Creating a memoir from old family letters and photos can get complicated. You start out with good intentions and then find yourself sorting through hundreds (even thousands) of letters and old photos trying to find a way to make a manuscript. Scrapbooking has been around for years, and it is a convenient way to take [...]
Let’s look at how structure frames the plot (in a good way). The plot is the sequence of events in a story that answers the dramatic question. The structure, or narrative structure, is what keeps the events in good order. Structuring your plot correctly is key to a story that reader's want to continue.
“What’s your story about?” As a writer, you have probably been asked that questions many times. Often, writers fall into the trap of stating something like, “science fiction,” or “it’s a mystery novel.” However, they are simply giving the genre and not the theme. What is a theme? A theme simply answers what the story is about.
Have you ever read a story where you had a hard time figuring out what was going on? Not in an Inception type of way, but more like you can’t figure out what the story is trying to accomplish. What is happening? A well-defined plot describes the main part of the story in which everything revolves. Knowing and answering the big dramatic question centers around the protagonist’s central conflict and keeps the reader interested in your story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
