The Catholic Writers Guild

One of my dubious distinctions as a writer is being lumped in the group of Authors Who Have Long Boring Acknowledgements Pages.  These lists are no fun to read unless your name is on the page somewhere; even then, you skim right to your own part and skip the rest.  But still, some of us feel compelled to put them in our books.  Why?

I did it because it feels like cheating to have only my own name on a book, when I know how much work others put into it as well.  Maybe not as much as the author, but a whole lot more than they got paid for, that’s for sure.  From start to finish, here are the different kinds of hands that went into my book:

1. The people who got my life to the point where I could do this.  I didn’t spring from the earth ready to write a book.

2. The people who slapped me silly when I was goofing off not writing.  I think I need to hunt down my slapper, I have a project I’m neglecting right now.

3. The people who read my manuscript and told me everything that was wrong with it, and a few things that were good with it.  To name a few CWG members and friends who had a hand in getting my recently-released book fit for the general public:

• Lisa Mladnich made me cut my manuscript in half.
• Christian LeBlanc found 98% of my typos.
• Dorian Speed told me some of the things I said were just plain dumb and needed to be fixed.
• Sr. Marie-Paul Curley made me liven up my writing.

But my personal favorite slice of editing history isn’t from my book, it’s from John McNichol’s Emporer of North America: My son & I got to preview one of the later drafts, and give our feedback on a fight scene.  That was the coolest.

4. The people who got my manuscript ready for production, and got the books out the door.  Not all of them made it into print, since you don’t meet many of the biggest helpers until after the final manuscript is sealed and delivered.

Do writers slave away in isolation?

Not for long.  Sure, there are many hours of thinking and writing and revising and thinking some more, and you do a lot of that on your own.  Time In Chair is the #1 ingredient in a published book.  No one’s going to come along and extract your book from your brain for you.  But there’s an enormous difference between writing for fun — at home, on the blog, wherever — and writing for serious publication.

As a writer you have two choices.  You can present your book to the world as it comes out of your head, and find out on the internet everything you did wrong.  Or you can first present your work to a team of critical, nit-picky taskmasters who will help you clean up your act before it goes public.  You’ll end up with a long, boring acknowledgements page, but you’ll also end up with a much better book.

Jennifer Fitz

Jennifer Fitz is the author of The How-to Book of Evangelization: Everything You Need to Know But No One Ever Taught You from Our Sunday Visitor and Classroom Management for Catechists from Liguori Publications. She writes about all things evangelization and discipleship at jenniferfitz.substack.com. For updates on where else to find her, visit JenniferFitz.com.