Tool Time: Outline view in Word

There’s an ongoing war–okay, maybe a minor skirmish–over whether to outline your work before you start writing. On the plus side, and outline can give you a structure to write to, and keep you from running down rat holes so far that you’ll never get back. On the minus side, if you don’t outline, your plot may surprise you–and by extension, your reader.

For the purposes of this post, we don’t care. But we can help you outline in cool and user-friendly way by using Word’s outline view.

What is outline view?

Outline view allows you to use the heading styles set in the Word document to create a hierarchical structure within a document, making it easy to list bullet points below chapters.

In the outline, you can move easily from level to level and build an informational hierarchy.

Getting to Outline View

Note: Before you start, you’re best off using a new document and using this for outlining purposes only. In most cases, building your outline into an actual manuscript is much more work than just writing the manuscript in a separate document.

To get to outline view, click the View tab and select Outline.

Using Outline View

You can move from one outline level to the next by pressing the Tab or Shift+Tab keys, or clicking the arrows in the upper left corner of the window.

You can contract a section by selecting the higher-level outline item in that section (for instance, Chapter 1) and clicking the minus button. You can expand it with the plus button.

And you can move a section up or down in your work (like moving chapter 1 after chapter two) by compressing both chapters, then selecting chapter 1 and pressing the down arrow button. The up arrow button works the same way, but moves you up.

It might be a little trickty at first, so if the outline doesn’t do what you want it to do, remember to use your undo button.

 

Fun with Easter Eggs

“Me and the Lord, we got an understanding.” Those words, bordering on blasphemy, were uttered by Jake Blues in the Blues Brothers.

They came to mind as I faced a struggle recently and worked my mind around it. I don’t write about faith here typically–not the venue. But here, it’s appropriate. As I believe, God wants me to do my best and He can handle everything above that.

See, myeand the Lord, we got an understanding.

I love to quote movies, song lyrics, almost anything and stick them in my work. They’re called Easter Eggs. They’re homage, self-amusement, or even an attempt to build an inside relationship with your readers who notice them. They seem like good, harmless fun, if you don’t let them get in the way of the story, and you don’t completely rip someone off.

For instance, unless you’re shooting for parody, it’s probably not the best idea to close a climactic kiss off scene between your protagonist and his high-maintenance girlfriend by having him say “Frankly, dear, I don’t give a damn.” That would be a little obvious, and readers would perceive it as a big rip off.

Also, if you’re writing a fantasy story in a pretechnology period of knights and sorcerers, a reference to Jedi mind tricks isn’t likely to work.

So what are the characteristics of a good Easter egg?

1. It should be subtle and only register with a portion of your readers. If it’s too obvious, it’s not really an Easter egg. For instance, “the first rule of fight club” isn’t really an Easter egg because most people understand the reference. “Me and the Lord, we got an understanding,” would be an Easter egg because only a subset of people, usually around my age or older with excellent cinematic taste would recognize the reference.
2. It should fit the character you’re using it with. For instance, an atheist, a seven-year-old, or a devout priest wouldn’t be likely to use that kind of line. It should fit so well and be so subtle that if you don’t recognize it, you don’t realize it’s there.
3. It should be fleetingly brief. Anything long would cause issues with the flow of your story and turn from an Easter egg into plagiarism. It would also violate fair use rules.
4. It should fit your audience. If you’re writing cozies about crime-fighting house pets owned by a retired librarian, even if you could find a way to include the Blues Brothers reference without disrupting things, no one would get it.

Do you add Easter eggs? Would you? Are they a fun sideline, cheap ploy, sign of immaturity (like that’s a bad thing), unprofessional?

Exercise Wednesday: The Hat

Imagine if you saw something, a hat let’s say. You were sitting, just letting your mind wander and you saw a memorable hat. It doesn’t have to be a hat like the super-amazing magnificent hat in the great literary classic Go, Dog, Go.

In fact, a plainer hat would probably be more interesting. For instance, the hat displayed below is a Brooklyn Dodgers hat I wear to exercise. As you might notice, I sweat a bit when I exercise. But this hat might be interesting if you were to just find it without knowing my backstory for it.

For one thing, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles 54 years ago. That means someone wearing a Dodgers hat must (1) be old enough to remember and idolize the team as it existed before the move, (2) have no understanding about the logo on the hat or (3) be an annoying baseball geek like me.

For another, that’s a lot of sweat in that hat. The State of New York is actually bidding on that hat because there’s enough salt to clear the roads for three weeks. Maybe it’s an exercise hat. Or maybe it’s a work hat. Or maybe it’s a hat someone wears walking cross-country to raise money for something.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to write about the origin of this hat (or another distinctive item of your choosing). Time limit: 25 minutes.

The secret to writing is…writing

This is kind of a continuation of a previous theme.

I work out with a group of people on Tuesday nights. A friend of mine named Daniel showed up at last night’s workout (I’m writing this on a Wednesday morning) and we talked about various things. At one point, he said, “I don’t know how you do the writing you do. You just sit down and do it and have something every day. It takes me forever.”

I considered telling him about my superhuman skills and moral superiority, but decided not to. Instead, I alluded to the workouts we’d just done. There’s a move called a an oblique pushup. You get in pushup position, then while you’re doing the pushup, you raise your right knee toward your right elbow.

I can do maybe two of them, and when I do it, I look like a dog with a lame back leg. Then again, I’ve only been trying to do oblique pushups once a week for maybe six weeks. It’s no wonder the people in the video can make it look pretty and powerful and I make it look like I need a trip to the vet.

I’m like that guy in the back of the picture. I got the basic stance down, but I look at the push up and…I’ve got the basic stance down.

It’s the same thing with writing. I’ve been doing this blog for almost three years. Before that, I did another blog for about six months. After you do something a lot time, you start to get better at it. And after you’ve done something you’re decent at for a long time, you can make it look easy.

So, if you’re starting, and you feel like you need a trip to the vet (or the nearest watering hole) after you try to write a simple blog post or a chapter of your work in progress, that’s okay. Next time that happens, just think of me trying to do an oblique pushup. Last week the neighbor came by and said, “You know the humane thing would be to just put him down and end the misery.”

Dude, I’m out of shape, not deaf.

It gets better, but you have to keep at it.

Keeping an even tone in first-person narration

I don’t write blog posts in first person because I am the center of the universe. I write that way because I cut my teeth on detective novels, because Robert B. Parker has fused himself to my muse and that’s how it works for me. Third person is awkward.

I like first person because it gives you insights to what’s going on in the protagonist’s head, and because it provides ample opportunity for humor. A god-like third-person narrator seems like a jerk when he notices a large person taking a third trip to the buffet line. In the hands of a skilled first-person narrator, this observation can be poignant, sad, or the kind of joke you laugh at, even though you know you shouldn’t.

If this was me, this wouldn't be clams. It would be eclairs.

The problem with first-person narration is it’s hard to keep consistent in a 300-page manuscript. There are days when I sit down and become that narrator, and the words and observations are crisp, biting, and appropriate. I hop deftly from point to point like one of those tree monkeys you used to see in Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

And some days, the tone isn’t there. It’s more analytical or it’s not as snarky and light. But maintaining that constant, entertaining internal dialog is key to a first-person narrative. The reader’s basically renting space inside the protagonist’s mind for several hours, so it better be an entertaining place.

The key is to really know your protagonist. Know his or her voice, what he or she likes or doesn’t like. What scares him, what sets him off, what he thinks is funny. If your narrator is a bastardized version of yourself, you’re probably okay–except maybe not.

Your internal narration can shift from day to day, even hour to hour. For instance, in the mornings, I have a hard time with brightness and sunshine. It’s not that I hate mornings–I really don’t–which is good because God calibrated my body to never sleep past six o’clock. But I don’t see happy things in mornings, and a light, gently sarcastic touch is hard for me at that time of the day.

If you’re writing in first person, in addition to all the other revision stuff, you need to make sure your protagonist doesn’t sound like the light rock morning deejay for fifteen pages, then like Sam Kinison for the next fifteen.

So sayeth I, the center of the universe.

“We’re in Amazon’s sights and they’re going to kill us.”

According to one unidentified industry insider, Amazon may be drawing down on the Big Six.

Standard disclaimer: The opinions in this article are mine and are not necessarily those of the Florida Writers Association, its leadership, or its members.

According to Pandodaily.com, that’s the last line in a long e-mail from a publishing insider (full text here). The insider is convinced that Amazon is trying to spend the New York publishing industry out of existence, using an approach similar to the one the US used to exploit the USSR’s internal weaknesses in the 80s. Spend an enormous amount of money and make your competition bet it all to keep up.

Publishers can’t afford a $1 million royalty. Amazon can. Publishers can’t afford to take a big loss on books. Amazon can. Publishers don’t have something else to fall back on to pay the bills. Amazon does.

One could argue, as Sarah Lacy, the author at pandodaily does, that publishers are lazy, going with the sure thing, that they lack innovation. And while that might be true, if Amazon’s approach is to spend the Big Six out of existence, that could be considered a predatory business practice. And if it happens that way, the publishers, be they lazy, scared, or just stuck in an old business model that doesn’t work, will petition the Justice Department to bring an anti-trust lawsuit on their behalf.

Either way, a model in which Amazon is the path to publication isn’t healthy. Anti-trust laws exist for a reason and predatory business practices are one of them.

In its defense, Amazon is doing things traditional publishers aren’t doing. There’s a reason Seth Godin, JA Konrath, and others are going to Amazon. They’re getting more money, but that’s not the entire picture. A document was recently leaked from Hachette indicating why publishers are relevant.

Among the points, one directly challenged by the insider in the nando article, is that Hachette finds new, unique voices. It acts as a venture capitalist for writers, pledging advances to fund the writing process. They sell and distribute books and help authors build a brand and protect their intellectual property.

Konrath responded that publishers should stop saying they’re relevant (when you have to tell people–even internal people–that you’re relevant, that’s not a good sign). He says they should actually be relevant. While Konrath’s first point deals with paying authors, the rest do not. They deal with time to market, marketing, and fighting piracy. Konrath says publishers should stop because the pirates will always win (everywhere but Pittsburgh).

In other words, it wasn’t just the royalties that lured Konrath to Amazon. It was the overall business model.

This fight has many rounds left, but the pando article certainly caused a number of waves. The tea leaves seem to say that publishers must become more nimble to survive. But where there’s turmoil, there’s always opportunity. And that is good for authors or would-be authors.

Industry News: SOPA Crashes and Burns, IP Arrest, Penguin Makes Out

SOPA Crashes and Burns, for Now

Maybe President Obama and Marco Rubio were frustrated because they couldn’t use Wikipedia on Wednesday. Or maybe it was the outpouring of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion bills in the Senate. Google, Wikipedia, and many other sites were partially or totally blacked out to protest the bill. Powerful Republican Congressman Daniel Issa of California has indicated that the House Bill will not make it to the floor for a vote. Although no such statement has come forward about the Senate companion, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (sometimes referred to as ProIP or PIPA), Florida’s Marco Rubio is one of four co-sponsors who have withdrawn support for the bill. And the Obama administration has announced it will not support the bills. That having been said, many are still concerned the SOPA will rise like Spock in the non-bootlegged version of Star Trek III I watched last year. Lamar Smith, the bill’s primary sponsor, has vowed to recast the bill and to “find ways to combat online piracy.” Depending on what the next version of the bill contains, there are worse outcomes. Note: The pinheads in Washington, our elected officials waited until after I wrote this to withdraw the bills. Pinheads. If they craft a better bill, this will be interesting because the coalition in opposition won’t be there, as it was this time. 

Megaupload shut down; found and employees charged

Meanwhile the Justice Department has shut down the file-sharing site Megaupload and indicted its founder and six others with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. Megaupload is a “locker” site which allows people to store and transfer large files. Many of those large files are movies, television shows, books, computer games, and other software. The Justice Department estimates that nearly half a billion dollars of what it calls “estimated harm” has occurred because of the site. Two other similar sites, Rapidshare and Mediafire were unaffected. As part of the action, the government also seized $50 million in assets and 18 domain names. For a copy of the indictment, click here.

The holidays were good for Penguin

Pearson, the British publisher that owns Penguin books, has raised it 2011 earnings guidance, estimating a 10% increase in adjusted earnings per share. Pearson said that rapid growth in digital products and investments in developing economies have fed the rise. Strong sales at the end of the year also fed the growth.

Tool Time: How to get a picture into Word

Disclaimer: I don’t have a Mac, and the budget doesn’t allow me to get one just so I can write blog posts, even if I could take the write-off. If you have a Mac and you want to chime in, that would be most welcome.

For the most part, fiction doesn’t include pictures. But even fiction writers sometimes don’t write fiction. And if you write non-fiction, you may have to embed pictures into your work. And since Word is the tool most people use, we’ll cover how to get a picture into Word.

Inserting an existing file

If your picture already exists as a file, you can insert it into a Word document by clicking the Insert tab and clicking Picture. After you find and select the picture file, click the Insert button.

Although you should use whatever picture format is required by the person receiving your work, Word can almost definitely accommodate it. Word supports Windows Enhanced Metafiles (.emf), Windows Metafil (.wmf), JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg), Portable Network Graphics (.png), bitmaps (.bmp), graphics interchange format (.gif, .gfa), compressed Windows enhanced metafile (.emz), compressed Windows metafile (.wmz), compressed Macintosh PICT (.pcz), Tag Image File Fomrat (.tif, .tiff), WordPerfect graphics (.wpg), computer graphics mode (.cgm), encapsulated PostScript (.eps), Macintosh PCT (.pct, .pict).

Copying and Pasting

Let’s say you have the picture already posted to a web page. You can copy it from your page and paste it into Word. The copy step will vary depending on your browser, but it’s going to be pretty close regardless what you use. Find the picture, then right click it. In Firefox, select Copy Image. In Word, place your insertion point where you want the graphic and click Paste.

Of course, if you’re doing work for money, your picture should not be a copyrighted image or you should have permission to use it.

Working with your image

After you get the image into Word, you can do a number of things to work with it.

Resizing the image

If you click on the image, you’ll notice circles on the corners squares in the middles of the image. You can click these shapes and drag them to change the picture’s size. The circles, on the corners, resize both the height and width. The squares change either the height or width.

If you want to make sure the picture keeps its shape, use the circles in the corners. If you need to change just the height or width, use the squares in the middle.

You can also change a number of properties about the picture by clicking the Picture Tools Format tab.

The highlighted icon, Position, allows you to wrap text around your picture.

 

Jumpstart Your Writing with a Do-It-Yourself Retreat

Chris Hamilton writes often on this blog about some of the things that get in the way of his writing, and he recognizes an important truth: most of the things that get in the way of our writing do so because we let them. How we prioritize our writing life is, primarily, a choice we make. For him, non-writing activities (i.e. television) are often the interfering culprit, whereas I’ve found that activities related to writing can cause the hours I’d intended to devote to actual writing to evaporate into thin air.

I write this first post for the Florida Writers blog just as I’m about to begin a very special week. It’s the type of week I try to give myself at least once or, if I’m lucky, twice a year. It’s a writing week. I steal away to somewhere and do nothing except write. Well, I eat and sleep, and I take walks, too, but the walking is really an offshoot of the writing, because as I walk, my brain works out many of the issues that arose while I was writing. (The picture below is a hint to where I do my writing and walking.)

I’ve been doing these writing weeks for a good number of years now, but this year’s week is extra special to me because it dovetails with one of my two* New Year’s resolutions: to say “no” to the many things that appear on the surface to be writing-related, but in actuality don’t do anything to help me finish the next book. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the years since writing became more than just a hobby for me, it’s this: if you’re a novelist and you don’t finish the book, everything else you do to advance your writing career doesn’t matter too much.

I’ve already taken numerous steps to accomplish my resolution. I’ve unsubscribed myself from many, many newsletters and e-groups that, while interesting and often educational, took way too much time to read. (Anyway, I’ve always believed that the best writing education is also the easiest and most enjoyable: reading good books. A lot of them.) I’ve limited the amount of time I spend on social networking sites, which wasn’t hard to accomplish because I’ve never been overly active on them in the first place. I’m returning to a system where I read and respond to emails first thing in the morning and then again when I’m done writing for the day. The time in between is reserved for my writing. I’m fulfilling existing commitments but not taking on any new ones, at least not until the balance between my actual writing time and the time I spend on other writing-related activities is back where it belongs: for me, that’s about 80/20.

I’ve determined to do all of these things to help me finish the next book, but even more importantly, I recognize that I’m happiest when I’m writing. It’s as simple as that. When I write, I’m happy. When I don’t, I can get a little . . . well, let’s just say that when my husband gets home at the end of each day, he can tell immediately whether I’ve had a productive writing day.

Left: Me after a writing session. Right: Me after not writing (sigh).

The “happiness” benefit is why the week away is so important and special to me. It’s a time to recharge, to go back to the beginning when the writing – the actual sitting down and creating stories out of nothing – was all there was, and all there needed to be.

By the time you read this, my special week will almost be over. If all goes well, I will have a nice chunk of new writing and I will return home jazzed to keep the momentum going. What about you? Do you hope to make writing – I’m talking actual sitting-at-the-keyboard writing without distraction or interruption – a priority this year? If so, how do you plan to accomplish your goal?

*That second resolution? To exercise more, what else?

_______________________________

Julie Compton is the internationally published author of two novels, Tell No Lies and Rescuing Olivia, both from St. Martin’s Minotaur. She can be reached at julie@julie-compton.com.

Writing Exercise: The Letter

In this exercise, one of your characters is going through some papers, cleaning out a drawer, whatever, and comes upon a letter written by someone they love. It may be a romantic love interest or not, maybe a parent or a long-dead grandfather. The letter changes things.

The easy way to do this is for the letter to be a love letter from a romantic love to someone unexpected. Alanis Morrissette does a pretty good job of that in the following song.

Let’s not do the easy thing–you can if it works best for you, but if your story doesn’t demand it, try for something different.

Otherwise, shoot for a scene where the letter isn’t obvious, where it uncovers something unknown that changes everything.

Time limit:  25 minutes