Writer’s Guide — Creating a Character Profile
When writing your novel, it’s important to get to know all your characters, even the bad ones. Developing your character profiles and investing the time to understand them more intimately. Doing so will enable you to write with more authenticity. Flesh them out and imagine how they would act in the real world.
Writer’s Guide — Different Types of Point of View in Writing
Contemplate reading the latest murder mystery on the market. Imagine your emotional response to the story presented from the point of view (POV) of the husband who first stumbled upon the scene of the crime. What about a story from the victim’s perspective as they you (the reader) tell their story? Would your reaction be any different if the narrator was an omnipresent narrator with no direct ties to the characters? The point of view, or voice that tells your story, directly impacts your emotional connection to your story.
Writer’s Guide — Tips for Writing Dialogue
Fiction can exist without dialogue, but it’s often the interaction between characters that brings readers into the story. Dialogue helps to move the story along. It also gives your characters a voice and life of their own. So, what exactly is it? Simply put, the dialogue is a conversation between two or more people put down in written form. It’s an exchange of information or ideas. It’s what the character’s say and is most commonly the text between quotation marks.
Understanding Active and Passive Voice in Your Writing
When writing blogs, articles, and novels, understanding the active and passive voice is important. Most style guides, such as the APA Manual of Style or AMA prefer that author’s use the active voice in general. But what does active voice mean? Is it required to always use active voice? Not necessarily. Let’s discuss what the different styles are what when it is appropriate to use one or the other.
Writer’s Guide — Show, Don’t Tell
We've all heard everyone from English teachers to writing coaches tell us to show, not tell. But what exactly does it mean to show rather than tell?
Anatomy of a Book — 25 Parts of a Book That Every Writer Needs to Know
Every book is unique. The book arrangement shouldn't be. It's important that the organization follows standard publishing industry practices. Parts of a book should appear in a standard location in every book. Organizing your book using these rules makes finding things easier for your reader. For example, every book has a front cover and a back cover. Prologues and table of contents are up front, indexes are in the back, etc.
How to Add a Drop Shadow in Adobe InDesign
When creating an eBook or similar publication in Adobe InDesign, you may find yourself needing to make text pop just a little to stand out on the page. This is especially useful when you have white text against a medium-dark background. It’s not dark enough for the white text to be readable on its own but not light enough for a darker font. We could take the text into Photoshop and build ourselves a nice frame with a drop shadow. However, here's a much simpler way to add a drop shadow in InDesign.
How to Determine Word Count and Check Spelling in Adobe InDesign
In publishing, you learn that triple-checking your work in Microsoft Word is just the beginning. Once you have begun putting the document into a document layout program like Adobe InDesign, you never know what changes may occur. As people begin reviewing the manuscript in its final stages, little changes can impact the quality of your document. A newly added caption may have a small typo that everyone misses at the last minute. Here’s how to determine word count and check spelling in Adobe InDesign.
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