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A Quick Primer for Fiction Writers in using Microsoft Word in the Digital Age

It always saddens me a little when a writer sends me an overly formatted Word doc to turn into an ebook or print-on-demand. It’s not that I have to clean it up–I can strip and flip the messiest files in less than an hour. What bugs me is how much thought and effort the writer wasted on utterly useless manuscript styling.

Example of a Word doc that has been overstyled.

The majority of writers I work with use Word. The vast majority have no idea how to use Word for their own benefit. I understand. I was a fiction writer for over two decades and even though I have been using computers and a variety of word processing programs since the late ’80s, it wasn’t until I started learning book production that I figured out how…

Can you tell from a one-line description whether you want to read a book or not?

This week I’ve been working on my query letter, and especially the single sentence near the beginning that sums up my story. I could have written another 10k-15k of new words in the time I’ve been sweating over this sentence, and I’m still not happy with it.

On Thursday, I was cross-eyed from wrestling with The Sentence when

Today my mind is on editing again, because I’m still editing my second edition of the Herezoth trilogy. And as much as some days I REALLY feel the itch to be writing again and feel that the autumn can’t get here fast enough, editing is cool, even if it’s tough. It’s worth doing, and it’s worth doing well.

It’s not all fun and games, but here are five reasons to persevere when editing makes you want to pull your hair out:

1. YOU HAVE YOUR STORY.

The most enjoyable, but in a lot of ways, the most challenging part of writing is discovering your story. If you’re editing, that’s DONE. You might cut some things. You might rearrange some things. But generally, once you’ve gotten your draft down and you move on to editing, your basic story is in place.

How reassuring is that? It’s a great relief. In a…

I sometimes wonder just how much responsibility to the world at large us writers have. I did a post recently concerning triggers and got much interesting feedback about that. A trigger can be anything, a taste, a touch, a scent, words read in a book. The general consensus seemed to be that it was the readers’ responsibility to watch for those things that might trigger an untoward response or memory.

As writers, we should write about whatever we want to. There should be no censorship. To rate books like movies seems ridiculous; G, PG, R, X. And who, or what organization, would govern that?

I recall a friend bringing a paperback book to junior high school.  It was Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”. There was a passage in that book where she describes her own breast development and compares them to apricots and cantaloupes. We sat in the library and…

In our last post on writing tips, we gave general advice on how to write good dialogue. Today, we want to blog about so-called dialogue tags.

A dialogue tag is a verb such as “said” or “asked.” The function of a dialogue tag is to let the reader know who’s speaking. If used correctly, dialogue tags are a good thing because they avoid confusion, so here’s some advice on how to use dialogue tags:

1) Avoid “creative” dialogue tags

Some writers become overly creative when it comes to dialogue tags. They seem to think that “said” is boring, so they use a plethora of tags such as whined, admitted, yelled, grumbled, etc. Please don’t do that.

“Said” and “asked” (and the occasional “shouted” or “whispered”) are actually the best verbs to use in a dialogue tag. Readers’ minds skip over it, while other tags pull the readers’ attention away from the dialogue and become a…

From CBS.com

by Margie Lawson, @MargieLawson

If you watch NCIS, you know Jethro Gibbs, aka Mark Harmon, has rules. Fifty-plus rules. My next fifteen (or fifty) blogs will feature a different Margie-Rule for writers.

[Click here for Margie’s Rule #1:
Never Take Any Word for Granted.]

Margie’s Rule #2: Write the Hard Stuff: Facial Expressions

Write the hard stuff.

Those words sound harsh. Nobody wants to write the hard stuff. And writing fresh facial expressions is tough.

It’s easy to write a sigh. It’s easy to write a nod. It’s easy to have a character shake their head.

It’s easy to write eyebrows raising, lifting, lowering, wagging.

It’s easy to write eyes narrowing, widening, slitting, squinting, winking, rolling.

It’s not easy to write fresh facial expressions.

You may be thinking, why write fresh? What’s wrong with writing overused facial expressions? Everybody writes them.

Lots of writers use…