Notion : a personal favourite of mine. from what i’ve seen, unlimited projects with a variety of cards to use. it also has an mobile app with it. highly recommend.
Milanote : has some limitations on how many cards you can have but has different templates you can tinker around with. is more of a whiteboard type of site.
Hiveword : i haven’t used it but it provides a novel-building template for plot, scenes, characters, etc.
Lucidchart : another i don’t use but from what I’ve seen, it’s similar to Milanote with their whiteboard style. also has a variety of templates of charts, diagrams, and more!
Helpful Tools:
OneLook Thesaurus : my go-to website for finding synonyms. also provides definitions!
Language Tool : a chrome extension similar to Grammarly that acts as a grammar-aid tool.
Character Creation / World Building:
Pinterest : a great source if you’re searching for inspiration. you can also find tips and prompts on the site too!
Reedsy Character Name Generator : a name generator that include forename and surnames. has nationality specific names and a few mythic / fantasy name generators.
Fantasy Name Generator : this name generator has much more variety with character names and fictional location titles.
Inkarnate : a fantasy world-building site that I used in the past. fun fact: i made a little (it wasn’t little) dragon shaped island for one story that never made it on paper.
When I was a young writer, I was told that I often started my sentences with “there is/there was/there are.” I was told to eliminate those as much as possible.
I couldn’t believe how often I used them. My first novel was completely littered with them.
I learned to diversify and grow my use of verbs. Instead of the state-of-being verbs, like “is” which isn’t very descriptive at all, I started using stronger verbs.
Instead of writing “There were a bunch of trees on the hill” I wrote “A cluster of trees towered over the hill.”
“Towered” is a much stronger verb than “Is”
Use the state-of-being words, but if you can, try replacing them with more active verbs. You might be surprised how much your writing improves.
Congratulations, you’ve finished a manuscript! That
monumental achievement alone deserves a reward. Please get yourself something
delicious—don’t worry, I can wait.
Back? Awesome, because it’s time to talk about an important
step of the prepublishing and/or pre-editing process, and that is how to format
your manuscript.
When you’re writing your manuscript, it’s likely you have a
unique setup. Fancy fonts, different text and document background colors, your
preferred way of formatting the document—all elements work together to create a
comfortable writing space where you can be your most creative.
As both a writer and editor, I have no problems with writers
going wild with their documents’ technical aspects while they’re drafting—I do
exactly the same thing when drafting. But when it comes time to share your project with other
people—especially professionals in the publishing world—your snazzy setup is no
longer going to be a benefit. I could share horror stories relating to document
setup, from thousands of spaces used instead of the tab key to wacky file
conversion issues.
Please don’t make your editor’s job any harder than it needs
to be. Fancy formatting looks great, but it can be a nightmare to undo and
wastes time that your editor could otherwise spend polishing the words
themselves rather than what’s around them. It’s also significantly easier to
work with a document that adheres to a standard format because it’s easier to
catch mistakes that way—the editor isn’t distracted trying to wrangle extra
spaces and text appearing in other languages.
Most publishing houses have what are called submission
guidelines. Read them. Follow them. There’s little chance your
manuscript is exempt from the rules, and believe me when I say authors who
flaunt the guidelines don’t win the respect of the people who are working on
their manuscripts.
If the publisher/editing service you’re submitting to
doesn’t have obvious guidelines, first ask about them. They might have preferences.
If not, as follows are some basic standard practices in North American
publishing.
First off, if you can’t bear to give up your fancy writing
setup, create a new copy of your document specifically for editing/submitting.
Clearly label it as such. Make sure you implement any changes to this
for-editing/submitting document, not just your fancy original.
Page and text setup:
Remove any document background images/page colors.
Change the entire document’s font to Times New Roman
point 12. Make it black. Not dark gray, not dark brown—black.
Set the margins to one inch on all sides. This is
Microsoft Word’s default document format, but not enough submitted manuscripts
use it. Remember: layout for publishing comes after editing, not before.
Editors are liable to completely change your document’s pretty formatting to
industry standards anyway.
Set the document’s orientation to portrait, not
landscape.
Center all section and chapter titles (e.g., Table of
Contents, Chapter 1, Acknowledgements, About the Author, etc.).
Remove all double spaces from the file. Seriously.This is an incredibly easy step. Do not make your overworked, underpaid
editor do this incredibly trivial and time-consuming task for you. Especially
if you are using double spaces to indent or center content. If you, for some
reason, are using the space bar to indent or center content, please stop
what you are doing and follow these steps:
Use your word processor’s
“center text” function. In programs like Word, this can be done by hitting
Control + E. (Ctrl + L and Ctrl + R, respectively, align text left and right.) Do
not justify your text unless the guidelines demand it.
Use
the tab key to indent paragraphs.
But bear in mind that sometimes this can result in a “tab” character existing
at the beginning of a paragraph. This is bad. Preferably, set the entire
document to a 0.5-inch indent and delete all tab characters.
Seriously, though, you should be searching every document before you send it
out or copy it to an online format for double spaces. Make this a good habit,
and you’ll ensure you set yourself apart as a cut above the other writers out
there.
Set the entire document’s line spacing to double.
Front matter, chapters, and back matter should be
separated by page breaks, not by a series of blank lines.
Run spell check. This sounds obvious, but trust
me, I’ve received manuscripts riddled with obvious spelling errors. If
you write with spell check off for one reason or another, turn it back on when
you’re getting ready to send a document out. Make a full pass on the document,
and pay attention to every instance of that red squiggle.
Make
sure you’re spelling the names of your characters and places consistently.
I’ve seen Matt become Mike in the next paragraph, and Donilo
become Donillo. Editors’ trust in the author’s abilities to do anything
with competence drop drastically when we find these kinds of careless errors.
Similarly, either use the American spellings or the British spellings. Be consistent.
Separate your scenes with fleuron breaks. Three
centered asterisks (***) used without spaces is the most common method of
creating a fleuron break and the one I recommend using, although sometimes
three number signs/hashes (###) can be acceptable. Do not use fancy symbols or
symbols created through special fonts. They will not carry through if your
editor changes your entire document to Times New Roman.
Optional change: remove the
indent from the first paragraph in a chapter or after a scene break.
Make a point of using punctuation consistently. If you’re
going to use the oxford comma, use it every time. Use a single dash consistently.
Punctuate dialogue properly.
Improperly
punctuated dialogue is one of the most common errors editors fix. There are
only a few basic rules, covered here (link embedded), so please make an effort
to learn and use them.
Use paragraphs properly. New speaker = new paragraph.
New subject = new paragraph.
Once again, if you really want to delight your
editor, change all hyphens between number ranges to en dashes. 3-5 days will
become 3–5 days.
Correctly title your document. The title isn’t somehow going
to magically change from StupidProject.docx or afhuowjfoa;wijef.docx to TheHungerGames.docx
between your submitting it and other people reading the title.
If possible, use the .docx
file format.
I want to wrap this up by saying that yes,
editors are here to catch the mistakes you’ve missed, and we invariably have
obscure technical knowledge that most writers don’t know exists (in Greek,
the question mark is represented by a semicolon), but it’s your
job as the writer to put your best effort forward. Also bear in mind that not
all editors get paid to handle formatting issues but are expected to resolve
them anyway. Fixing these basic issues yourself or, better yet, not creating them at
all will help both you and your editor(s) ensure the version of the book you
put out is the best possible version.
This is what I do to a novel or a novella before showing it to anyone (including beta readers). I’m posting it in hopes that it will help someone, and I’m not expecting it to work for everyone. Take any parts that help you!
The goal of this step is to reduce word count by removing redundant and filtering words, and make the text more crisp and direct.
Two things up front:
‘Imperfect’ doesn’t mean ‘bad’. Good writing can have imperfections.
The goal is to get the manuscript to a stage where the imperfections won’t be distracting to beta readers.
anyone who says the blue beetle movie is a basic origin story is lying to you. in a normal superhero movie they get at least a day or two of fun hijinks—sticky fingers, zappy powers, quippy one liners—meanwhile jaime reyes over here is speedrunning the worst 48 hours i’ve ever seen anybody experience.
