In praise of reading out loud

By Sam Kruit (ERWA Editor in Chief)

It’s the end of the year, so I’m going to keep this short and
light and highlight just some of the issues that programmed spell and grammar
checks can never save you from.

If editors aren’t in your budget, and beta readers do things
in their own sweet time, read your work out loud. Seriously. It’s the best
investment of time you can make towards the end of the polishing process.

You’ll catch over-long sentences. You’ll catch awkward
punctuation. You may catch words spelt correctly, but used wrongly. You’re more
likely to pick up on formatting issues. And by focussing on each word
individually, hopefully you’ll rescue yourself from the kind of goofs that
continue to crop up in journalistic writing all the time—ones that even bypass
the section editor or editor in chief.

Read, learn, and giggle if so inclined! Have a great festive
season.

Lesson 1:  one letter
out of place changes everything…

Before Miss
Colverson concluded her concert with a rendition of ‘At the end of a perfect
day’ she was prevented with a large bouquet of carnations by the Mayoress.

Today’s
weather: A depression will mope across Southern England.

Unless the
teachers receive a higher salary they may decide to leave their pests.

The Red
Cross found a bed for him in an institution specialising in the treatment of
artcritics.

Mrs Norris,
who won a brace of pheasants, kindly gave her prize bark and this raised £5.50
for the funds [this one’s 30 years old… so about £35, really!]

The bride
was very upset when one of the bridesmaids stepped on her brain and tore it.

Lesson 2: keep an eye on the relationship between subject and
description!

After
consuming about a hundred portions of chips, 28 pounds of sausages, rolls ice
cream and cake, the Mayoress presented the trophies to the boys.

A carpet
was stolen from Walsingham Hall over the weekend. Measuring six by six feet,
the thief has baffled the police.

Parents and
teachers are definitely to blame here. You find them playing on both main and
by-pass roads, throwing each other’s caps and dashing out after them, and many similar
games.

Today’s tip
tells you how to keep your hair in good condition. Cut it out and paste it to a
piece of cardboard and hang it in your bathroom.

‘We saw
over thirty deer come to the forest to feed in the early morning,’ said Mrs
Boston, and added that they had thick sweaters and several flasks of hot tea
with them.

A quantity
of drugs were discovered by a sniffer dog hidden in a cigarette packet.

Lesson 3: Watch the juxtaposition of information…

COUNCIL
‘DIGGING OWN GRAVE’

Smaller
body urged.

The
celebrated soprano was involved in a serious road accident last month. We are
happy to report that she was able to appear this evening in four pieces.

The boy was
described as lazy and insolent, and when asked by his mother to go to school he
threatened to ‘smash her brains out’. The case has been adjourned for three
weeks to give the boy another chance.

Lesson 4: there is such a thing as trying to say too much in
too few words…

PASSENGERS HIT BY CANCELLED TRAINS

BOLTING HORSE SAVED AFTER FALL FROM PONY

GRAPEFRUIT LATE TELLING POLICE OF INJURED MAN

PUPILS MARCH OVER NEW TEACHERS

POLICE MOVE IN BOOK CASE

MAN CRITICAL AFTER BUS BACKS INTO HIM

Firemen in
Yorkshire received over 20 letters of thanks today thanking them for their
efforts which destroyed five houses yesterday.

By Sam Kruit (ERWA Editor)

The deed is done, the manuscript (MS) complete. But in the
course of submitting or getting feedback, it’s likely it’ll have to go through
the formatting wrangler a few times before it’s ready to post in Storytime, or fit to be submitted to an editor’s inbox. 

One of the most annoying things about writing is having to
rearrange the appearance of your MS to fit the layout requirements of those who
are going to read it. So, this editor’s corner article is devoted to the
practical art of making MS Word work for you. 

• Pull up an old document,
• make a copy,
• switch on the paragraph marker (the fat, back-to-front P
  with the double stalk), which you’ll find on the home menu under ‘paragraph’
• and prepare to experiment with tips and tricks.

Before beginning any
mass change in a document, it’s worth standardising things like your scene
breaks first. For example:

1. Open find and replace
2. In Find, Type a space
   and then your scene marker
3. Find next (you might
   not have any leading spaces. If so, good.)
4. If you find one, type
   your scene marker into Replace with no spaces.
5. Repeat for spaces
   after your scene marker
6. Repeat to find any
   incidents where you’re an asterisk short (* * * ), and any other combination of
   mess-up you can think of.

Once all your scene
markers look as you want them to, you can do your global reformats and fewer
things will slip the net.

Aghhh moment #1 –
scrunched post syndrome

You’ve posted your story to ERWA Storytime in good faith,
but when the email is returned to you through the list, you find that all your
line breaks have disappeared. The whole thing appears in one lump, with or
without indents, and you struggle to pick out the starting point of each new
paragraph.

Solution:

1. Open Find/Replace
2. In Find, type ^p
3. in Replace, type ^p^p
4. replace all.

This will double up your paragraph spacers so that it
appears normal on the email. If you find your story has indeed been scrunched,
simply re-post in the expanded version with a quick note to say that the
documents are the same, but that the format has been tamed. It’s worth just
emailing it from one personal account to another to experiment before you post.

Aghhh moment #2 –
‘more white space, please!’

The editor wants scene break markers separated from the text
with an extra blank line either side. Currently, yours look like these:

Waffle waffle waffle rhubarb waffle rhubarb Waffle waffle
waffle rhubarb waffle.

* * * *

“Rhubarb!” Waffle waffle. “Waffle rhubarb waffle?”

Solution:

1. Open find/replace
2. In Find, type ^p* * * *^p (this shows the single carriage
   return between the end of the last line, the scene marker line, and the break
   to the start of the next scene).
3. In replace, type ^p^p* * * *^p^p (this will add in an extra
   line break for you)
4. Find next, make sure it works, then replace all.

Aghhh moment #3 – ‘My
scene breaks have all shifted to the left!’

Whether you’ve just tried the trick above, or simply
discovered that your entire manuscript has to be left/fully justified
(whichever format your MS isn’t in at
the moment), it is rather exasperating to find that all your scene breaks have
moved from their tidy central spots. Don’t foam at the mouth just yet.

Solution:

1. Open find/replace
2. Click the ‘more’ button
3. Copy your scene marker into Find (with no spaces either
   side)
4. Go to the bottom of the screen, where it says ‘format’
5. Select paragraph, and in the paragraph dialogue box (PDB for
   short!) go to the alignment selection and choose left/fully justified,
   depending on what your entire text has been converted to. Click ‘ok’.
6. Now, in Replace, paste your scene marker again (still with
   no excess spaces)
7. Go back to format, paragraph, PDB, and select ‘centred’ from
   the alignment section.
8. Click Find next, and watch your asterisks ping back into the
   middle of the page.

Aghh moment #4 – the manuscript
conversion

Currently your manuscript is in the ‘online’ format. In
other words, all paragraphs are flush to the left margin with no indents, and
there is a blank line between each paragraph. In MS Word, this is also called
the ‘normal’ style.

BUT your editor/publisher/agent wants the full manuscript
set-up:

Double-spaced; Times New Roman 12; normal margins; indent of
a half inch at the start of each paragraph. No gaps between any paragraphs
except for scene breaks or special effects.

Oh, and their rules say ‘no tabs’. In other words, don’t
press the Tab key to create the indent.

Solution (select a sample of a few paragraphs to practice
this on):

1. open the PDB
2. under ‘indentation’ select ‘first line’ from the ‘special’
   drop-down box
3. Under ‘by’, type 1.27 if that isn’t automatically set for
   you as soon as you choose ‘first line’. This is the standard half-inch indent.
4. Under ‘spacing’, click the box that says ‘no extra lines
   between paragraphs of the same style’.
5. Click ok.

You should now have several indented paragraphs with no gaps
between them. You can now change spacing and font as you require. To reverse this process (from US MS format to ‘online’):

1. Select the paragraphs you want to change
2. Open the PDB
3. Under indentation and ‘special’, select ‘none’.
4. Under ‘spacing’, make sure the tickbox for no spacing
   between paragraphs of the same kind is EMPTY.
5. Click ok.
6. You should be back to online format.

There are countless things you can do with Find/replace. You
can standardise the type-setting, removing extra spaces between punctuation and
following words. You can also use it to find an over-used word by typing into
both Find and Replace, but assigning a highlight colour to the replaced version
(go to format at the bottom, select ‘highlight’ and pick your shade.

By the time the next Editing Corner comes around, I’ll have
type-setting standardisation document I can share. And perhaps, in the next
editing corner, I’ll be able to dip into Find/Replace’s little magical world of
‘wild cards’. Until then, have more fun and less stress making MS Word behave
for you.

By Daddy X (ERWA Editor)

What does fiction do for us? Take us to the outer reaches of
the universe? To new worlds? Inside technology? To a contrived history of the
pyramids? Do we, as writers, first experience our travels in the real world,
then relate the trip to our readers? Or do we create the journey from whole cloth?
What stimulates a reader’s mental and emotional synapses to trigger a
particular realization the writer has in mind? How to get readers to process
information the way we intend? Do we acknowledge sophisticated readers by subtle
tricks, isolating ourselves from their own interpretations? Or do we hold their
hands, explaining everything as we go along, leaving nothing to the reader’s
imagination. How do we make it all happen? How to keep it real?

Life experiences hint at ways a character may behave in a
given circumstance or what reactions may result from certain stimuli. Creating an
acceptably realistic scenario is a melding of what we know as fact with what simply
could be. It’s a matter of blending the universally accepted knowable with
conjecture. Sounds easy, as long as we’re simply writing what we know, what
we’ve lived.

While I certainly do make up shit, I can’t say that I’ve
ever been tempted to write anything too far out.  By that I mean crossing erotica with Sci-fi, paranormal,
vampires, zombies (ick). I do have a couple thousand words set on another
planet, but there it sits, in the ‘what next?’ pile.

Fact is I’m not really conversant in the very fantastical,
except for those places I’ve traveled within myself and consequently still within
my world. Doors opened and thresholds were crossed under the influence of
psychedelics. Real life, whether interpreted within our conscious minds or not,
is all so interesting (and fantastic) that there’s enough internal space to
explore before I’d get to setting up other, unfamiliar, complicated societies.

 It’s hard enough to
grasp the one we’re living in, for crissakes.

Clearly, a lot of readers do love these fantasy genres, and
the artists who create them can be quite affecting. The great storyteller
Stephen King is one who states the impossible and makes us believe it. The
writers of the ‘Star Trek’ series, endowed with the innate ability not only to
create new worlds, technologies, societal patterns, etc. also remembered to
take us along for the ride. As if a phaser was something everybody had in a
drawer somewhere. We felt we understood how warp drive worked.  

Feeling one’s way around a created fantasy world is at once
a noble, frivolous, and difficult task.

Noble, in that alternative orderings of the human condition
potentially reside in the random cards of earthly imagination.

Frivolous, for those who lead a more simple existence—even
folk tales and creation myths, no matter how complex, tend to stay fixed within
a culture.

Difficult—in that it all has to jibe for the reader.

We mustn’t forget the need for the human mind to create
fantasy. Even in the most removed tribes, the otherworldly has a way of
creeping into practical existence even though a moody, introspective state couldn’t
be sustained for long. Not at least without the cooperation of others of like
mind. It seems as though there’s a need in our species that requires flights of
fancy. Escapism? Metaphor? A need to explore the creative process? This is the
genesis of magical thought. To create an unsubstantiated story to explain who
we are, why we are, and where we come from. Births of religions would fall somewhere
within this realm.

The very complexity of our own way of life seldom makes
sense, so why, one may ask, does ‘real’ matter so much in fiction? Good
question, but fiction has to make sense relative to itself. Life doesn’t have
to follow any rules. A reader’s observation may suggest that a particular outcome
of a series of events would be impossible given the information provided.

At times it appears we accept such incongruities in our real
lives much easier than we endure errors in our fiction. Reality is a state of flux.
In the real world, we can’t always predict the effect of an action, whereas in
the world of fiction we must. We can surprise, but the surprise must be congruent
with what has come before.

My guess is it’s my own laziness, covering for some
perceived inadequacy that keeps me from the difficult stuff of research, which
would be necessary to any endeavors in writing the fantastic. Same as a historical
piece for that matter, so it’s not just a simple fear of the unknown that keeps
me from that noble task. 

My lamest excuse would be that at this stage of life, there
isn’t time for researching something outside my experience. After all, I’m still
a long way from exhausting what I’ve learned thus far. Going forward, it
follows that research into esoteric and non-substantive issues could be a waste
of time.

Time better spent writing.