Noel C. Cilker

I find, from time to time, that it's difficult to explain to people  exactly  what it is I write. "It's history," I say, "but it's not a textbook. It's going to read like a novel." "Oh, so you mean a historical fiction?" I'm asked. "No, it's all true, all nonfiction. It's more like a historical narrative, I guess." "Oh," is the usual response I get, usually accompanied with a quizzical expression of someone who doesn't get it but would rather talk about something else. I really don't know what to call the genre. The closest I've found is Narrative History which is taking history and telling it in story form. This genre allows for more speculation, more dramatic elements and, for the reader, a more exciting and engaging bit of history. The problem I face, though, is how much license can I take and still have it counted as a history book? Passages like this easily count as history...

A lot has happened since I posted a month ago. The biggest accomplishment is that I've hit about 25,000 words in my rough draft. That's in the vicinity of 25% completion, although with all the cutting and editing I'm going to have to do, it could be considered less. One thing I'm noticing is that I'm using a lot of quotes from primary and secondary sources. A LOT. This sometimes makes me feel a little guilty because I wonder if I should count them toward my daily goal of 1,000 words. After all, all it takes is some copying and pasting of a paragraphs-long firsthand account and suddenly I'm the most efficient writer in Berkeley! A thousand words by lunchtime! But is it a cop out to take someone else's words and add them to my count? For instance, here's a paragraph I wrote about the service in some early Chinese restaurants in San Francisco. Keep in mind this is a rough draft with no editing. "Gwai-lo" in the first line is a Cantonese word for...

One of the lessons I'm trying to learn is how to write effectively. Having a schedule full of activities, as mentioned in my previous post, doesn't help. But more to the point, I'm trying to unlearn what I used to do in school as a writer and learn what I should  be doing instead. For example, in school, I used to sit in front of an empty computer screen with that damned cursor blinking . . . blinking . . . blinking . . . waiting for me to write something, anything,  that would break up that field of white. Every writer faces the daunting challenge of a blank page but my problem was how I went about filling it. Instead of spewing out ideas and getting them on the page, I crafted complete sentences in my mind, honing them and trying to get them perfect before setting my typing hands to work. I'm learning now that that's not sustainable. I lost too many good ideas because I couldn't get them into the right form. Getting everything perfect before  I write doesn...