Minnesota writer teaches online book editing class

Jan. 26—SARANAC LAKE — Once a writer gets a story down, what comes next may be nebulous.

Nicole Helget, a Minnesota-based award-winning author, teacher, Minneopa Valley Press editor-in-chief, and manuscript consultant, helps writers get to the next step in "Editing The Whole Book: Narrative Arc & Structure," a four-week online class to be held Saturday mornings from 9 a.m. to noon beginning on Feb 4.

Offered by the Adirondack Center for Writing, this class is intended for fiction or nonfiction writers who have all or most of their book written and now need guidance in revising their book's structure/story arc.

Helget is the author of "The Summer of Ordinary Ways" (Borealis Press/Minnesota Historical Society), "The Turtle Catcher" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), "Stillwater" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), "Horse Camp" (Egmont), "Wonder at the Edge of the World" (Little, Brown and Company), "The End of the Wild" (Little, Brown and Company), and the forthcoming essay collection, "Love on the Wintry Prairie" (University of Minnesota Press).

A New York Times Editor's Pick and People Magazine's Critic's Choice writer, she has dozens of starred reviews and writing grants for her work in nonfiction and fiction, especially about climate change and water quality.

She has written dozens of children's nonfiction picture books, published under various pen names, and also ghostwrites books for clients.

RURALIST

Helget identifies as a working-class rural writer, and she writes what she knows in southern Minnesota and farther afield.

"That is my sweet spot, and it's unavoidable because that's who I am as a person," she said.

"I still live on a farm, and we still are impacted every single day by the weather, by seasonal changes. We live very, very close to nature, and I think that's likely the major difference between rural writers and suburban/urban. It's not, you know, one is better than the other. It's just something that I see in my editing is that writers who live among people tend to be really good about writing about interpersonal conflict in their writing. They really, really develop characterization and man vs. man plot lines really, really well, and that makes sense because they are interacting with people all the time."

Rural writers, and she says she knows she's generalizing, tend to be good working about man vs. nature or descriptions of settings.

"And again, it's not that one is better than the other," she said.

"It's just that they're different."

BLACK HOLE

Helget's online course is a lifeline for writers bobbing in pre-publication waters.

"I've been working with writers for around 10 years, a decade," she said.

'I work as a manuscript consultant. I work as a developmental editor. Sometimes I work as a personal coach in writing. I feel like there are a lot of options and a lot of support for writing the book, for developing the craft, and getting that first manuscript down. There are classes everywhere for that. So what I've noticed is that once that first draft is complete, there's like a black hole."

'BAKING THE CAKE'

What does a writer do with the first draft? What's the next step to get support for editing?

"Even among the editing classes, I've noticed that there are a lot that are devoted to like frosting, laying words, like the poetry, and we need all of those things, too, but you shouldn't be putting frosting on the thing before the cake is baked," she said.

"This class is more like baking the cake. Let's go back to the beginning and ask ourselves how the physical journey is layered? What is the personal transformation? Because every single book, no matter what genre you're writing in, has those two elements. All writers are trying to figure out the relationship between some kind of physical journey and some kind of character's personal transformation. And, so that's what we're going to be doing."

Online attendees need to be "in deep stages of a book-length story with at least one major plot line."

"They need most of a first draft done," she said.

"Among the many things I've noticed with people's first completed draft is that they're really front-loaded. They're good at building. The Act 1 takes way, way too long. and sometimes I think writers kind of like run out of steam by that third act. It's pretty amazing because you can literally see writers telling themselves the story in the first act, and sometimes what we do is we look at those pages and ask ourselves if we're really not writing some of the resolution already.

"And if we have, sometimes just pick it up, move it to the third act, massage it a little bit, and then when you close the book, what you need to have is these two acts looking at each other. Like the first act asks questions. The third act is the act that answers them. So, they're like talking to each other."

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter@RobinCaudell