Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Here's An Editing Hack...

 Disclaimer first—I do not consider myself a professional anything, so my suggestions and tips should be taken as just one more person on the internet sharing his personal opinion, based on his own experiences.  These tips and ideas may work for you too, but they may not.  Just saying.

Writing Tip #025

 

Okay, you’ve finished you first draft.  You’ve read through it once.  You’ve read through it twice.  You’ve fixed a countless number of mistakes both times you read through it.  You start in on your third pass through your work, and I’ll be damned, another misspelled word!  How is it that our eyes can read over the same misspelled word three to five times without even noticing it?

 

I’ve run across an easy hack which has helped me locate a lot of misspelled words in my latest work in progress, and it’s so simple.  If you’re using Microsoft Word to write your story, try using the “Read Aloud” tool in the Review tab.  Word isn’t flawless in paying attention to punctuation while reading, but when it reads a misspelled word out loud to you, you’re going to notice right away.

 

I use Word for all my writing, so I know this tool is available in the program.  If you need help finding it, please feel free to reach out in the comments, and I will do my best to direct you to it.  I’m pretty sure most other document programs have the “Read Aloud” option also.  I’d be happy to hear if any of those programs you are familiar with pay attention to punctuation while reading.  Please share if you can!

 

Keep Writing!    

Sunday, October 23, 2022

Thank You For Noticing!

            Sometimes, I just want to reach out to a reader and say, "Thank you for noticing the effort I put into that!"  In a reader’s review of my book, TheGouge, the reviewer picked up on something which I’m not afraid to say I’m pretty proud of:

 “All of the characters acted logically and in line with their personalities, which I greatly appreciated. It’s always a pet peeve of mine when characters do dumb things just to move the plot forward, and I’m happy to say that this wasn’t an element of David’s story at all.”  

              

I’m confident I’m not the only author who tries to keep from creating characters who are illogical or out of the norm for the sake of being out of the norm, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about my character’s actions and whether or not what they do will be considered believable.  I get caught up in wondering if the first person who reads this will say, “Why is he doing that?  Why doesn’t he just do this?  If he’d just think, he could have saved the day instead of causing all this drama!  And that’s just it.  Sometimes, like the reviewer above mentioned, a character creates a problem just so the story can happen; not just move forward, but so the story can exist in the first place.  I get that characters are allowed to make mistakes, otherwise, there might not be any reason to write the book in the first place.  For me though, that’s just not good enough.  Can't we at least inject some good reasoning into their lives for believability's sake?  It might even make for some interesting plot twists.  

I’m going to keep fighting the good fight, and strive to create plots which happen regardless of the actions of my characters, and my characters will just have to live around them!  Maybe this will work out, or maybe I'll be called out on it.  Afterall, I'm not perfect.  

 

Keep Reading!

BOOK REVIEW: The Manic Mission: Children of the Mob, BY: C.J. Simone

  This was a wild ride right from the beginning.  In the first pages there’s action, mystery, thrills, and suspense, and it doesn’t let up f...