Five Word tricks for Writers

or most of my brainstorming, outlining, plotting, dreaming, etc I like the old-fashioned feel of pen and paper. I don’t get real fancy when it comes to the computer—just Microsoft Word for drafting and editing. I might not be very high-tech with my writing, but I do know a few helpful tricks:

1.      Flagging. Whether I’m writing the first or the fifth draft, I use triple question marks like these: ??? to flag areas that I need to take another look at. For example:   ???insert more characterization here; or ???research 1930s music. Then all I have to do to find all my notes is do a CTRL-F for Find and type in double question marks (just in case I did ?? instead of ???). Little trick I picked up when working for a publisher. It’s a fast way to find all your notes.

2.      Highlighting. Here’s a little trick I picked up from Margie Lawson’s EDITS system. I took her Empowering Character Emotions class last month. She teaches you how to use highlighters—physically on printed paper, but in a pinch you can use the computer highlighting—to isolate certain aspects of your writing. For example: you can highlight all your dialogue in one color, and your character’s internal thoughts in another color. It’s a colorful way to see what you have and have not included in your WIP. I highly recommend Margie’s classes to learn this system.

3.      Coloring text. This tip I just learned from a kind judge in The Sandy Writing Contest. (I made the finals and have just a few days left to take their advice and polish my first 20 pages to an even greater shine before it is off to the final round of judging. Just thought I’d slip that in here!) Back to the kind judge: She changed the text color of all instances of the word “was” and all my exclamation marks: ! Apparently I use these two objects frequently. So, I thought, wow, she did a lot of work here….hmmm….I wonder…Yes!  Ctrl-F to bring up the Find box. Click on the Replace tab. Then, click on the More button. Then click on the Format button. Now you can access Font color (and underline, and colored underline, and so much more.) WAS I ever glad to find this!

4.      25 line manuscript. What do you do if you enter a contest like the Sandy and you have to have your WIP formatted with exactly 25 lines? Don’t panic because this is another easy one. I snagged this sanity-saving tip from Jen Crooks at the OCC RWA blog (Friday, April 20, you’ll have to scroll way down). Basically, all you have to do is go to Format/Paragraph. Set Line Spacing to Exactly. Then in the AT box put 25. And, if you have not already done so, deselect Widow/orphan control on the tab labeled Line and Page Breaks.

5.      Inserting Drop Caps. Whenever I don’t have a picture for our blog I fancy things up with a Drop Cap (see above…though if you are reading this by RSS it might not show up). Just highlight the first letter, go to the Format menu and select Drop Cap. Also, back in the day when I was focused on writing magazine articles I used the drop cap on my query letters.