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Tag: hints and tips

  • Show not Tell Thursday

    Show not Tell Thursday

    I’ve been using Scrivener for a couple of years now. For those who don’t know what Scrivener is, it’s software for writing books and it comes from a company called Literature and Latte. It’s a popular piece of software used by many writers around the world.

    I won’t sing Scrivener’s praises too much, suffice to say it knocks using a word processor into an old bean can. There are loads of reviews of Scrivener on the net so turn to Google if you’d like to see what it can do.

    The point of this post (at long last!), is to say I often come across blogs that say once you’ve completed your book you have to finish the editing process using a word processor such as Microsoft Word. One of the reasons given is that people reckon Word tracks down mistakes such as double spaces between words whereas Scrivener doesn’t.

    If you’re one of those people, then struggle no longer! Scrivener can tackle multiple spaces with ease. There is a command on Scrivener’s Format menu which searches the currently open document for multiple spaces and replaces them with single. You can find it under Format > Convert > Multiple Spaces to Space.

    This is a useful tool but the one thing Scrivener doesn’t do is find those pesky spaces you’ve left at the end of a piece of dialogue. Sure you can search for <space><comma><closing quote mark> (i.e. a space followed by a comma followed by a single quote) but it would be nice if Scrivener flagged these automatically.

    The closest you can get to this ideal, as far as I’m aware, is to show hidden characters. This is where spaces are shown by a light blue dot between words and paragraph breaks are shown by the character. I’ve found that this works well for me, making it obvious where I’ve entered unwanted spaces.

    In the example on the left there is a space after Watch out. With spaces being shown as a blue dot, that unwanted space is easy to spot.

    To show hidden characters select Format > Options > Show Invisibles. See the screen grab below:

    Since finding the ability in Scrivener to show invisible characters, I’ve been doing all my writing with them showing. It feels a little strange at first but I quickly became used to them.

    It’s certainly better than compiling your Scrivener project into a Word file, then using Word to find double spaces and oddly placed spaces, then going back into Scrivener to fix them.

  • How do you do that? Creating names for characters

    Recently I was asked how I dream up names for my characters.

    I suppose I don’t have a single technique. After all, my novels have a mixture of aliens and humans, contemporary and otherwise.

    For the contemporary humans I use names that are reasonably common today. Writers often base their characters on people they know and I’m no exception. I try to pick names for my human characters that I deem is in keeping with their personality and bears no resemblance to the name of the real person on whom they are based. There are several articles on the internet about choosing names for human characters so I won’t go on about it here except to add I always Google the names I choose (i.e. first name and last name together) to check if another writer has used the same name.

    When it comes to aliens and, sometimes, the native human inhabitants of Hollow I devise their names from scratch.

    I start with a ‘seed word’. This is a word usually chosen at random. I look around and see what words are on labels, signs, posters or whatever nearby. If there is a multi-syllable word so much the better but, if not, I’ll join two or three shorter words together as a starting point. Or I might just select a word at random from memory. Once I have my seed word, I remove a letter here and there, maybe add one or two letters, replace and rearrange some until I come up with a word that feels like an alien name.

    For example, nearby where I’m sitting I see ‘Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary’. I decide to try ‘Twentieth’ and start by removing letters:

    • Wentieth
    • Wenteth
    • Twent
    • Tieth
    • Entit
    • Wentit

    Hmmmm… I quite like Wenteth. It suggests a European Middle Ages type of character.

    I also like Twent because it sounds close to being a rude word (to me anyway!). A good choice for an unsavoury character perhaps.

    Let’s assume none of those appeal. Next is to try adding and rearranging letters, maybe even removing some more. For this example I’ll only use Wenteth to mess around with:

    • Thewent
    • Hewent
    • Hewen

    Let’s pop a G on the front of Hewen:

    • Ghewen

    That’s interesting. Ghewen could be the name for a character with a nice nature. But what if I’m trying to make up a name for a not so nice character? How about adding sibilance?

    • Geshen

    That could do the trick. I’m still not happy though, so I’m going to play with Geshen some more:

    • Geshent
    • Hentesg
    • Henstheg
    • Veshen
    • Vessen
    • Vesset
    • Vessett
    • Vassett

    And so on. You can stop when you’ve found a name you like or you could keep going and review the list later.

    As always, Google your chosen name to make sure it isn’t used by another writer. Another reason to search the internet for the name you have selected is to check if it isn’t simply a word in another language (in the above examples ‘vessen’ turns out to be an existing word in Catalan). Even worse, you might invent a name that is a perfect fit for a warrior only to Google it and find it’s the name of an infamous coward.

    You don’t have to do these steps in any particular sequence. Start by adding letters instead of removing them if you want. You don’t have to start with a multi-syllable word either. You could start with ‘dog’ and add letters making it into ‘Dotig’, ‘Dorag’ etc. Do whatever you like. There are no rules.

    Sometimes you might deliberately pick a seed word that describes an attribute of the character. It might be a character who’s often angry and rants a lot so you pick ‘rant’ as the seed word. After playing around with ‘rant’ you could end up with a name like ‘Ranthar’, which, if you’ve read my books, you’ll recognise 🙂

    I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this technique or something similar. For example, it’s not uncommon for businesses to be called after peoples’ names joined together in imaginative ways. All I’ve tried to do is describe how I create names.

    Finally, a word about punctuation. There is a tendency for some fantasy and science fiction writers to litter their characters’ names with apostrophes to make them even more unusual. Avoid. It’s a clichéd technique and detracts from the readability of the story.