong women who suck at love. Aside from being a writer, professional reader, and teacher, Ines is a very bad Buddhist. She sits in sangha each week, and while others are meditating and getting their zen on, she’s contemplating how to use the teachings to strengthen her plots and character motivations. Ines lives outside Washington, D.C., with her two little sidekicks who are growing up way too fast.

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Nink: The Care & Feeding of Your Newsletter

This article by Tara Wyatt is from the July 2021 edition of Nink, the monthly newsletter of Novelists, Inc.  (NINC). Nink, which is packed each month with informative articles for career novelists, is a benefit of NINC membership. 

Newsletters, while an incredibly useful author tool, can be frustrating. What do you send? How do you find subscribers? Most importantly, how can you get the most out of your newsletter?

How to get started
If you’ve never set up a mailing list before, the first thing you’ll need to do is to pick a provider. There are dozens of mailing list services available, and the options can be overwhelming.  Let’s look at the three most popular platforms:

  • MailChimp is one of the biggest and best-known email marketing platforms. If you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers, the platform is free to use, but pricing quickly jumps to $31 per month for 2,500 subscribers and $79 a month for 10,000 subscribers, making it one of the more expensive platforms.
    • Pros: MailChimp’s reporting and the metrics available to users are thorough and extensive, and they have several beautifully designed templates, making it easy to send eye-catching emails to your subscribers.
    • Cons: Automations are difficult to set up (we’ll talk more about automations shortly), and affiliate links are not allowed.
  • MailerLite is a newer service, but is very similar to MailChimp in terms of its design and ease of use. The biggest difference is that they are significantly cheaper than MailChimp, as 2,500 subscribers will only cost you $15 a month, or $50 a month for 10,000 subscribers. However, only the first 1,000 subscribers are free, as opposed to the first 2,000 with MailChimp.
    • Pros: Extremely user friendly with an easy-to-use interface and helpful customer service, and features such as integrated automation and a landing page editor.
    • Cons: The reporting isn’t as comprehensive as what you get with MailChimp.
  • Aweber has been around for nearly 20 years and is a giant in the email marketing industry. The first 500 subscribers are free, which means they have the smallest free plan of the three services, but the pricing is reasonable: 2,500 subscribers, $29 a month; 10,000 subscribers, $69.
    • Pros: Aweber offers A/B split testing, analytics, and a highly functional mobile app for stats. They also offer user-friendly templates, and automation and list management tools. Their customer service is top notch.
    • Cons: If you’re not into the reams of data available on Aweber, there are cheaper options. Users have also reported deliverability issues with Aweber.

If you build it, will they come?
Now that you’ve chosen your email list service and set up your account, the next step is to get readers onto your list. Sadly, it’s not as simple as creating a newsletter sign-up form on your website and hoping readers will find it and subscribe. However, enticing readers to join doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are a few strategies that will help you start growing your list.

(Note: Integrating the sign-up on your website with the back-end of your newsletter is sometimes seamless and sometimes complex, depending on what platforms you’re using. You may need some technical assistance to get that set up).

Reader magnets
A reader magnet is something you’ve written that you offer to your readers for free in exchange for signing up for your mailing list. Your reader magnet can be anything, from a short story to a full-length book. If you’re just starting out, you could write a prequel novella to your first novel. If you’re uncomfortable giving away entire stories for free, you could create detailed character profiles for readers to download, or put together a sampler that contains the first chapter of each of your books. The idea is that the reader magnet will entice readers to give you their email address in exchange for this bonus goodie, so make it relevant and interesting to your target readers.

Another example of a reader magnet is a bonus epilogue. Include information about this at the back of the book, giving readers the link to sign up to download their copy. This is a highly effective strategy and attracts the readers you want—the ones who read and enjoyed your book—onto your list.

Once you have your reader magnet chosen (and you can have more than one, especially if you have reader magnets specific to certain books), advertise it not just on your website, but also in the back matter of all of your books. A reader who’s just finished your book is more likely to be “warm” and willing to hear from you on a regular basis.

As long as what you’re offering is enticing, reader magnets are a fantastic way to grow your list.

Onboarding automation
Once someone signs up for your list, what happens next? They need to hear from you right away, especially if they’re expecting the delivery of their reader magnet. This is where onboarding automation comes in. When you set up your mailing list account, you’ll also want to set up a welcome sequence containing anywhere from one to several emails that are sent automatically. (The process for setting this up will vary from platform to platform, but there is technical support available on all of the major platforms.)

The first email should welcome them to the list and thank them for signing up while providing them access to their free content. Follow up with a second email a few days later—here, you could highlight a permafree book (or offer them links to other free books if you don’t have any freebies of your own to offer), or give them more information they would find interesting and relevant. A third email could once again thank them for signing up while letting them know what to expect going forward (how often you send, what type of content you include, for example).

BookFunnel
Now that you’ve chosen your reader magnet, you might be wondering how to deliver it to your readers. While it’s possible to simply host the bonus content on your website (or on a site like Google Drive or Dropbox), you could also use a service like BookFunnel. The main drawback is that BookFunnel isn’t a free service, but it offers numerous benefits you should consider.

If you’re using BookFunnel, you simply upload any reader magnets to the site and use the generated link they provide in your onboarding sequence, directing readers to the BookFunnel site to download their content. Any technical glitches or requests for help will go through BookFunnel and not to you.

Another advantage to using BookFunnel is that they offer monthly promotions where you can team up with other authors in your genre to offer readers a free book in exchange for signing up for your list. If you’re focused on building your list, this is an excellent way to find new readers.

However, if you’re on a budget, BookFunnel isn’t a necessity, and you can deliver your reader magnets by providing a link to a shared Google Drive folder, for example. You could also team up with other authors on your own to do newsletter building cross-promo. This is more time intensive, but a good option if you’re on a budget.

The care and feeding
Now that you have a mailing list and are starting to attract readers through your reader magnets, joint promotions, website, and back matter, the next step is to start sending on a regular basis. Whether you’re sending weekly, on the 1st and 15th, or monthly (and this will vary from one author to the next), be consistent. Sending regularly trains your readers to expect to hear from you and allows you to develop a relationship with them as opposed to simply showing up in their inbox when you’ve got a new book or a sale. Finding out how often your readers want to hear from you will take some trial and error. One way to fast-track this process is to survey your readers about their email marketing preferences and incorporate what you learn.

The content you include will be up to you and dependent on your readers and your brand. However, it’s a good idea to keep a list of content ideas so that you’re not stumped for what to send. Make sure that your content is relevant and engaging for your readers. If every single email is nothing more than a sales pitch, readers will lose interest and your open rates will drop. Some non-sales content ideas include a behind-the-scenes look at your work in progress, character profiles, book recommendations, a personal story, memes, news stories relevant to your books, recipes, updates on what past characters are up to now, and things that have inspired you, such as songs or places.

Another key to success is to pay attention. Subscribe to newsletters from authors who would have the same target readers as you, and look at what they include in their emails. What resonates with you? What gets clicked or elicits a response in your newsletters? Make a note of what type of content works best.

In addition, include a link to the reader magnets at the bottom of every email, as some readers may have missed content and will appreciate the link. It’s also a good idea to include a link to your most recent book and/or the first book in your series at the bottom of the email.

Hit send
A successful, fruitful mailing list is one of the most powerful marketing tools in your author arsenal. Focus on growing your list, sending regularly and giving readers interesting, click-worthy content, and you’ll reap the rewards.

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Tara Wyatt is a contemporary romance author who lives near Toronto, Ontario. Known for her heat and her humor, her books have won several awards. When she’s not writing, she can be found playing with her daughter, reading, or binging Netflix with her husband.

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Nink: Fact-Checking Your Nonfiction

This article by Nicole Evelina is from the June 2021 edition of Nink, the monthly newsletter of Novelists, Inc.  (NINC). Nink, which is packed each month with informative articles for career novelists, is a benefit of NINC membership. 

Fact-checking is perhaps more important today than ever before. Our readers have access to the same information we do and a handful of them like to point out errors. While this is embarrassing, it can also have serious negative effects on a career, even for the most seasoned pros. Look at Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of The New York Times. She was lambasted for errors in her book Merchants of Truth, for which she was accused of plagiarism and improper attribution of sources.

In most cases, publishing houses consider fact-checking the author’s responsibility, as it is part of your final product. However, many nonfiction books are never fact-checked, according to multiple online sources and an informal poll of members of the Biographers International Organization.

Publishing a book or article without fact-checking is dangerous for both the author and publisher, so going through the process is highly recommended. You can hire a fact-checker, but you can also do it yourself. There are pros and cons to the DIY approach.

Pros:

  • You are the expert in your subject, so you know it better than most strangers would.
  • If you do it yourself you’ll know for sure it was done to your satisfaction.
  • Should anyone question your accuracy, you can speak to how it was verified.
  • It saves you money—anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000+ depending on the rate and the length of your book.

Cons:

  • You must learn how to fact-check, whereas if you hire someone, they are (hopefully) already an expert.
  • After spending years researching and writing a book, you may be too close to the subject to check it objectively.
  • Fact-checking takes a fair amount of time and determination.
  • If something slips through, you are 100 percent accountable.

If you choose to do it yourself, I recommend reading The Fact Checker’s Bible by Sarah Harrison Smith. It’s an older book meant for fact-checkers who work with authors but is applicable when checking your own work as well. For a more recent book that covers fact-checking in the digital age, check out The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking by Brooke Borel, which breaks fact-checking down by type (book, article, etc.) and by type of fact (basic facts, numbers, quotes, analogies, descriptions, etc.)

Step One: Take good notes
Fact-checking begins while you’re doing research. Anyone who has had to write a thesis or is trained in research knows the importance of documenting your sources. But this is not only true for the final book, article, etc.; it also applies to your notes. If you use footnotes or parenthetical documentation—which is (author last name, page number), for example (Evelina, 153)—with each one of your notes, it will make it easier for you to go back during your fact-checking process and make sure you are correct. And it is important to put that information with each fact you note down because you will likely move your notes around as you learn more. If you always keep the source citation with the note, you won’t run the risk of not remembering where it came from.

When working in archives, if they allow you to take non-flash photos of source material, do so. You will thank yourself not only when writing the book, but even more so when you fact-check. If the archive doesn’t allow photography, ask to photocopy the source or scan into a PDF. There is usually a method available, though you may wish to ask if there are restrictions on use (i.e. can you use the photo in your book/article? Are you allowed to post it online?)

Also, don’t discount the value of a bibliography. I keep a running list of every source I consult while researching. Then once I’ve written the book, I copy that list to another file and delete the sources that didn’t make it into the final book. That way, if I realize I failed to cite something or need to go back, I still have a full list of sources in addition to the bibliography that will appear in the back of the book or on my website (if the book has only a list of major sources.)

Step Two: Identify the facts
Hopefully you’ll have time away from your manuscript before fact-checking so you can look at it with fresh eyes. Read through and underline every statement of fact you will need to check. Borel advises to read your work from the perspective of someone who is skeptical of your approach or wants to find errors. Highlight what they might question.

Step Three: Double-check your sources
The first thing you should do to check a fact is look back at your notes and confirm they match. Then if you have the source material at hand, do a second check. If it is archival material that you can’t easily access, you have two choices: you can email the archive and see if they will either fact check it for you or send you an electronic copy of what you need or hope your notes are accurate. Obviously, the first is preferable, but sometimes you don’t have that option.

Step Four: Look for generalizations and exaggerations
It’s very easy to write in sweeping generalizations and nearly everyone does at least once in a draft. (See what I did there? Even that sentence contains both.) Hopefully your editor caught most of them but go back and mark any that you see. Is there a way you can hone what you mean to be more accurate? These types of statements aren’t as serious as plagiarism, but they can annoy readers, make you look like you don’t know what you’re talking about, and will bring out the ire of scholars.

Step Five: Check every single quote
Be especially careful with quotes because you run the risk of being accused of defamation in the form of libel if they are inaccurate, especially if they create a negative impression of the source. If you have recordings of your interviews, listen to them again or review your handwritten notes. If feasible, run quotes you are unsure of by the source and get their approval in writing, especially if you don’t have a recording to back you up.

With academic writing, this is less of a worry because those types of quotes are more informational than opinion, but make sure the facts in them are accurate. If you are quoting from unpublished source material (such as a letter, diary or other private correspondence held in an archive or personal collection) your quotes must be verbatim, misspellings, weird punctuation and all. Also, be sure you have permission from the estate or archival institution to quote from the source. (That is usually taken care of when you research at an archive, but if you are unsure, ask again.)

Step Six: Check for plagiarism
We would all like to believe that we aren’t guilty of plagiarism, but it can be easy to do inadvertently, especially when you are summarizing someone else’s thoughts in your own words. Cite your source whether or not you are quoting them or paraphrasing them. Compare the words in your book/article to your source. Be on the lookout for any wording or phrases you wouldn’t ordinarily use or that are overly formal. Those are good indicators that you need to double-check. Also, watch out for quotation marks that were accidentally removed in editing or citations that were lost when information was moved around.

If you doubt a quote or phrase, run it through Google with quotation marks around it. You’d be surprised how quickly it can find a source. That shouldn’t be your only method of verification, but it is a place to start. As always, check your notes and the source.

Also, be aware that it is possible to plagiarize yourself. That can happen if you use your own writing in more than one place with the exact same (or really close) wording.

Supplemental help
There is software that detects plagiarism, but many are only available to teachers/professors and educational institutions. However, several companies like Grammarly ($11.66-$12.50/month) and Quetext ($9.99/month) offer low-cost online options where you copy/paste your text in. For a fee of $19.95-$39.95 you can use Scribbr, which is considered by some as the most accurate and useful. Scribbr also has an add-on called Own Sources Checker that allows you to check unpublished sources. As of this writing, Own Sources is free if you use the regular Scribbr program. These types of programs can be useful in showing you potential errors, but they cannot and should not replace the steps outlined above.

Fact-checking can be one of the more arduous parts of writing nonfiction, but it is essential. You are better off double-checking everything now, instead of after someone questions or sues you. After all, you are an expert and your reputation—as well as your scholarship—can only benefit from extra due diligence.

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Nicole Evelina  is a USA Today bestselling author of nonfiction, historical fiction, and historical fantasy. She feels anyone’s pain who follows the advice in this article, as she recently fact-checked her first biography. It wasn’t fun, but now she can sleep better at night.

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Nink ~ The Official Record: Me, In My Own Words

This article is from the June 2021 edition of Nink, the monthly newsletter of Novelists, Inc.  (NINC). Nink, which is packed each month with informative articles for career novelists, is a benefit of NINC membership.  This month, NINC has invited Sandra Kitt to share her story as a pioneer in the publishing industry.

Yes, it’s true that I am the first African American to publish with Harlequin, the Canadian publishing mammoth known worldwide for the most enduring and creative line of romance novels in publishing history. I didn’t make this discovery until after I’d published my third book with Harlequin and realized through simple research (I’m a former librarian) that I was the only African American writer consistently published in the burgeoning romance genre of the early 1980s. To admit to this longevity doesn’t make me feel as much ancient as it does experienced. Those early years put me on an important and necessary path to learning how publishing worked. Learning quickly helped to keep me in the game. And, to be honest, I can’t recall if Harlequin ever publicly acknowledged that I am their first Black writer.

I’d made my entry into the industry with two of my first manuscripts being chosen for the then American Romance imprint from Harlequin. It was a new line of stories set in America, written by American writers. It was an immediate and remarkable beginning for me, made more so by my gradual discovery that no one in publishing was prepared for a Black writer to break in, and stay for decades. I slowly began to experience a little pushback as I advanced within the genre with stories that were not the norm for romances. At the time, the industry seemed to have a fixed belief that only white men and women fell in love. I entered their space with a wider worldview that romance novels prior to my entry had not realistically explored.

I was told I didn’t really write “romance.” I already knew that. I didn’t write what I sometimes read as formulaic linear stories. Women’s fiction as a category didn’t exist at the time and, since my stories did have romantic relationships, by default I was whack-a-moled into the box marked romance. My stories were big, complex, sub-plotted, and interjected with social and familial issues never covered before in romance novels. I wrote interracial romances (for sure a first) and included the male point of view (another first), but editors couldn’t deny the strong romantic element that tied the stories together, and which found a following among readers. Penguin Putnam helped me climb higher for a while, when it published The Color of Love, a controversial interracial story, in 1995 simply as mainstream fiction.

The book never made any bestseller list, but was critically acclaimed by USA Today, was optioned by HBO and Lifetime, and is still available more than 25 years later. Obviously, outside the periphery of romance, other sources saw creative merit in my work. The late director Jonathan Demme passed on an early suspense my agent pitched to him, but with the caveat “…tell her to keep writing.” I went on to publish with nearly every traditional publisher from the ‘80s through the early aughts of this century. Until my latest book, Winner Takes All, my last book was published in 2010 from Kimani, another Harlequin imprint. It would seem that I had, unbelievably, come full circle.

On the surface my publishing trajectory appears charmed. And it was. I was being interviewed, profiled, and invited to national book festivals that were then popping up all over the country, sponsored by such publications as the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. For a time, I was sent on yearly book tours and lectured at universities, local libraries, and special-interest groups and organizations. I met an incredible array of writers both inside and outside of romance, many who’ve become long-standing friends. I’ve been championed by editors and publishers, who seemed to admire what I’d accomplished in my first 10 years as a published author. They all saw that I had longevity and possible staying power.

But, as one powerful industry executive said to me, “They don’t know what to do with you.” I was, apparently, an anomaly. Different. This, along the way, led to a series of unfortunate and terrible incidents that, while I was enjoying undeniable success, also made me aware of subtle and not-so-subtle ways I was being sabotaged and held back. Some support seemed slipshod, haphazard, indifferent. And yet…was it really racial, or just instances of trusting and expecting too much from professionals who were not always competent or up to the demands of their own positions? Had I contributed by too often giving in, going against my own better and sometimes more reliable instincts? But yes, some of it was racial.

Editorial changes were made randomly without consideration of consequences; promises were broken that often worked against actually helping my work succeed. Despite saying that I would be published in hardcover, publishers broke that contract promise without a word of excuse or explanation. I was scammed outright on one contract after bailing out a publisher on a project for which they couldn’t find a writer. The end result was not only humiliating but dispiriting.

I waited for the larger industry acceptance that I had a contribution to make, that I was breaking new ground that publishers could have benefited from if they’d been able to see beyond the obvious—that I was a Black romance author—and were willing to develop a “wider and newer worldview” of their own. I believe even now it was a missed opportunity.

Adam and Eva unexpectedly became an early classic for Harlequin, reissued and printed several times. But when it was picked up by the Italian affiliate of Harlequin for sale in Europe, the cover art was a painting of a white couple, instead of the Black characters the book was about. I understood perfectly why that decision was made. Nevertheless, I charged the editorial decision with being disrespectful and bigoted, perpetrating a lie on book buyers.

I once had an editor confess that the publisher would never inform me that I was among their top 25 bestselling writers (Were they afraid to admit that a Black writer was able to compete creatively?), and I was left out of any and all promotions that noted those writers. One publisher kept a “milestone” list for writers based on how many books they’d published. When I knew I’d made that milestone, the criteria was suddenly changed and I no longer qualified.

I eventually came to learn that I could not depend on all publishers to market me with any kind of insight or real knowledge of me. Being easy to work with might have been a mistake on my part. But when you’re the “first” you step quietly, you watch and listen, and trust that your publisher and editors want what you want—for the book to do well so that everyone benefits. I was disappointed that the industry as a whole, and some of my publishers in particular, never saw the importance of sharing or exploiting my value as a writer of color, or making an effort to capitalize on me being “the first” in their midst. The publishers could have been seen as progressive. Instead, I saw the situation, in part, as a loss of energy, time, and talent from everyone.

But, here’s the thing. I have done more as a published writer, a second career I hadn’t really anticipated, than I could have imagined. I came into the industry, into a specific genre, that was growing exponentially and earning more money than any other segment of the publishing industry ever. It is not a stretch to say everyone knew my name, knew who I was. I found genuine support in publishers who sought me to write for them even though sometimes just getting into print was not enough, and their efforts fell flat.

I absolutely love writing, creating, pulling together my themes and premises with a host of characters that I believe in…adore…and root for. I loved working with editors who got my voice and didn’t try to force me onto paths ill suited to me, or to satisfy a misplaced and always-changing expectation, or a target audience. I love the editors who fought for me in their meetings, trying to convince their team that what I’d written, that I, was worth fighting for. I loved the bookstore owners and sales staff who championed my books by chatting up the stories with their customers. The librarians and teachers, the readers I’ve met who validated what I’d written with their praise and support. Yes, it fed my ego. All of which forces me to remain true to me and my stories, and my view of the world that is only getting wider, to explore, to include…and to write about how we love.

To learn more about my journey, watch my interview with Jayne Ann Krentz on Facebook. I’m still here.

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Sandra Kitt’s The Color of Love was issued in 1995 to critical acclaim. Girlfriends, an anthology from HarperCollins, was nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Fiction in 1999. The first Black writer to publish with Harlequin, she launched Arabesque, the first African American romance imprint in 1994. She has designed cards for UNICEF and illustrated books for the late Dr. Isaac Asimov. Her most recent project is a trilogy, The Millionaires Club. The first book in the series is Winner Takes All. She is represented by Lisa Erbach Vance with the Aaron Priest Agency in New York.

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