Month: October 2019

How to write a novel

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Perfect timing for this topic, considering that NaNoWriMo starts this weekend. Whether you decide to participate or not, it’s a good excuse to start writing…and keep writing. Setting the habit of writing every day is one of the most recommended activities in writing of any sort, but is that even possible? Of course, it is. As with any other habit you plan to develop, it will take a bit of effort, especially at first. Think back to your first visit to the gym. Painful, wasn’t it? And you never wanted to do it again…but you did.

It may not be a daily habit for many of us, but you still go stretch those muscles every so often—do the same for your mental muscles—the more you do it, the easier it gets. As with the gym, set aside some time…each day. As little as twenty minutes can work, but if you manage to get a full hour, you’ll accomplish much more. The first few days, you may end up just sitting there staring at a blank screen, but once the ideas start flowing, it will amaze you how much you’ll accomplish. The trick is to stop at the end of the day in the middle of a scene…in the middle of a paragraph…in the middle of a sentence. When you return the next day, you’ll be impatient to get back and finish that bit.

Write, just write

Now, all you are doing is writing. Don’t scroll back to read…at least not farther than needed to get back into the scene. Reading…and editing…are far off in the future. Worry about them later, much later. Don’t concern yourself with perfection either. Completion is your goal, not a wonderful book. It’s reasonable, even probable, that your novel stinks. That’s normal. In fact, if you accept that your novel won’t be any good, all the better! When you get to the slow spot in the middle, give it a kick. Add in something you hadn’t planned on—a car crash, a talking dog, a lover from the past—just keep writing

If you follow the NaNoWriMo plan, you should be done with 50,000 words by the end of the month. Don’t worry if you don’t get that far…or if it takes you a bit longer. The plan is to finish. If your story is shorter than some, that’s fine. If you take three or four months to get to the end, that’s outstanding as well. Just finishing and you are ahead of 99% of the world. How many of your friends can say they’ve written a novel? Odds are, they are the ones who will soon be bragging that they know someone who has: YOU.

Done, now what?

The next step is to put that novel in a box and hide it somewhere. Don’t look at it, don’t share it, don’t even mention that you have it. Instead, start writing the next one. Yes, start your second novel right now. You have the habit of writing daily—use it! Keep those mental muscles active—you’ll find it to be much easier this time. The words will come with ease, the plot will unfold before you, when you get to that sticky spot in the middle, you’ll continue because you’ve done it before. You know you can do it…again.

In six months or so, after you’ve finished the second one, you are allowed to pull out that first one and gawk at all the problems you used to have. If you feel like it, you can go over that first one and clean it up, but that’s not necessary…just having it in hand gives you the strength and will power to continue, and if you toss it, you’ll still have learned from it. Take your second one and move forward. Congrats!

Singular They

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This is going to be a touchy topic, so hang in there, and we’ll see what we can do with it. Agreement in count is important in English. We don’t say, “He are there,” because ‘he’ is singular and ‘are’ is a plural verb. For the same reason, we don’t say, “Friends is good.” Again, one is plural (‘friends’), the other singular (‘is’).

Agreement between nouns and verbs is good, but nouns and the pronouns referring back to those nouns need to agree as well. In “Lisa is happy because she won the prize,” ‘she’ is referring back to Lisa, so the pronoun agrees with the noun in count (and it also happens to agree in gender, but we don’t care about that now).

The problem is that English doesn’t have a non-gender singular pronoun referring to a person. (The word ‘it’ usually refers to non-people…unless used in a derogatory manner, such as referring to an ex-spouse.)

History:

Part of the problem is that English is such a mishmash of other languages. We took many of our content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.) from Latin, but grammatical words (pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, etc.) came from other sources, one being Old Norse. The Old Norse pronouns their, theira, theim can be traced back to about 1200, where they replaced the existing words hīe, hīora, him (which could have been confused for the remaining pronouns of ‘he’, ‘her’, and ‘him’).

The plural form of ‘they’ was around for about 100 years before being used to refer to singular subjects, and all was well with the world. For example, in 1375, singular ‘they’ appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf. Here’s the Middle English version: ‘Hastely hiȝed eche…þei neyȝþed so neiȝh…þere william & his worþi lef were liand i-fere.’ In modern English, that’s: ‘Each man hurried…till they drew near…where William and his darling were lying together.’

It wasn’t until the Prescriptivists of the 18th century got a hold of English that it was frowned upon “because a plural pronoun can’t take a singular antecedent” (along with a few other ‘rules’ that no longer apply: End of Sentence prepositions and Split Infinitives for example). The Prescriptivists proposed to avoid using plural ‘they’, encompassing singular as well, by using ‘he’, which encompasses females as well—trade one globally misused word for another. They clearly forgot that singular ‘you’ used to be exclusively a plural pronoun. If they had noticed, we would probably still be using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ for singular second person instead of ‘you’. No one complains about using ‘you’ to refer to a singular subject, so why worry about ‘they’?

Modern:

All right then, enough history. Consider these modern sentences:

  • “One of your girlfriends phoned, but she didn’t leave a message.”
  • “One of your boyfriends phoned, but he didn’t leave a message.
  • “One of your friends phoned, but they didn’t leave a message.”

Any problem with ‘they’ referring to a singular subject? Not if you’re speaking, but written English is a bit more formal…though it is not so formal as to require “he or she” all the time, so relax and converse with your readers.

ISBN

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Ah! Good ol’ ISBNs. How much do we know about them…how much do we care? Everyone talks about them, but what do we really know of them? Why are they so important? Do we really need them? What do we do with them? And what do all those dashes mean? …Don’t worry, we’ll get to all of that right now.

First off, it’s an acronym for International Standard Book Number (so it isn’t right to talk about an ISBN number, just say ISBN). It has a few cousins, too, the main ones are the ISSN (for serialized publications such as magazines and newspapers) and the ISMN (for musical scores), but our focus is on books. The ISBN is used to identify books…or book-like items—including ebooks and audio books.

As an international standard, the ISBN has a lot of information, and the first part is what ‘country’ we’re in: 978 (and the new 979) is BookLand. (Yes, they really set up a separate country just for us.) The next part is called the Registration Group Element…but we just call it the Language group. (In 978, a 0 or 1 in this position indicates English, 2 French, 3 German, 4 Japan, 5 Russian, 7 Chinese, etc.) The next part is the Registrant Element…we say Publisher. Then follows the Publication Element. The last digit is a checksum just to keep the computers happy.

Hyphens:

The hyphens are important, too, and have certain places to go, but the problem is that two of the elements aren’t fixed in size: the publisher and publication. Together they have to occupy a total of 8 digits (in the main language groups), but it can be 2&6, 3&5, 4&4…down to 7&1. Obviously, the fewer digits used to identify the publisher, the more digits there are available for publications. In the 2 digit publishers, each one can have a million publications…and in the 7 digit publishers, although there is room for ten million publishers, each one can have only ten publications.

Yes, ten publications is the smallest you can go, but why so many? What if you only have one book to share with the world? You’ll still need a few ISBNs: one for the paperback, one for the hardback, one for Kindle ebook, Nook ebook, and don’t forget your audio book. It needs a separate one, too. The ISBN identifies each different type of media, because if the reader wants to have a book in hand, you don’t want a CD to arrive when your book is ordered!

What that means is that when you put your ISBN on the copyright page and the back cover (along with its barcode), you need to make certain the hyphens are in the right places. Forgetting them is either a sign of ignorance or an attempt to obscure the size of your publisher. These days, you have nothing to hide. If you’ve been picked up by one of the Big 5, let the world know by putting your hyphens in the right place…and if you’ve gone the self-publishing route, be proud of that fact and boast to the world by putting your hyphens in the right place—between each element!

Non-fiction Keyboard Shortcuts

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Some aspects of non-fiction just don’t apply to fiction, and we’re going to address a few of those, along with their keyboard shortcuts. Although some fiction books may have a Table of Contents or even an Index, most do not. On the other hand, almost all non-fiction books have both. It’s a way for the reader to find the specific information needed. Other than building up a TOC with Heading styles, you can mark selected text to appear in either the TOC or the Index (or in a Table of Authorities).

Table of Contents

  • Mark table of contents entry – Alt-Shift-O
  • Mark index entry – Alt-Shift-X
  • Mark table of authorities entry (citation) – Alt-Shift-I

Along with your bibliography, you’ll want to have explanatory notes for some sections. Footnotes and Endnotes are perfect for that. Footnotes will move to the bottom of the page where they are referenced as you make changes to the text. Endnotes will appear the end of chapters (with section breaks), also moving around as needed.

  • Insert footnote – Ctrl-Alt-F
  • Insert endnote – Ctrl-Alt-D

Fields

Using fields is definitely an Excessive topic level. Few will need them, but those that do will enjoy the capabilities they afford. You can have fields that automatically show the correct page numbers of figures, tables, and other sections of text, despite rearranging everything all around. Here we will introduce only a few field shortcuts. We will cover how to use them later.

  • Insert empty field – Ctrl-F9
  • Update selected field – F9
  • Update all fields – Ctrl-A, F9
  • Switch between selected field code and result – Shift-F9
  • Switch between all field codes and results – Alt-F9
  • Go to next field – F11 or – Alt-F1
  • Go to previous field – Shift-F11 or Alt-Shift-F1
  • Open Bookmark Dialogue Box – Ctrl-Shift-F5 (set bookmark to reference later)
  • Insert PAGE field – Alt-Shift-P (shows current page number)
  • Insert LISTNUM field – Ctrl-Alt-L (increments a list count)
  • Insert DATE field – Alt-Shift-D (updates to show current date)
  • Insert TIME field – Alt-Shift-T (updates to show current time)
  • Lock field – Ctrl-F11 (prevent field from updating)
  • Unlock field – Ctrl-Shift-F11 (allow field to update)
  • Unlink field – Ctrl-Shift-F9 (remove field and replace with field value)

One point about Bookmarks: If you select hyperlink when you create references to them, then readers of electronic copies of your document will be able to click on them and be taken to the bookmark’s location. That would be true of web pages, PDFs, and your original Word document.

We’ll leave off with this list for now, although there are a few more shortcuts we’ll check on later…those that apply only in Tables or Outline View.

Writing and Editing Terms #1

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A lot of jargon and quite a few abbreviations exist in the writing, editing, and publishing industry, so we’re going to take a moment to dispel some of the fog and shed light into the crevices. We have a whole post on just Printing Terms and another one on Grammar, so this time we’ll focus on the Writing process. Rather than have an alphabetical list, we’ll start off with a few abbreviations that may be new to you, then delve into the writing process itself, and finally finish up with a short list of things to avoid. As the whole list is too long to include all here, we’ll continue with this topic next month (Writing and Editing Terms #2).

Abbreviations

  • MC: Main character—central character whose actions and adventures the reader follows
  • ms: Manuscript (usually lower case)—unpublished, final copy ready for editing
  • mss: Manuscripts (plural, also lower case)—in case you have more than one going on at a time
  • WIP: Work in progress—the story currently being worked on
  • AKYB: As You Know, Bob—a method of info dump via dialogue, often stilted and awkward for the characters
  • TOC: Table of Contents—occasionally used in fiction, almost required for non-fiction

Creating the story

  • Pre-writing—Steps taken before starting to write the story itself, can include Brainstorming, Researching, Mapping, and Outlining, often used to create characters and build the story world
  • Brainstorming—Collecting ideas without regard to feasibility, hopefully some will become useful later
  • Researching—Discovering facts to create story environment
  • Mapping—Drawing the story world to envision any distances, locations, or natural obstacles that may become relevant
  • Outlining—Listing short bullet points to summarise content of story, can be used later to create TOC
  • Creating Characters—Listing details of characters, often written up on a sheet inspired by Role Playing games
  • World Building—Creating the story world (whether fictional or not) to give the reader a feeling of actually being there, can include culture, language, landscape, and history to allow consistent backdrop for story—important for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Historical stories where the story world may not be familiar to the reader
  • Zero Draft—Writing step that precedes First Draft, total story dump without regard to practicality
  • Rough Draft—Early draft of work that has not yet been re-read by author
  • Draft—Sequential versions of story as revisions are made, numbered as work progresses

Problems to avoid

  • Info Dump—Excessive description, backstory, or other information that doesn’t push the story along
  • Head Hopping—Changing POV character mid-scene
  • Purple Prose—Excessively descriptive writing, overloading the reader with irrelevant details (also Flowery Writing)
  • As You Know, Bob—Characters being forced by the author to discuss things they would already know in the story world for the benefit of the reader

These are just a few terms…we’ll continue the list next month. See you then!