Inventing Reality Editing Service

Moving right along: Into vs. In to

Let’s get, ahem, into the difference between these two sets of words.

Into means movement, as in We headed into the restaurant.

In to, however, means nothing; the two words actually appear coincidentally together in a sentence, as sometimes they are part of other, adjacent constructs. For example, in might be part of a verbal phrase, such as drive in, while to is part of an infinitive verb like to pick up, and hence the sentence I’ll have to drive in to pick up some ice cream for the cake.

The easy way to remember the difference is to ask if in and to modify other words in the sentence. If they do, then use in to. Otherwise, into is the right call.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Great tips for placing photos in your ebook

When formatting your ebook, photos are a must if you’ve written nonfiction. Pictures, maps and illustrations can add value to your book in a number of ways and unlike a paper book, won’t drive up the title’s price.

There are several elements to consider when placing a photo in your ebook, though. Among them are photo selection, using copies, format, dimensions, resolution, color, and placement in the text.

Let’s look at each one as going step by step through how to place a photo in your ebook.

Photo selection
A photo for the sake of having a photo doesn’t benefit the reader, so only select those that enhance the book’s quality. For example, the photo should illustrate a concept that otherwise is difficult to visualize. In my hiking guidebooks, that might be a trail map or a picture of a rare flower that can be seen along the path. A photo also could provide additional but relevant information that wouldn’t appear in the text. For my books, this might be the view from a vista or a trailhead sign that misspells the trail’s name (which can be pointed in the caption).

Never use the original
Always work with copies of your original photo. Should you crop or accidentally delete the original, you then limit your options for using that picture in your book. Place the copies in a new folder so you do not confuse them with the originals.

Photo format
Photos can appear in a number of formats. The most widely accepted format in ebooks is a jpeg (.jpg), so convert all of your photos to that type. Portable network graphics (.png) also are widely used but still not universal. Never use photos that are bitmap (.bmp), vector (.eps or .ai), Photoshop (.psd), or raw camera (RAW or Exif) files.

Photo dimensions
A photo has height (how high it goes vertically) and width (how long it goes horizontally). You want your photo to at least be the size of the ebook screen. The short side on a few ebooks is 1600 pixels, so that’s probably the smallest you want the photo to go. Unless you’re offering some kind of photo where details are important (such as a map) so that the photo that can be enlarged on the screen, there’s no need to go much larger than this minimum size.

Resolution
Use photos that are 300 dpi (dots per inch). This ensures they will appear in your ebook at the highest quality possible. Photos smaller than 300 dpi will increasingly appear pixelated the closer you get to 1 dpi. And there’s no real benefit in going more than 300 dpi unless someone is reading your book on a 30-inch monitor.

Use color
Color photos in a paper book greatly raise the production costs and so ups the price you must charge readers; this is not so with ebooks. So why not use color when you can? Most people only expect to see black and white photos if they are historical (pre 1960s) or if it’s intended to be artistic.

How to place them
Once you have a jpeg photo that is the correct size and dpi (and in color if possible), you’re ready to place it on your MS Word document. Begin by setting the manuscript in single space mode. After the last line of text that you want the photo to appear after, hit ENTER key twice. Insert the photo there. On the line below the photo, type the caption/cutline. Use a different font and point/font size than the manuscript’s main text to help distinguish it; italics often is all you need. At the end of the caption’s text, hit ENTER twice and continue with the manuscript’s main text.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Four writing prompts: Violence

Good stories center on the clashing of characters’ goals and motivations. Sometimes a character’s goals and motivations arise from witnessing or suffering from another’s brutality. Here are four writing prompts for stories that center on violence.

Man vs. man
Two characters are caught in a situation in which they are pitted against one another in some sort of savage competition. Why are they pitted against one another? What if one of them decides to no longer fight? How does he convince the other to not fight?

Man vs. society
Our main character lives in a setting where violence is rampant. What if he decides he no longer can by being violent as well? How does he arrive at this turning point? With such an attitude, can he survive long in this setting? How does he begin to encourage and change others to be nonviolent?

Man vs. God(s)
A man suffers during horrific acts of violence (e.g. genocide, a political purge in a third world country, revenge by a drug cartel) that causes him to question God’s existence; after all, how could a just God allow such horrors to occur? How does he regain his faith (Perhaps he discovers that without faith, he increasingly behaves in the same ways that those who caused him so much pain?)?

Man vs. himself
The protagonist finds himself in a situation (e.g. an occupying army, a gang, prison) where depravity involving violence is the norm. Unable to walk away from it, how does his conscience wrestle with the horrors he witnesses and even is expected to participate in?

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Most popular point of view types in stories

Among the most important decisions a fiction writer can make is what point of view to use in a story. Point of view determines what aspects of a story will be left out and deeply affects how the reader relates to the main character and interprets the tale’s message.

The various points of view available to novelists and short story writers generally are grouped into three categories: first person; second person; and third person.

First-Person
When the story’s narrator also is a character in the story, first person point of view is being used. First person usually is easy to spot because the narrator uses “I.”

First-person major
In first-person major, only the main character’s experiences and thoughts are relayed to the reader (as in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels). This allows readers to have a very intimate experience with the main character, as they see the events through his eyes. On the downside, a narrator can be unreliable, meaning not being entirely truthful, often requiring the reader to think a little more about what is occurring.

First-person minor
In first-person minor, the narrator is a character in the story but not the protagonist. This creates a sense of intimacy with the narrator and his views while making the protagonist more of an object to be examined. A major limitation is that the narrator can’t experience what the protagonist sees, feels or thinks, only what is observed of him. This point of view is used in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in which the narrator Nick tells what occurs to main character, Jay Gatsby. This subtype sometimes is referred to as first-person peripheral.

Second-Person
Second person occurs when the story is told from the reader’s point of view. Very rarely used in fiction, it is common in nonfiction, especially instructional works. “You” often appears in such works. A good example of second person in fiction is the children’s tale The Monster at the End of This Book. In second person, the reader is the story’s protagonist.

Third-Person
For third-person, the protagonist is part of the story, but the narrator is not. It can be identified by the narrator’s use of he, she and it. The advantage is it offers a more objective portrayal of the main character while still presenting his perceptions, emotions and thoughts. This still generates much less intimacy with the main character than first-person major, however, making it a poor choice when the author wants to challenge the reader’s viewpoints through the protagonist’s questionable behavior. Two major subtypes of this point of view exist.

Third-person limited
In a limited point of view, the narrator only tells what the protagonist sees, feels and thinks. Other characters only can be shown through their actions or the words they speak, as the protagonist would observe them. An excellent example of this in literature is Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. This approach allows the reader to have a more objective view of the protagonist but still get into his head.

Third-person omniscient
The omniscient subtype allows the narrator to be god-like, in that he knows and can present what every character sees, feels and thinks. The narrator knows what characters don’t even know and can offer commentary. This point of view is particularly useful in novels with multiple character storylines, such as Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

One modern technique involving third-person is combining the two subtypes so that different scenes in a story are told in third-person limited but focus on a different protagonist. For example, if a novel has four protagonists, the first chapter might be told in third-person limited with Character A as the main character, while the next chapter is told in third-person limited with Character B as the main character, and so on. Chapters told in third-person omniscient that focus on these many protagonists also might be included. This style sometimes is referred to as third-person multiple.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Five Great Quotations about the Craft of Writing

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” - Stephen King

“Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.” - Julian Barnes

“First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” - Kurt Vonnegut

“...what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.” - John Gardner

“One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.” - Bill Bryson

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Your writing is a textual painting of the world

Writing is textual painting in which the elements of fiction – plot, characters, setting, point of view, theme, and style – are arranged to create a piece of art. Because of this, some work by hack writers look like a kid’s painting. Others show more sophistication and flair, fine enough to hang in a living room but hardly museum quality. And then there are those select few authors and books that are for the ages.

So when you write on the canvas of notebook paper or computer screen, are you aiming to be a master?

Does your writing enjoy balance – that is the symmetrical arrangement of the five elements of fiction and writing style, that creates a pleasing whole? Or have you gone plot-heavy at the expense of character development, detailed the setting with purple prose rather than moves the story forward, or selected a third person point of view though reader intimacy with your protagonist is necessary?

Does your writing enjoy movement – that is, the positioning of the elements of fiction to create a sense of action? Or have you provided details such as the physical appearance of characters that have no bearing on the plot, written here-to-there lines (“He opened the car door then placed the key into the ignition”) that slow the story, or penned pointless dialogue that has no bearing on resolving the story’s central problem?

Does your writing enjoy rhythm – that is, an underlying beat that evokes specific emotions and responses? Or does the word choice and semantics undercut the emotion they are intended to elicit (remember that semantics are the writer’s hues) or maybe the similes and metaphors contradict the story’s theme and message?

Does your writing enjoy focus – that is, the emphasis on a protagonist or major theme that the story is about? Or does your story include too many characters so that no one stands out as the protagonist, offers too many subplots that have little to do with solving the tale’s central problem, or allows the protagonist to drift so that his actions aren’t the reason he emerges victorious in the climax?

Does your writing enjoy contrast – that is, the proper use of opposites to evoke the feeling you intended? Or is the setting out of whack with the scene by giving positive, light descriptions during a tense moment, or by giving a character personality traits that make him one-dimensional and so diminishes the suspense of whether or not he’ll solve the story’s central problem?

Does your writing enjoy pattern – that is, a structure to the story to give it a form so that readers may easily navigate it? Or does the plot eschew the traditional inciting incident-rising action-climax-falling action-denouement, the character’s development doesn’t occur in sync with that scaffolding, or perhaps an object in the story is used multiple times to represent contradictory ideas?

Does your writing enjoy proportion – that is, the fitting together of your story’s elements in terms of size and scale? Or is the setting an unlikely place for your story’s action might occur, the protagonist is too inexperienced to resolve the central problems, or the writing is overly poetic and epic in tone given the problem that must be solved?

Does your writing enjoy unity – that is, do all the story’s parts fit and belong together? Or does something feel awkwardly out of place, such as an overdescribed setting that slows the story, a lack of significant action to justify the character’s growth, or preaching rather than inferring the message through the protagonist’s decisions?

A picture is worth a thousand words, the old saying goes. To be a master writer, your challenge now is to paint the perfect picture in even fewer words.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

What is a “text-to-speech” ebook?

Among the many but little-known advantages that an ebook can offer is text-to-speech, also known as TTS.

TTS uses a computer-generated voice to read text aloud. It is available in most smartphones, tablets and laptops; for older hardware lacking TTS, third-party apps usually are available. TTS sometimes is referred to as voice-to-speech. It initially was created so the visually impaired could enjoy the ebook. Typically the sales page for Kindle ebooks will indicate if TTS is available for a title on various devices.

Be aware that TTS is not the same as an audiobook. An audiobook involves recording a real person reading the text, so an interpretation of the rhythm and emotion that the author intends to convey often is delivered to listeners. In contrast, TTS will sound mechanical and stilted, though software is improving with each passing year. Indeed, sometimes listeners are able to change the quality of TTS so that it reads the text slower or faster as preferred. In a few instances, listeners even can choose between a male or a female voice.

Further, because an indie author must pay for services to have a book recorded, few titles are available as audiobooks. This is not the case with TTS, as anyone with the software on their smartphone, tablet or laptop can utilize it and have any book read aloud to them.

Despite that TTS and audiobooks are different, they are similar enough that controversy has arisen over the former’s use. Ebook creators, such as Amazon’s Kindle, believe that TTS is a part of its ebook rights and so can be sold without the author’s permission. The Authors Guild, however, argues that TTS is an audio right, and so ebook creators should not be able to offer it without the writer’s (or copyright holder’s) permission. Be aware that enabling Digital Rights Management (DRM) on your ebook sometimes can prevent TTS from reading the ebook.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

How to fix run-on sentences in your writing

Sometimes sentences are too complex or too long to read because no punctuation or conjunction is used to connect ideas. When two clauses that could be independent sentences are joined that way, you’ve written a run-on sentence.

Consider the following run-on sentence:

Heavy wind and rain struck the area Tuesday, many businesses and homes were out of power.

The sentence really consists of two sentences that could stand alone: Heavy wind and rain struck the area Tuesday and many businesses and homes were out of power.

One simple solution is to simply separate those parts into their own sentences by correctly punctuating them with a period:

Heavy wind and rain struck the area Tuesday. Many businesses and homes were out of power.

Instead of using a period, though, you could keep the sentences connected with a semicolon:

Heavy wind and rain struck the area Tuesday; many businesses and homes were out of power.

You also might use a conjunction (and, but, or, so) with a comma before it to connect the two parts of the sentence:

Heavy wind and rain struck the area Tuesday, and many businesses and homes were out of power.

Which option you go with depends on how you wish to relate the ideas (A stronger connection is suggested when using a semicolon or a conjunction.), the audience’s reading level (Younger readers will better understand shorter sentences.), and maintaining some variety in syntax (If the previous sentence used a conjunction to combine two sentences, you probably want to split this sentence into two.).

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Four writing prompts: Race

Good stories center on the clashing of characters’ goals and motivations. Sometimes a character’s goals and motivations arise from seeking to win a competition. Here are four writing prompts for stories that center on race.

Man vs. nature
The main character must accomplish a goal before impending storm – say a hurricane or a blizzard – makes that impossible. What is the goal to be achieved and why is it so important? What happens when the main character, with his goal in reach, decides to keep pursuing it despite that the storm arrives?

Man vs. man
Our main character is engaged in a race with an old nemesis, and the winner will be able to prove his worth and gain something of great value. What struggles have the characters had in the past with one another? How might the nemesis underhandedly attempt to prevent the main character from winning?

Man vs. God(s)
What if the main character – angry at the world and angry at God – decides to enter a dangerous race that he may not be qualified to complete? How does this attempt to prove his anger is justified actually bring him closer to God? Why he is angry at the world and God in the first place?

Man vs. himself
Our protagonist have five minutes to disarm a bomb whose interior he’s entirely unfamiliar with. How does he keep his cool and succeed?

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

How to make your main character likable

Among the major challenges facing fiction writers is creating a protagonist who readers will like. After all, if readers loathe the character, they probably aren’t going to continue with the book. In fact, they may wrongly decide that you’re an author who always creates unlikable characters and not purchase your other books.

No matter the genre you’re writing in, almost all likable protagonists share several common traits. Among them are:
• Flawed personality – No one is perfect, and neither should be your main character. Too perfect characters are dull because they’re one dimensional. The flaw should be something that challenges the protagonist in resolving the story’s central problem, and he should be able to overcome that failing so he can be victorious in the end.
• Noteworthy qualities – Despite possessing a serious internal flaw, the protagonist at heart must be a decent human being. For example, he keeps trying no matter how difficult the task or he puts others before himself, especially in those people are in need of help.
• Self-sacrifice – The protagonist’s reason for resolving a story’s problem should not be for personal glory but to help others. On fact, to finally overcome obstacles, he should be willing to give up something important to himself.

Another technique writers can use to increase likability is ensuring the reader sees the world through the protagonist’s eyes. Offer evocative descriptions of the world that appeal to all of the reader’s senses. This creates intimacy for the reader, who vicariously experiences all that the main character does.

A final thought: No matter how much you try, no character is universally likable. Some readers desire perfect white hat characters while others hold the flaw itself in such low repute (such as a bad temper or alcoholism) that your protagonist is doomed despite that he ultimately changes ways. Don’t worry about this, however. Focus on what the majority of readers are looking for, and most book lovers will relish your protagonist.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.