Writing

Hook, Line and Sinker

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 4 Comments

#writetip I guess I’ve been fishing a lot lately, but Hook, Line and Sinker made me think about how I review scenes.

How about: Hook, Tension, and Point of Scene?

These are three useful things to ask yourself after writing a scene. I write thriller/mystery novels, so the pace has keep moving.

If the scene doesn’t have a hook early on, why would anyone keep reading?

If there is no tension, why would anyone keep reading?

If you can’t state the point of the scene, why did you write it?

As usual, only my opinion . . .

Converting from iWorks Pages to Microsoft Word

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 2 Comments

#writetip This is probably one of those things everyone knows except me. I recently switched from iWorks Pages to Microsoft Word. I’m a fan of both programs, but found most of the people I exchanged documents with use Word.

So for convenience, I changed over.

Already having completed the first draft of my novel, Burnt, I converted the document and at first glance everything appeared fine.

Until . . .

My proofreader sent the document to her kindle. The italics in the document didn’t transfer, but they appeared in the Word document on her computer copy.

What happened, you ask?

The italics showed on the Word copy, but when I clicked on italicized text, the little box at the top that shows a text is italicized wasn’t highlighted. The code to format the text didn’t copy from Pages to Word.

Hence the text didn’t appear italicized on the Kindle.

To fix this, I had to retype in any italicized text and hit the italics button. The next version appeared correct on the Kindle.

How does one know these things until they come up and bite you? And how do I know there aren’t other errors?