Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
One of the things that authors rarely do, at least in my experience, and which they should do, is provide the editor with a stylesheet.
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Thanks for this, Rhadin. I was wondering what a style sheet was, and you explained it. It reminds me of a tip - several in fact - that I got from Elizabeth George's book "Write Away". In there she has a sheet of questions one should be able to answer about one's principal characters: favourite colours, favourite food and drink, whether (s)he smokes, drinks, takes drugs, etc, very detailed. I also found that I needed more questions than EG had suggested.
I have filled out one of these for each of my characters in the first book, skipping some of the questions for minor characters. But I saw that this was so important that I transferred many of the questions to a spread sheet, where I included such things as colour of hair and eyes, height, weight, BMI, date of birth and age on a certain key date in the story, etc, plus relationships to other characters. This was invaluable.
Even more invaluable, so much so that I think it should be included in the definition of a style sheet, is the calendar of events, or timeline, if you will. In my first book I had a critical period which I thought was six months, and constructed a time line based on that. At a late stage I discovered that this period had been reduced by a legal change to three months, which put a tremendous strain on the credibility of the action taking place in the period, but with a good timeline, I was able to make the necessary changes.