Rick Taubold's Blog, page 4

Formatting your novel with Styles—Part 2: adding styles

From Rick: In Part 1 we created a new template to use for formatting your novel. In Part 2 we’re going to start to set up several Styles for the main body and things like title, chapters, scene breaks, and a couple of others you might find useful. The first thing to set up is […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Three useful articles for writers

Three useful articles for writers From Rick: I wasn’t able to finish Part 2 of the Formatting and Templates series for this week, so here are a couple of articles to read in the meantime. I know I’ve talked before about protecting yourself from scams (only the first article deals with that), and I hope […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Formatting your novel with Styles—Part 1: template creation

From Rick: In the past I’ve talked aboutbasic manuscript cleanups, creating a clean source file for your manuscript, and formatting. I’ve also mentioned using Styles in MS Word to help with formatting, but I left that topic to your own research because I felt that it was perhaps a too complex a topic to deal […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Tips on writing from the experts

From Rick: A good friend recently shared some writing tips from Kurt Vonnegut, and this prompted me to look up the source. In doing so, I found a site with tips from many noted authors. This is an extensive collection from twenty-one writers, but I selected those tips that I felt applied to all writers […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Article links on two topics: IP and Characters

From Rick: Honestly, not for lack of ideas but for lack of time, I haven’t been as diligent lately in doing a blog on a weekly basis. Believe it or not, I often spend the better part of a day doing one of my more extensive posts. This week, I’m doing an easy one for […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

The importance of your character names

From Rick: I’m trying to un-busy myself enough to get back on schedule of posting weekly on Mondays instead skipping a week here and there or posting on Tuesday. We’ll see how that goes. ===== In the past I’ve talked about the importance of making your characters interesting because stories don’t exist in a vacuum. […]

Dived or dove: some confusing past tenses

From Rick: Last year I did a post on verbs whose present tense, past tense, and past participles were all the same (like read: I read a lot, I read a short story yesterday, I have read fifty books so far this year). Here’s the link in case you missed it: VERBS WITH THE SAME […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Is writing fun for you?

From Rick: A recent blog post by Kris Rusch posed this question to me. Unlike I usually do, I’m going to talk first and post the link to her article at the end. You can scroll to the link if you want to read her article first, but I’m going to ask that you don’t. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Is your writing style right?

From Rick: My wife came up with this post idea. I was telling her about a particular issue I had encountered in a piece I was reviewing, and she suggested the topic. What do I mean by the right writing style? Let’s start with examples of what prompted this post. It had to do with […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Simplified intellectual property rights for writers

From Rick: Recently, my local writers group had a presentation from a lawyer on intellectual property rights focusing on copyrights and permissions. Of course, the presenter’s first words were, as you might expect, a disclaimer that anything in the presentation was not to be taken as legal advice (even though it’s advice and he’s a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...