I’m following up here on Connie J. Jasperson’s post from Life in the Realm of Fantasy (previous post) with some strategies that have worked for me. (As is so often the case, I found my way to this post via Chris the Story Reading Ape!)
Jasperson’s post confirms for me that some of these procedures aren’t common knowledge, so they’re worth posting about. If they are common knowledge for you, and you have other pointers to include, please share!
a) If you need to remove tab marks or spaces, as Jasperson rightly directs, you can do so via search-and-replace. I am a Mac person, but as Jasperson says, the general idea is usually the same across versions and major platforms, so you may just have to find where a particular button lives.
- In your manuscript, Select All by using CTRL (Command on a Mac) + A. (I sometimes do all this in smaller chunks, like chapters, because I also have to deal with centered chapter numbers—see below.)
- CTRL (or Command on a Mac) + F will take you to the Search (Find) dialogue box. On my Mac, Shift+Command+H opens the “Replace” option as well, but I can also open this from a tab in the Find box.
- At the bottom of the Find box is a tiny downward-pointing arrow. Clicking on this will open a set of options. Clicking on “Special” will allow you to select the tab character for the “Find” line in the Find box. Or, if you like true simplicity, you can type in ^t. This is the tab symbol. Make sure letters you use with the caret (^) are lower case.
- Leave the “Replace” line blank.
- Click “Replace all.” The computer will sweetly get rid of all the tabs.
You can use this same method to eliminate spaces you’ve used for indents as well. Simply type however many spaces you used into the “Find” line and leave the “Replace” line blank. Want to make sure you didn’t miss any spaces at the beginning of paragraphs? Type in ^p for “hard return” (paragraph return) and a space. Then use “Find Next” a couple of times to make sure you’re catching the right things. Then type ^p in the “Replace” line (IMPORTANT!), and click “Replace All” This will preserve your paragraph returns but eliminate the space.
Similarly, you can use this to get rid of those extra spaces that sometimes get typed by fast-moving fingers, or you can correct consistent misspellings.
b) You can use Jasperson’s method to center chapter numbers or titles. Just select the number or title, then use the paragraph format box to center it. In a later post, I will discuss using Word’s “Styles” to accomplish some of these same effects.
c) My version of Word allows me not just to choose “different first page” but also to “format page numbers.” I can set the document to begin paginating at zero. This means that the title page has no number; the manuscript text itself begins at one. If you’re an editor who would prefer that the title page start with number one, so that the ms. begins on 2, please let us know!
And again, if you have quick tips to build on these, please share!
We fiction, memoir, and essay writers are all bombarded—understandably—with the need to SHOW, not tell. The temptation to tell rather than show—at its simplest level, to write “he felt sad” rather than letting his actions and dialogue reveal his reactions—haunts us all. It’s easier: We don’t have to hunt for ways to describe expressions and behaviors. And after all, “he felt sad” takes up a lot less space than “The room around him seemed to darken, the sounds of cheerful conversation to slow to dirge-like rhythms.” And hey, will readers interpret such descriptions the way you intended? Maybe the guy is just having a heart attack.
Note that I converted the whole book, a choice that requires me to scrutinize every word because screenplays are radically length restricted (a 358-page book becomes a 100-page play). But casting individual scenes can provide some of the same benefits.
Just Can't Help Writing 