A Neat Trick for Finding and Getting Rid of Passive Verbs in MS Word

Posted on April 21, 2013 by UltraRob

I was hunting for a good site today to give advice on Passive vs. Active verbs to another writer and came across this little nugget. The article it’s from is good, but this part is gold! Serious kudos to the author!

“MS-Word has a great and quick method to finding those “to Be” verbs.

The “Reading Highlight” feature is one of the most useful tools in the MS-Word arsenal, but the RH is an especially neat way to check your writing for passive voice use.

What Reading Highlight does is perform a search, but instead of taking you to the next instance of your search terms, it highlights all instances throughout the text.

To use Reading Highlight,

–select a highlight color from the “Home” tab, then hit CTRL-F to bring up a search window.
–Enter your search term or phrase, click the “Reading Highlight” drop-down, and select “Highlight All”.
–Click “Close” and watch your highlights appear.
–To remove the highlighting, re-open the search box, click the “Reading Highlight” drop-down, and select “Clear Highlighting”.
–Again, click “Close” and the highlighting will be gone.

How do you use this to find passive sentences and those “Here is”, “There are”, and “It is” beginning phrases?

Well, we know most passive statements use the verb “to be” in some form or another. So we want to search for “be” in all its variants: is, was, are, am, were, etc.

Open the search dialog (CTRL-F),

–type “be” as your search term, and click the “More” button.
–Put a check in the box next to “Find all word forms”, click the “Reading Highlight” button and select “Highlight All”, and click “Close”.
–Now, every permutation of “to be” will be highlighted.
–Not all of them are going to be passive — or too passive, anyway — but many will.
–Rewrite all those sentences to have more active verbs.

Using “to Be” verbs for anything other than linking verbs or helping verbs is a bad habit.

Any habit learned can be unlearned.”

via To Be, or Not To Be: Getting Rid of those Pesky “to Be” Verbs | Recipes for Writing.

I tried it myself on the work I’m editing. I had it hunt for “be” and “have” verbs (which also tend to be passive) and highlight each type it found. In a 91,000 word document I found roughly 2000 BE verbs and 1000 HAVE verbs. Not all of them are full words, though, and for the length of the document that isn’t bad.

Still, it’s a new tool in my editor’s toolbox I intend to make great use of!

Rob

This post is from my blog at robynpaterson.com.

Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Writing Fast

Posted on April 19, 2013 by UltraRob

Dean Wesley Smith wrote a good piece on his blog about writing speed, quality, and productivity. I definitely recommend reading it if you have the time.

Writing Slow Equals Writing Better is a complete myth, a nasty sacred cow of publishing that hurts and stops writers who believe it.

— The truth is that no two writers work the same and no book is the same as the previous book or the next book.

— The truth is that writing fast is nothing more than spending more time every day writing.

— The truth is that there should be no rule about speed relating to quality.

— The truth is there should be no rule that lumps all writers into one big class. There should only be your way of writing.

via Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Writing Fast |.

My Advice to Aspiring Authors | Hugh Howey

Posted on March 15, 2013 by UltraRob

Since some who read this blog are aspiring writers in the prose field, I thought I’d pass along this excellent blog article written by successful independent author Hugh Howey.

http://www.hughhowey.com/my-advice-to-aspiring-authors/

He really hits a lot of important points on being a writer in the new e-book focussed market. I also think he is spot-on about how the best thing a writer can do is write, get the product out, and keep writing, the marketing can come later.

For me the most interesting was the following:

“Know your gatekeepers. Appealing to readers is the endgame. They want story over prose, so concentrate on that aim for both, but concentrate on story. Agents and slush-pile readers are often the opposite, which is why they bemoan the absence of literary fiction hits and cringe at the sale of Twilight, Dan Brown, and 50 Shades. You are writing for the reader, who is your ultimate gatekeeper. Get your work in front of them, even if it’s one at a time, one reader a month or year.”

He really has an excellent point with this one. The truth is, if your core story is strong, then the average reader will forgive a lot in the area of style. Simple, clear prose without spelling or grammar mistakes is all most readers require to enjoy a story, and that isn’t all that difficult to achieve. It’s the characters and story that will bring them in and keep them reading, not the prose, as the authors he’s mentioned have proved.

Of course, the opposite is also true- you can polish a turd of a story all you want, and it will still be a turd!

via My Advice to Aspiring Authors | Hugh Howey.

How To Sell Ebooks

Posted on February 10, 2013 by UltraRob

From Joe Konrath’s blog:

“How To Sell Ebooks

I just hit a milestone that is hard for me to grasp. As of January, I’ve sold over one million ebooks.

That’s a lot of ebooks.

The question I get asked more than any other is: How can I make my ebooks sell more copies?

That’s actually not the right question to ask. Because there is nothing you can do to make people buy your ebooks, except maybe hold them at gunpoint or kidnap their pets.

This business isn’t about what you have to sell. It is about what you have to offer. And luck plays a big part.

But I’ve found you can improve your odds. Here are some things I’ve done that have seemed helpful.

GOOD COVERS

I can’t overemphasize how important a good cover is. Hire a professional. And keep these things in mind:

1. At a glance, it should convey the type or genre of the book you’ve written.

2. It should be readable in grayscale.

3. It should be readable as a thumbnail.

4. Your name and the title should be large and clear.

There are other little tips that I recommend. Usually legacy book covers have a lot of writing on them, and that makes them subconsciously identifiable as professional. Taglines. Blurbs. “By the author of Whiskey Sour”. That sort of thing.

Your artist should know what vectors are, and the rule of three, and the importance of the color wheel, and all the other tricks used to make a cover pop.

If your sales are slow, consider getting a better cover.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg, lots more great advice at…

via A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: How To Sell Ebooks.

Kurt Vonnegut: 8 Basics of Creative Writing

Posted on January 21, 2013 by UltraRob

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last

via Kurt Vonnegut: 8 Basics of Creative Writing.

Productivity Hunt- Google Drive

Posted on December 25, 2012 by UltraRob

Taking a little tip from Terry Mixon of the Dead Robots’ Society podcast with my newest writing project, I’m going to use Google Drive (aka Google Docs) for my writing this time. With it, I can write on my desktop, laptop, iPhone, or whatever computer I happen to be sitting at that can access the net and it’s all synced constantly into one document. The idea will be to harness all those downtime moments like lunch hours, killing time between classes and waiting in the doctor’s office and use them for writing time. I’ll report back on how it goes!

Rob

This post is from my blog at robynpaterson.com.

My Second Novel- Little Gou and the Crocodile Princess, is done!

Posted on September 3, 2012 by UltraRob

In Summer, 2008 I started what was to be my first novel- Little Gou and the Crocodile Princess. A thrilling WuXia adventure story centered around everyone’s favorite gambler in his first long-form adventure. I wrote the first 40,000 words of the story at a rapid pace, with everything coming together like a finely crafted puzzle. It was great, it was fun, it was going to rock!

Then I hit writer’s block with the story so hard that I think it gave my grandchildren a bloody nose.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get the story moving again. All my attempts failed, and the tricks I used to plot it out produced nothing but boring crap.

So, I set it aside and moved on to other projects. I was in full audio-drama production mode, so it wasn’t hard to just let that fill my creative needs and figure that I’d return to Crocodile Princess when the time was right.

Well, after 4 years of aborted attempts, and one novel (Twin Stars, Book One) completed, I sat down at the end of July and told myself I was going to finish this thing. I’d just gotten done listening to Stephen King’s book “On Writing”, which I adored, and decided that instead of plotting it out and trying to force things, I’d follow his approach and just sit down each morning and let it flow. I started using my old laptop, which can’t connect to the net, stuck it in the basement and used that as a writing area. I decided that I wouldn’t force it, just try to feel my way through the story inch by inch as naturally as I could.

Then I wrote. Every day.

I also decided to take some writing advice I’d heard once from Podcaster Mur Lafferty- “It’s okay to suck.” (Which I took to mean your first draft will often suck, but just write it anyways and then fix it during revision.)

Well, this morning, on the last day of Summer (as we teachers reckon it) I wrote the work FIN at end of page 511 and saved it. (Then saved it again on a memory stick, and stuck it up on Carbonite to make sure it doesn’t get lost- ever!) At 96,449 words, I wrote roughly 54,000 of them in just the last month, which means I both won by NaNoWriMo standards, and have now written my longest 100% original work ever. (Twin Stars being an adaption of the first season of the audio dramas.)

Now, I will set it aside and let it sit for a few months while I focus on work, editing Twin Stars and getting it out for sale, and possibly writing my third novel. (Which will likely either be a Young Adult fantasy novel, a detective novel set in Taiwan, or a techno-thriller set in the near future.) Editing Crocodile Princess will also be an interesting challenge, because my writing style has changed a lot in the past four years, and I will have to make the two halves blend with each other. Either way, I’ve finished a novel, and now know I can do it if I try.

For now, the important thing is letting my brain rest and catching up on all the movies and other media I’ve ignoring over the past month while I focussed on writing.

And get lunch. Lunch is good.

Rob

This post is from my blog at robynpaterson.com.

4 Things Science Fiction Needs to Bring Back | Cracked.com

Posted on August 17, 2012 by UltraRob

A truly great list that I agree with 100%!

It’s tempting to look around at today’s literary scene, with its Twilight and its Fifty Shades of Grey, and wonder if we shouldn’t just flush the whole goddamn concept of written language down the toilet — maybe start again with some sort of hybrid colorwheel/odor system for communicating thoughts. Strangely, the one genre thriving in the swamp of modern literature seems to be science fiction. It’s kind of appropriate, actually: All of our crazy high technology has made publishing and distributing books about crazy high technology much more approachable and widespread than ever. But even the best works could stand to learn a little something from the past, so here are a few things that I miss about old science fiction, and would like to see come back.

via 4 Things Science Fiction Needs to Bring Back | Cracked.com.

TeaNoWriMo Results/ Writing Update

Posted on August 4, 2012 by UltraRob

Well, I tried to make July 2012 in Teacher’s Novel Writing Month, hoping that using this month off could help me boost my creativity and give me a jump forward.

How did it turn out?

Well, with a goal of around 50,000 words for July I managed to pull of a whopping 6000 or so. Yay me!

As it turned out, July was a month filled with personal issues and obstacles that basically killed my writing time. It’s odd, really, sometimes I feel I’m busier and more occupied in the Summer when I’m not at the college than I am when the college is in full swing and I’m teaching and marking!

So yeah, TeaNoWriMo ended up being a bit of a bust.

But, was it a complete loss?

Not entirely.

First, while I wasn’t up to writing a lot at first, I did get some editing done. I’m almost done my first editing pass on the Twin Stars novel, with just the very last section to go before I can get into the second pass. (Which will be the point where I start to do serious line editing and polishing.)

Second, I did get some writing done on a project which has been stalled for almost three years, and in fact I think I finally got the darn thing back on track again. I won’t mention the project name because I don’t want to jinx it, but in the last two weeks or so I’ve added another 12,000 words to it and hope to add a heck of a lot more during the month of August.

Two things have added to my productivity that I thought I’d mention.

One, which I got from the Dead Robots’ Society podcast, is that I pulled out an ancient laptop I had that doesn’t connect to the internet, stuck it in the basement, put Scrivener on it, and made it into my primary writing machine. The basement is cool, which is important because our brains work best at 22-25 degrees celsius (72-77 F), and quiet, so I don’t have any distractions. Also, since it can’t connect to the Net (most important of all!) it forces me to stay on task and keeps me from checking my mail or FB. I’ve been amazed how much this has helped my writing and kept me in the zone.

Two, I’ve been making use of one of the Pixar Writer’s Tricks whenever I get stuck- I have a blank document running in the background, and when I get really stuck, I just start writing down what won’t happen next. It’s amazing how quickly those things on the list start to become what might happen next and get things moving again. Sometimes I also alternate writing what won’t happen next with what could happen next, and do a couple lines of that to see what ideas can fall out of the tree. It doesn’t matter if the “won’ts” are silly or off topic, as long as they’re getting written down and keeping you writing and thinking. So far it’s worked almost every time I’ve gotten stuck, even if I don’t always use what got written down.

So, in August if I’m not participating much online or blogging much, please forgive me. I’m trying to get done as much as I can before September, and literally not online most days except to check my messages using my iPhone.

Keep writing!

Rob

This post is from my blog at robynpaterson.com.

Pixar Story Rules in LEGO!

Posted on July 29, 2012 by UltraRob

Alex Elyar on Slacktory has taken Emma Coat’s Pixar’s Rules of Storytelling and turned them posters illustrated with Lego for great visual results:

I’ve always heard that you can have one major co-incidence per story and the audience will generally let it pass. However, this rule is pretty good too!