The Making of a Book

In the early 1990s I read A Narrative of Facts by Robert Baxter, a short, autobiographical book written by a British lawyer in 1833. Though I was in the habit of reading material from that age period and earlier, I found this book especially difficult. Nonetheless, it was so absolutely fascinating that I thought it well worth the effort it took to read. I wanted to share it with everyone, but not many people appreciate old English like I do, and I didn’t find many willing even to try.

A few years later, my husband, Lee W. Brainard suggested I rewrite Baxter’s story in modern English. Neither of us are big fans of updating the English of old books for the benefit of readers who think it is too hard to look up archaic words and ponder over quaint phrases. Baxter’s book is an exception to our usual rule of letting old authors use their own words to tell their own story. One reason for this exception became apparent when I made my first attempt to rewrite A Narrative of Facts. I had worked on only a few pages when I realized that replacing archaic expressions was not enough to make the book readable. The organization of thoughts was still foreign to our common way of thinking, and the manuscript I was creating was too complicated for my targeted audience. I set the project aside for nearly 10 years.

In 2011 I took the book up again, writing in the third person and reorganizing the story. When I was finished, I handed the manuscript over to my husband. Lee thought I had left out too much material, so he spent a year or two putting doctrinal arguments back in. When he was done, I sifted through it again, banishing some of the doctrinal portions to appendices in order to maintain an easily readable flow of events. The end result is nearly 10 years of writing and rewriting again and again and is evidence of at least two things:

1. Rewriting in “modern English” is not as easy as it sounds, at least not when you start with a book that actually needs to be rewritten for modern readers.

2. Writing with two authors is harder than writing by yourself. I believe, however, that the end result in this case is better than if either of us had worked on our own. To judge for yourself, order the book from either of these places:

Amazon.com (paperback or kindle version)

Smashwords (e-versions)

Many thanks to Bill Kinderman of Sioux Falls, South Dakota for proofreading and making excellent suggestions!