We’d all love our readers to fall into our writing and not know how to get out. Walt showed a great graphic to entice us. But how do we get there?
Continue reading Help your reader get lost in your book, with Walt SochaCategory Archives: Writing
Tips and Tricks with Word
Some Neat Tricks
TABS
We told our pre-editors to take out all the tabs (see notes on Style – you don’t need tabs to indent your paragraphs, and you’re really much better off without them). We told you tabs break ebooks. But what if you’re not writing an ebook. What are tabs good for? Well…
Continue reading Tips and Tricks with WordUsing Word with Style
GUESS WHAT!
You don’t need to indent your paragraph with a tab, or separate paragraphs with a blank line, or use two spaces after a period, or retype your whole document to submit to an anthology that requires 1.5 line spacing, or indent lines of poetry with three, four, five spaces (and lose count), or …
Continue reading Using Word with StyleWriters’ Mill Anthology Style Guide
Here’s the current Writers’ Mill Style Guide, developed over several years of creating the Writers’ Mill Journal. The aim (for editors) is to edit invisibly.
Continue reading Writers’ Mill Anthology Style GuideHow to Use the Navigation Pane
The Playlist Creators for our anthology will use the Navigation pane in Word to move entries around. If you use Heading 3 for the titles of stories and poems (or chapters in your novel), then you have Heading 2 and Heading 1 “spare” to play with. Use Heading 2 to create sections or parts of the book. You’ll probably (maybe) remove these later), but they allow you to drag everything in a particular section from where it is to a new location in the book. All the images and text, from this Heading 2 to the next Heading 2, will move together – no need to cut and paste!
Continue reading How to Use the Navigation PaneLay out your book with Word
How to Lay Out a Book just using Word
Word is a word processor, not a layout program, and real layout programs like InDesign will do a better job. But… you probably haven’t got InDesign on your computer, and you probably do have Word. So…
Continue reading Lay out your book with WordCharacter Emotion and Word Choice with Eric Witchey
Eric Witchey is a well published author all around the world, and a well respected writing teacher – definitely a writer helping writers! Find him at https://ericwitchey.com/index.html
Continue reading Character Emotion and Word Choice with Eric WitcheyWriters’ Mill Minutes April 21st 2024
Writers’ Mill Minutes, April 21, 2024
Cedar Mill Library, Beaverton and online Zoom
Eight participants attended online, and six were present in the library meeting room, for a total of fourteen. Sheila Deeth led the meeting from her online Zoom perch in Tennessee. She announced at the opening of the meeting that today’s program would be recorded and asked if there were any objections. If so, Zoom attendees could hide their video and remove their surnames from their screens. In person attendees would be invisible anyway, as only today’s speaker, Carolyn Martin, would be on camera at the library.
Continue reading Writers’ Mill Minutes April 21st 2024Submissions and Settings with Carolyn Martin
Carolyn Martin (https://carolynmartinpoet.com/) presented a wonderful hybrid workshop at our hybrid meeting on April 21 2024. The meeting was recorded and can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Iq4hT0DJA (submissions) followed by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGL4rVOHbR0 (settings)
Continue reading Submissions and Settings with Carolyn MartinThe Efficient Use of Word with Sheila Deeth
With thanks to all the members who offered advice, questions, comments and more, most people present learned something during our “efficient use of Word” meeting, so now we just have to try not to forget it all. To that end, Sheila has added (she hopes) everyone’s suggestions to the file she was working from, and uploaded the file in DOCX and PDF format to our website.
Efficient Use of WORD, word doc: https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/The-Efficient-Use-of-WORD.docx
Efficient Use of WORD, PDF: https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/The-Efficient-Use-of-WORD.pdf
If you want to know what we did at the meeting, and if you want to use WORD more efficiently, please follow the links and download the files. Then you’ll be able to follow through all the actions and add to your own skillset.