Dianne Frost at Dianne in Writing was gracious enough to host a post of mine on her blog. Here’s a teaser …
Have you ever been reading a new romance novel and felt something familiar, a bit of déjà vu? The “stage” is different, the “actors” are different, and even the situation is different, but it still feels cozy and intimate, like your best pair of fuzzy slippers.
If this has happened to you, then you might be starting to recognize the tropes in your favorite romance novels.
What Are Tropes?
Tropes are everywhere, not just in romance novels. In writing, they are commonly used themes. They’re recognizable once you’ve read enough books or watched enough TV. Think of the “lovable, overweight cop,” the “suave, seductive vampire,” or the “bullied kid overcomes” plot. As TVTropes.org puts it, “For creative writer types, tropes are more about conveying a concept to the audience without needing to spell out all the details.”
Jade Young was kind enough to invite me to write a guest post on her blog, The Educated Writer. Hop on over to her site to check it out and read my post on “10 Ways to Meet Your Daily Word Count for NaNoWriMo.”
Please join me in welcoming guest blogger Janell E. Robisch to The Educated Writer! So, you’ve decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month. You’ve committed to writing 50,000 words in thirty days. If writing every day is new to you, you may quickly find yourself overwhelmed.
This is a great piece describing a four-act, two-body plot structure for murder mystery novels.
I’ve talked about this before, here and elsewhere, and never really laid it out. I decided it would be useful to have it here as a reference, so here goes. There are many variants on murder m…
Fellow fiction editor Lisa Poisso addresses the topic of errors in an edited manuscript. What is normal? How can you decrease the number of postediting mistakes? Read on …
How to use MS Word Track Changes with your edited manuscript
Your edited manuscript is back! It’s time to incorporate the edits. Track Changes can seem intimidating to work with the first time, but once you get comfortable with it, you’ll wonder how you ever managed notes, edits, and revisions without it.
Here are some tips for getting started processing your editing manuscript—but before you begin, remember that you really can’t go wrong if you save early and often. Save the document with a new working name right away so that you’ll always have the document in the form it was returned in from your editor. Keep saving regularly as you go so that if you make a big mistake (easy to do in the era of global search and replace), you can step back to a recent version.
After you receive your edited manuscript
The first thing you should do with a newly edited manuscript is read it with the markup turned off so you can clearly see how the editing text reads. You’ll probably find it more convenient to jot notes by hand about things you want to address later rather than distracting yourself by fixing things here and there at this stage. (Jot down a unique snippet of identifying text so you can easily find the right place in the manuscript later.)
To turn off the Track Changes markup, on the Review tab in Microsoft Word, find the drop-down box just to the right of the Track Changes box. Set that box to Final (in Word 2013, choose No Markup or Simple Markup). I recommend that you keep comments showing; if you’ve turned on the tracked changes in the text but you’re not seeing comment balloons in the margins, click the Show Markup dropdown next to the big Tracking button and check Comments to enable them.
When you’re ready to process the edits
Once you’ve read through the manuscript with the markup turned off and made notes of anything that needs more attention after your first read-through, you’re ready to peek behind the curtain and start accepting, rejecting, and revising the edits. Accepting an edit makes it part of your manuscript, while rejecting one deletes it.
To make the edits show up on your screen, set the drop-down box at the top of the Track Changes area on the Review tab to Final: Show Markup (or, in Word 2013, All Markup).
Does it seem like you see more comments this time around? You’re not crazy. Comments linked to material that was deleted only show when the deleted material is displayed, which only happens when the markup is on. Now that the markup is on, you’ll see every last explanation and comment that exists.
