Category Archives: Writing
Writers Mill Minutes 202408
Housekeeping
Writers’ Mill had 10 attendees in-person and 7 on Zoom for a total of 17 at our August meeting. Sheila started the meeting with the usual boring reminders: For online members:
Continue reading Writers Mill Minutes 202408Great Sites for Writing Tips
Find some great sites for writing tips here, and email pages @ portlandwritersmill . org if you have other pages that we should add.
Continue reading Great Sites for Writing TipsHelp your reader get lost in your book, with Walt Socha
We’d all love our readers to fall into our writing and not know how to get out. Walt showed a great graphic to entice us. But how do we get there?
Continue reading Help your reader get lost in your book, with Walt SochaTips and Tricks with Word
Some Neat Tricks
TABS
We told our pre-editors to take out all the tabs (see notes on Style – you don’t need tabs to indent your paragraphs, and you’re really much better off without them). We told you tabs break ebooks. But what if you’re not writing an ebook. What are tabs good for? Well…
Continue reading Tips and Tricks with WordUsing Word with Style
GUESS WHAT!
You don’t need to indent your paragraph with a tab, or separate paragraphs with a blank line, or use two spaces after a period, or retype your whole document to submit to an anthology that requires 1.5 line spacing, or indent lines of poetry with three, four, five spaces (and lose count), or …
Continue reading Using Word with StyleWriters’ Mill Anthology Style Guide
Here’s the current Writers’ Mill Style Guide, developed over several years of creating the Writers’ Mill Journal. The aim (for editors) is to edit invisibly.
Continue reading Writers’ Mill Anthology Style GuideHow to Use the Navigation Pane
The Playlist Creators for our anthology will use the Navigation pane in Word to move entries around. If you use Heading 3 for the titles of stories and poems (or chapters in your novel), then you have Heading 2 and Heading 1 “spare” to play with. Use Heading 2 to create sections or parts of the book. You’ll probably (maybe) remove these later), but they allow you to drag everything in a particular section from where it is to a new location in the book. All the images and text, from this Heading 2 to the next Heading 2, will move together – no need to cut and paste!
Continue reading How to Use the Navigation PaneLay out your book with Word
How to Lay Out a Book just using Word
Word is a word processor, not a layout program, and real layout programs like InDesign will do a better job. But… you probably haven’t got InDesign on your computer, and you probably do have Word. So…
Continue reading Lay out your book with WordCharacter Emotion and Word Choice with Eric Witchey
Eric Witchey is a well published author all around the world, and a well respected writing teacher – definitely a writer helping writers! Find him at https://ericwitchey.com/index.html
Continue reading Character Emotion and Word Choice with Eric Witchey