The Broad Strokes of Formatting

     Since I've been blogging about structural components of noveling thus far this week, I figure I might as well complete the trifecta with a lesson on formatting, the penultimate structural component (the ultimate one is probably like, plot or something).
      Knowing how to format your novel is extremely important--agents and publishing companies won't look twice at a manuscript, no matter how dazzlingly fantastic, if you haven't taken the time to bring it up to industry standards.  Chances are good, if you're self-publishing, that your audience won't stick around too long, either.
     A certain degree of experimentation can work to your advantage, depending on your genre and intended effect, but for the large majority of works, adherence to the rules is likely best.
     Your mileage may vary depending on the agent or publisher you're submitting to, but here are the basic industry standards for

General Text:

• One inch margins
• Half-inch indentations for each new paragraph
• Twelve-point Times New Roman font (black)
• Double spaced
• Alignment on the left hand side, jagged line on the right
• Include page number, title, and last name in the header for every page except for the title page

New Chapters:

When starting a new chapter, use the "page break" feature (so that if you go back to edit previous chapters, your formatting won't get fucked up)

Center your chapter titles about a third of the way down the page

Title Page:

• Place your contact info (name, address, phone number, email) and the  genre and word count in the upper left hand corner of your title page
• About half way down the page, state your title in either all caps or mixed caps ("The Fantastic Journey of Clodbourne Hammerstein and the Magic Oak Tree")
• Jump down a line and type "a novel by" 
• Jump down another line and type your name/pen name

     And that's about it, for now--at least, that's the simple version.
     Happy Tech Week from TheSpiderWriter, happy Finals Week to me, and may you all have a wonderful weekend and a happy next week, too.

A Few Methods for Stirring Up Story Ideas

     Sometimes you need story ideas.  Sometimes you don't know how to get them.  Here's a list of things you can do to try to get your brain moving!


1. Play The Sims

     You can laugh all you want, but I once wrote a 500+ page novel based on characters I created in the Sims 3, and the slew of crazy shit that happened to those characters after I created them.  The Sims is a great way to get your creative juices flowing--and the more expansion packs, the better.
     The Sims allows you to make your own characters (or randomize, if you need help creating the characters, too), and in order to stay interested in the sandbox gameplay you're essentially forced to make up a story about said characters, in your head and sometimes in their bios.  There are also dozens of worlds, thousands of trait combinations, and tons of character types to choose from and interact with, which can help you .
     There are so many variables in the Sims (with expansion packs, at least) that it's almost impossible not to come away with at least enough inspiration for a short story premise.
      I suggest using the Sims 3, but to each their own.

2. Read some one-shot fanfictions
 
      Whatever fandoms you might be into, I pretty much guarantee that, somewhere on the internet, there will be at least one good one-shot.  For inspirational purposes, I lean toward sadstuck, since there's a lot out there and a surprising amount of it is well-written (plus I'm a masochist and sad stories tend to resonate with me.  And I write a lot of tragedy), but one-shots of all kinds can be rife with ideas (AUs, fluff, smut, friendfics, whatever gets your mind working overtime).
      One of the best things about one-shots is that they not only deliver a concentrated punch of idea right to your brain (if you're lucky), they're also rarely longer than five or six thousand words, meaning they don't take up a lot of your time.  Longer stories, fanfic and otherwise, are great for ideas, and provide excellent insight into how to execute story and character arcs, but they consume a lot more time and energy than the shorter version.
     I also suggest fanfiction rather than short stories (though short stories are great and you should totally read as many of those as you can, too) for two reasons--one, you already know the characters, which makes it easier to immerse yourself in the story and quickens the pace of it (since you don't need to read through a description or question their personality or motives), and two, bad stories can be just as inspiring as good ones, and you're less likely to find published works that stink of amateurism.  Have you ever been reading a really bad fic with a really good premise and gotten so angry that you decided to write the same basic fic only a mILLION TIMES BETTER??????  Yeah, that's why fanfic.

3. Watch cartoons

     Cartoons are great for the same reason one-shots are great, only usually less weighted down by those pesky laws of reality--I mean, Adventure Time has KNIFE STORMS.  When was the last time you read about a world with knife storms?  Never?  I thought so.
     Sometimes the best thing for a writer is to just let go of all sense of reality, especially if you write sci-fi or fantasy, wherein anything can happen.  Cartoons are also good if you're trying to write family-friendly content, or if you need help writing child characters (or from the perspective of a child).  It can also be great for developing mythologies.  Imagine Adventure Time as a pantheon: Princess Bubblegum, creator of all Gods (through science, of course); Finn the Adventurer, God of travel and battle; Jake, Lord of Reality Manipulation; Marcelline, Queen of the underworld.  That would be pretty dope, right?

4. Go for a walk

     Exercise stimulates brain activity; it can help you retain information, recall information, and develop new ideas.  I suggest listening to music while you go out (that's how I get into the zone), but some people do find it distracting, or find that they gain more inspiration from the sounds of nature than from the rhythm of music.  Either way, it's also good to get away from all the distractions provided to you by the cozy insides of your teched-up, probably loud house.  Plus, you never know what you may encounter on your walk--maybe you'll see a skunk making friends with a bird, or some kids scaling up the side of a house, or witness the encroaching Singularity from a safe distance, any of which could be put to use on paper.

5. Take a nap

     I really really really truly do advocate that you try the radical curative powers of some good old fashioned nap.  It can refresh your mind and body, restore you to stress-point-zero, and you never know what you'll dream of while you're out.  Dreams can be quite the source of inspiration, I am told.
     I've also has some of my best ideas while perched upon that precipice between waking and sleeping, so make sure to take your notebook with you!


     Are there any other methods you use to stir up inspiration or capture ideas?  I'd love to hear them!

Things Not To Do During Camp NaNoWriMo

     The first half of Camp NaNoWriMo ended nearly a month ago, and I lost by a little more than half my goal.  I'm not proud of this, but I'm going to call it a "Learning Experience" and use it to get a blog post in.  Here's a list of nine things you SHOULDN'T do when embarking on Camp NaNoWriMo.

1. Get sick
        I came down hard with a throat virus in early April that really sent me reeling.  I couldn't talk, I couldn't move, I couldn't do much of anything.  The one thing I COULD do was write--which I did a lot of!  I got something like twelve thousand words written in one business week.
        But then I had to go back to school, and this is where I died.  I had reading to make up, worksheets to fill out, MORE reading to make up, and everything went to hell.  I was still sick when I went back, too, which meant that in addition to scrambling trying to catch up with backwork, I was also exhausted just getting up in the mornings, and my favorite thing to do was come home and sleep, which meant foregoing my daily writing for days at a time.
        Don't get sick when you do NaNo, kids.
    
2. Buy an iPad
        I've never owned an Apple product before, or even a cell phone more high tech than a basic Tracfone, but last month I decided to purchase a used iPad from my boss.  "This will be awesome," I said to myself.  "I'll be able to write my NaNo Novel anywhere I want and not have to worry about transcribing!"
        I did not, you will have inferred, understand how iPads work.
        My intentions were good, but one of the first things I did was go online and download a bunch of Apps that looked cool, and some of them actually were.  The one I wanted most to work properly, however--the word processor--was lackluster and comparatively difficult to figure out, and I ended up spending far more time trying to make my digi-self a rich famous moviestar in the coolest high school university EVER, which cost me precious hours in writing time.
        Since then I've chilled on the games (mostly), and I had a lot of fun but hindsight being 20/20 I know now that it was really a very bad idea right from the get go.  Maybe buying an iPad wasn't the problem in and of itself, but I'd say it's for the best if you not download really fun apps just before you start Camp NaNo.  Probably.
3. Start three plays
        I've never done more than one play at a time before, so I decided that the best thing for me to do would be to jump in and do three at the same time because easing your way in is apparently for chumps.  This, however, was ALSO a giant time suck on this, the month of my daughter's birth (my daughter being the manuscript, you see).  Three days a week since I've been out of the house essentially from eight in the morning to nine or ten at night, which cuts severely into the two-thousand-word-a-day goal I had set for myself.
        I don't regret this, since it's a lot of fun and also my career path, but NaNo was a bad month to START it--as I may have made clear by now, starting things is a hectic and exhausting business which leaves time for almost nothing else.  I had the same commitments this month as last, but this month it was far less taxing, simply because I'd already adjusted to it.
        Maybe just try to avoid starting pretty much ANYTHING, really, during NaNo months.
4. Get Sick
5. Get no sleep
        I have a lot of trouble sleeping most nights, but for some reason I had an especially hard time sleeping in April, which left me too lethargic and dry-minded to write much of anything at all.  Maybe it was because all of the above were tiring me out.  Because that's totally how normal biology works, right?  Yeah.
        It's really important that you get enough sleep to keep yourself healthy, especially on a NaNo month.  Writing fifty thousand words (or whatever your goal was this time around) is a terribly taxing task, and if you continually end up running on empty, your manuscript will suffer.  When your manuscript suffers, the writing gets hard to continue.  When the writing gets hard to continue, it's pretty easy to quit.  And when it's pretty easy to quit, you let the mouse in through the window and it sucks all your blood out through your palm.  And that, children, is why you never give a mouse a cookie.
        Can you tell that I'm tired as I'm writing this?
6. Get Sick
7. Get Sick
8. Get Sick
        Jesus Christ, please do not get sick on NaNo, you will regret it once you go back I promise you take care of yourself stay healthy stay hydrated sleep well don't lick peoples' noses, you don't deserve the loss of word count you are a good person you deserve a finished manuscript
9. Put it off until tomorrow
        When you have thirty days to write sixty thousand words, it's really easy to say "I'll just write four thousand tomorrow to make up for it!"  When you're tired and busy it gets even easier, and once you've pushed the deadline back once it's easier to do it again--and again, and again, and again.  Before you know it the month is up and you have almost nothing to show for it but a husk of an MS and some progress on a game you'll honestly probably delete in like a month.
        Sometimes it's unavoidable, and as I've said before, you don't need to beat yourself up about it--but you should do your best to avoid it.  When you dedicate yourself to a daily goal, do whatever is in your power to reach it as quickly as you can.  Write in the morning, write throughout the day, write when you get home from work, write, write, write, write, write.
        Because Write Is Right, and the only one you hurt by blowing off your goals is you.

Writer's Resources; Family Echo (Digital Family Tree Maker)

     Family ties can be really important to a novel--and also really hard to keep track of.  For years I've been trying to find a digital family tree maker that didn't make me share my results with the rest of the world.  I needed a place to store my FICTIONAL families, not the real one, and just a couple days ago I discovered Family Echo, a, you guess it!  digital family tree maker!  *Insert generic powerpoint applause here*

     Now all software has its ups and downs, so before you rush out to go find this beautiful invention, here are some pros and cons.

PRO:

     You can make a multi-generational family that stretches in all directions.

     On-screen you can see my MC's parents, great-uncle, cousins (and second cousins) once removed, siblings, and grandparents, which is all super nifty, especially since it's a pain trying to find ways to squeeze indirect family members into the margins of family tree scaffolds.  On most family trees, if you're allowed siblings at all it's almost invariably ONLY on the final rung, and when you have complicated families like this one that just simply won't do.  

     You go Family Echo; Four for you, Family Echo.

CON:

     You see those little gray lines shooting off into space?  Those are actually continuations of the family line.  Unfortunately, Family Echo doesn't allow you to view the entire tree at once--instead, you can only see the direct blood relations to any selected individual, spouses included.  Here I've selected one of the unnamed great-grandparents at the time, and as such I can see all the way down to the Striders and Joneses--but not the Dexters or Abernathys.  I'm not sure if there's a program out there that lets you see everything at once, but if there was, it would be very very useful when you're trying to see the entire scope of a family.

PROS:

     There are a few more neat things you can do off to the side.

     Most noticeably (in this image and the last), you can add a picture that shows up over here and in the family tree, which can be super useful--who doesn't like visual aides?  It can be a symbol, a photograph, a drawing, anything you need it to be.    

     Under that, as in the first image, you can edit the character's personal details--name, gender, birth date, and (if applicable) death date; and in the second image you see before you a rough biography that you too can complete at your leisure.  Birth place, profession, company, interests, activities, and bio notes are all open to list, so this can serve not just as a family tree, but as a complete character compendium!  

     And if you have contact information for your character that you don't want to lose track of (an address you don't want to forget, a phone number you need to keep consistent, etc.) you can type it on down under the contacts section, as in the third image.

     AND, if there's anyone you want to show this to, be it a partner or friend or what have you, there's an option to share the tree with someone else (button pictured at the top of the image below).

CONS:

     This is a multi-image job right here.  Now, these are minor set-backs (as all the drawbacks of this site are), but they exist.  Firstly, step-relationships:

     I understand that genetics are, by and large, the law of the land as far as family trees go, but the brotherly relationship between the above characters, blood ties or no, is fairly important to their development, and it's inconvenient that when I click on one brother (like so)

I can't see the other.  It's not a big deal for this tree, since it's very small and self-contained, but it could be frustrating for larger trees where step-siblings are more rule than exception.  You could just pretend that they ARE biologically linked, for the sake of ease, but that doesn't quite work if your alternate parental units are characters you'd wish to include in the tree.  Like I said, it's minor, but it's still an inconvenience.  

     There's also the matter of, *ahem,* deviant families.

     This family, from a completely different work (since the other one doesn't have any families that could illustrate the point), seems fairly typical, but that's because Family Echoes (like many other family tree makers) doesn't allow for incestuous ties.  

     It's not a common thing to think about, so it makes sense, but incest is a real part of a lot of peoples' actual family trees (not that they'd like to talk about it, I'm sure), it happens in fiction, and it's the basic stuff of mythology--and this family happens to be a family of Gods, demons, angels, and hybrids.  Because of the whacked-out stuff that this family's gotten into over the course of their several-billion-year history, there should be a third generation consisting of one boy and one girl, belonging, respectively, to Darac & Bristallar and [insert unpronounceable name of madness] & Genesis.  

     Again, I don't hold these things AGAINST the makers, but they are a little inconvenient if your trees need to be unorthodox.  To get around this you can always make a second family tree consisting only of those characters and their children, but it's probably easier just to keep track on paper at that point.  

     Overall, I'd give Family Echoes four pens out of five (which is a rating system that I'm positive will catch on immediately because it is just so great and original).  It's simple, easy to use, fairly comprehensive, and has only a few minor inconveniences to side-step around.  

     Unless I find something that can manage a full five pens (and feel free to submit other programs for consideration or give me the low-down on your own findings with this one!), this is definitely the family tree maker I'll be writing with from now on.