Tia Nevitt of Tia's Writing Blog has put together some great information to help writers get the most out of Microsoft Word. The principles she's outlined can easily be extended to other word processing tools as well, though you'll need one that supports outlining features to make full use of her suggestions.
This information's great for those of us who want to write our entire manuscripts within single files rather than breaking them into tiny elements the way a lot of the tools for writers expect us to do. The beauty of this approach is that you can define what your final document's going to look like even as you're writing it.
Just go to the blog and look for the links. They're in the upper left corner of the main page.
She covers topics like creating a manuscript template and making use of styles and the document map. She's written the instructions in plain English so you don't need to be a technical type to make sense of them.
Even better, she gives you the information you need in order to tailor the instructions to suit your own preferences.
I use a similar approach to Tia's, though I go back and forth between the Document Map and the Outline views a lot, depending on what I'm doing. It's really easy to move stuff around within the manuscript from the Outline view.
I also take a similar approach for my styles, though I don't name my scenes. Instead, I just separate my scenes with # (since that's the character I want to use in my finished manuscripts to designate scene shifts) and I define an extra style for 'Scene First Paragraph' and apply it to each scene's first paragraph. It's formatted just like other paragraphs in the manuscript, but it's one level up in the document structure so I can see these lines when I look at the Document Map or Outline. It makes for quick scanning to find just the scene you're hunting.
I define an additional style called 'Critical Event', which is at the same level in the structure as 'Scene First Paragraph.' I primarily use this to flag the things I'm going to want to highlight when I go back to write my full synopsis. So my structure, once there's some writing there, looks a lot like this:
Chapter
Scene First Paragraph
Scene Text
Critical Event
Scene Text
Chapter
That structure works for me, but with Tia's help, you can come up with just the right structure for your own work.
Happy writing!
-Originally posted on October October 28, 2008, at rascaleriter.com.
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Comments imported from original location:
#1 Tia
on Oct 30th, 2008 at 12:19 am [edit]
Wow; thanks for the link. You have inspired me to continue my series. I’m kind of on the fence about getting Word 2007, but some of my readers already use it and were able to use my instructions anyway.
I also use pound characters to separate scenes. The only reason I name them is so they will appear in the document map. I strip the scene names out when I’m finished with the draft.
I really like your “critical event” idea! And I’ll have to play with using the Outline view. I haven’t used that view since I used to mess around with Master Documents.
#2 Brandilyn Collins
on Nov 3rd, 2008 at 6:13 pm [edit]
Dora, thanks for your comment on my blog, Forensics and Faith. I’m glad to hear my own journey to publication story has helped you. Blessings!
~ Brandilyn
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