mystery

Listening to Your Novel

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 2 Comments

What do you hear when your novel is read out loud? #writetip

I’ve tried reading my novel out loud and taping myself.  Although this helps find errors and hear the tone of the story, it is very time-consuming.

I use my Kindle. The text-to-speech sounds like a robot, but that’s okay. While I listen, I concentrate on the words on the page and it takes me half the time it took with the tape recorder method. I use the slowest reading speed available.

The comment feature enables me to put corrections into the kindle, like leaving comments in a pages or word document. When I’ve finished hearing the novel I go back to my computer and enter the changes. This gives me a chance to review the changes before updating the novel.

If you’re used to typing on your phone, then you’ll have no problem with your kindle keyboard.

Hearing a novel helps find typos, repeated use of words, awkward dialogue.

I’m sure there are other products for this, I just happen to have a Kindle and use this feature. If you know of others, I’d love to hear about them.

Points Of View

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 5 Comments

Do you have too many? #writetip This is where a spreadsheet comes in handy. If you write in first person with one point of view, then you don’t have a problem. Same goes for third person and one point of view. I like to write from several points of view.

Use the sort function in a spreadsheet to sort by POV. This will give you a quick overview of how many POVs you have and how many times a character gets a POV.

If I find that a character only got one POV then I take a hard took at that scene. Does it need to be in that character’s POV?  Could it be rewritten from another character’s POV?

If the POV is needed, I study the character. I must have been interested enough to write a POV scene, so maybe that character should have a bigger part.

Only you can decide if you have too many, but you can’t do this if you don’t know how many you have.

See my blog about Keeping Track of Scenes for more ideas on how to use a spreadsheet.