Rob Bignell's Blog, page 352

Pardon me, mam (or maybe it's ma’am?)

“Mam” refers
to a member of a Mayan people of southwestern Guatemala or to the language they speak. “Ma’am” is the correct spelling of the polite address of a woman, as in “Thank you for the change, ma’am.”



Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

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Crack a joke – but only for a good reason

Just as
in real life when humor is used to ease tension in social situations or to bond with another person, so jokes and comedy serves a purpose in your story.




Unfortunately, a lot of novice writers don’t quite know when to inject humor into their fictional tales. The result is they either miss opportunities to use an effective narrative tool or they misuse (and quite often overuse) it.



There are a lot of good reasons to inject humor into your story. Among them:

g Plot device – Comedy can help relieve tension. If a novel, short story or stage play has a number of gruesome murders in it, for example, the reader can become numb to the tale’s intensity. To that end, Shakespeare in “Macbeth" used a short humorous scene (the drunken porter scene) after Macbeth assassinates the king.

g Character development – Jokes can be used to reveal information about characters, such as their foibles (via other characters making fun of them) or their values (as humor can suggest one’s belief system.). These inferred facts about the characters then can be incorporated into the plot for good effect, such as Indiana Jones’ fear of snakes in his various movies.

g Theme – By making fun of an idea or of a character who represents a concept, humor can bring to light a story’s message. There’s nothing quite like a cutting quip to break a protagonist’s knotty reasoning.



Unless you deliberately intend your story to be humorous – such as Douglas Adams’ “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” – be wary of overusing humor. Jokes and comedy that don’t serve a purpose and that work more like asides to fill up space actually slow the story. In such situations, your characters or narrator are just clowning around.



Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

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Think of your story as if a stage production

Sometimes when
plotting your short story or novel, thinking of it in terms of a theatrical or film production is useful. That’s because theater and film relies heavily on physical action to make the story work; beginning novelists and short story writers sometimes lose sight of the necessity for action and so get lost in their word-heavy medium.



Four terms can help you think of your novel or short story as if it were a theatrical or film production center on staging.



The first is onstage. These are events that the reader directly reads and experiences, as if a real-time observer or an audience member in a theater. Writers always should be aware that readers consider onstage events dramatic and more important than those that they don’t see.



Events that they don’t see but that are part of a story are said to be offstage. These events can include narration, a reminiscence, an indirect quotation, or even something that happened long before the story occurred and so is inferred.



The challenge for writers is to know when a part of their story should be onstage or offstage. Generally, narration should be kept to a minimum in a story as it is not dramatic action. A reminiscence is fine so long as is it doesn’t take up too much space in the story and so long as it is important by informing the reader about the character or helping advance the plot. When inferring an event, characters usually need to be limited to very specific and brief statements about it so that readers aren’t lost wondering what is being discussed.



Often the problem with a slow-moving story is that too much of the onstage action actually needs to appear offstage. A good example would be eliminating a scene that happened several years before the story occurs and instead simply have the characters refer to it through specific references. If you shift onstage action offstage, you destage the action, a term coined by CSFW’s Steve Popkes. In rewriting, editors who recommend that onstage action be deliberately revised so that it appears offstage often use the term unstage to describe this revising.



Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

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Editor interviewed at ‘Welcome to the Toi Box’

Published author
Toi Thomas' interview with me appeared Friday on her blog, "Welcome to the ToiBox" (I know, great name for her blog, isn't it!) In the interview, I tell about the celebrity that some people claim I'm most like, my favorite book from childhood, what music I listen to when chillin', and what my next book is about. Thomas is the author of four books, including the novels "Eternal Curse: Giovanni’s Angel" and "Legend of the Boy."



Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

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‘Hikes with Tykes’ ebook on sale this weekend!

This weekend

my Kindle ebook Hikes with Tykes: A Practical Guide to Day Hiking with Kids will be on sale. Beginning today at 8 a.m. PDT, for 12 hours you can receive a 67% discount with the ebook going for just 99 cents. If you should forget to purchase it today, no worries – beginning tonight at 8 p.m. PDT, you can receive a 34% discount with the ebook priced at just $1.99. The sale ends Monday at 8 a.m. PDT.



Comprehensive and conversational, Hikes with Tykes combines hiking parents' experiences, step-by-step how-to's, and practical guidelines to help you plan the perfect day hike with your children. Topics include: finding the best trail for you and your children; choosing the right footwear, backpacks and other gear for kids; using navigational tools from maps and compasses to GPS so no one gets lost; keeping kids from misbehaving by engaging in dozens of activities; and treating trail injuries from blisters to broken bones. Packed with tips from parents who learned how to hike with kids by trial and error, this volume is the only user-friendly guidebook that covers all you need to know about day hiking with children.



Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

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Attract and keep readers via blogging

Among the
best ways to begin a dialogue with readers as well as keep them and the media up-to-date is by creating a blog. A link to your blog should appear on your website among the navigation links. Never underestimate the value of fresh, original content to keep people coming back to your website and interested in your books.



If you’re apprehensive about setting up a blog, don’t be. They’re much easier to construct (and far less time consuming) than a website. They’re also free (such as Google’s BlogSpot), so don’t let a company sucker you into paying for one. The blog host will offer online tutorials about how to get your page set up.



Give your blog the same name as your website. Don’t worry about there being confusion over which is the blog and which is the website; readers will be able to tell them apart. There will be much more confusion if the names don’t match, as some readers will wonder if your blog is related to your book.



When setting up a blog, you’ll need to select a template (or design) for it. Try to find one that reflects your book’s mood or subject; for example, my hiking book’s blog features a background that is a trail through a field of tall grass. If all else fails, select a generic template in which the colors come close to matching those of your website.



Your blog will include a narrow column, typically on the left or the right side of your blog entry, in which you can add all kinds of pictures, notes and goodies for reader. That a cover of your book with a synopsis of it appears at the top of this column is vital. This helps connect the blog to a book or author. The book cover ought to be linked to a page where visitors can purchase your book online.



Below the thumbnail of your book cover and its description, add a brief “Meet the Author” blurb in which you offer a picture of yourself and a bio. The bio can be the same one used in your book or on its back cover.



If you offer consulting or other services related to your book – for example, maybe you’re a financial planner who’s authored a book about how to get wealthy – also include a picture or logo of your business as well as a brief blurb advertising it. Include a link as well to your business website.



Other items that might be included in the navigation column are a list of “followers,” or other bloggers who regularly read your blog (those bloggers typically declare that they are followers or fans of your site), as well as a list of previous blog entries with links to those pages. These elements typically are automated so that you don’t have to worry about maintaining them.



Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

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Fixing tab errors when formatting an ebook

When formatting
an ebook in Microsoft Word, one problem a number of authors run into is a “tab” error. In the case of Kindle ebooks, this usually means an unsightly, extra space or two before a heading or a paragraph. In the case of other ebook formats, especially if uploading them through Smashwords, this usually means not being included in their premium catalogs until the “problem” is correcting.



Fortunately, fixing tab errors is simple enough:

g In the command ribbon at the top of your document, look for the section labeled “Paragraph”. To the right of that word should be an arrow pointing southeast. Click that arrow.

g A window will open on your screen. In the lower left-hand corner of the screen, click “Tabs”.

g A new window will open. In the lower right-hand corner, click “Clear All” then “OK”.

All the tabs in your manuscript will disappear.



That may create a new problem for you, however: If you formatted your ebook so that each new paragraph was indented, all of the indents just disappeared. You’ll have to go back and add a blank line (aka a paragraph return) between each paragraph – which is how Smashwords anyways wants you to format your text anyway.



Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

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A cosmetic difference? makeup vs. make-up

I wouldn’t
make up this: Apparently people who’ve been applying makeup all of their lives don’t know how to spell what they’re putting on their face! Time for a makeup study session on this.



How the word is spelled really centers on what part of a speech it is in a sentence.



If a verb, it’s two words (“make up”) as in “You can make up the test after school.”



If a noun or adjective, it’s one word, no hyphen (“makeup”). To wit, “She purchased makeup at the cosmetics counter” (noun) and “Are you ready to take your makeup test?” (adjective).



Now you’re already to take that grammar test!



Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

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Give readers sleepless nights with narrative drive

Ever read
story before bed and find it so gripping that you stay up far later than you should just to find out what is going to happen? If so, you’ve been a “victim” of narrative drive.



Narrative drive is the force that makes a reader feel that something is about to happen. The more powerful your narrative drive, the less likely the reader is to put down the story.



Narrative drive is the force that makes a reader feel that something is about to happen. The more powerful your narrative drive, the less likely the reader is to put down the story.



All of the great works of literature have powerful narrative drives.



But creating a strong narrative drive involves a lot more than creating interesting settings (as does Frank Herbert in “Dune”), intriguing characters (as does Orson Scott Card in “Ender’s Game”), or a fascinating premise (as does Isaac Asimov in “Foundation”). It is all of these things more: good plotting, mesmerizing settings, captivating characters, proper point of view selection, an absorbing theme, and an artists’ handling of stylistic issues. So, while we can discuss elements of a story in isolation, as occurs on this Web site, always remember that a good story is the sum of these parts.



To obtain narrative drive, then requires a full sense of a story’s various elements. Still, there are a couple of things to keep in mind to improve your story’s narrative drive:

g Link description with action – Whenever you opt to describe a landscape or character, ensure that it serves the dual purpose of moving forward the story’s plot.

g Avoid stiff writing by using repetitious and superfluous wording – Poor writing follows a “He did this then this happened” pattern while quality writing takes an “As he did this, this happened” approach.



Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

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Start your story with solid narrative hook

One sign of
a good opener is that it makes the reader want to continue with the story. Using a fishing metaphor, a good opener “hooks” the reader.



Writers who catch the reader have employed a successful narrative hook. A narrative hook involves dangling elements of the story before the reader so he can’t help but bite. This is done by making the reader want to know more - the who, what, where, when, how and why of the story.



Consider this story opener:



Jord ducked around the corner, pressed himself hard against the damp wall, wishing he could fade into it. His eyes darted toward the wall’s edge, hoping to catch the shift of a shadow, a movement of brush, any sign at all that they were close.



Notice how it dangles elements of the story. The reader wants to know why Jord is running and who is chasing him. The reader wants to know if Jord will get caught.



Successful narrative hooks usually begin the story in the middle of the action. Conflict already is underway. Beginning a story this way immediately creates dramatic tension, which for most readers is the delight of the narrative.



Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

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