Adventures in Writing - Episode 1

Becoming an author can be a daunting and frightening experience for some. Being a writer put you under a lot of pressure. Getting your ideas out of your head and actually written is easier said than done. Sometimes you can have a really great idea, but have no idea how to write it out in a way that would make sense. That's where keeping extensive notes would really come in handy.

The key to writing a great story isn't good gramar, perfect spelling, or even getting the formatting of your pages correct. Its all about the fine detail. Before you can put characters into a new world you'd dreamed up, you have to build the world they'll reside in. To do that you need to write extensive notes. J.R.R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert both did this to extremes, but their worlds and their stories were richer as a result. By building the background to your story and the world its set before hand you give yourself a guide to follow. You're readers will quickly notice if you get a certain detail wrong which you've already established in pervious chapters. This applies not just to books to every other medium as well.

For my own writing I'm using MediaWiki running on a old computer running Ubuntu Server. This is the same software that powers Wikipedia. Installing this and getting it working isn't for everyone, but its proven itself to be an invaluable tool. I've built an extensive Wiki for my world my first novel in "The TruthSeeker Chronicles" series will be set. This includes a detail timeline of the world's history, information about the many races involved, information about the countries involved and their histories. I still have more to do, more to add, and that's ok. The more detailed your notes and information the richer your world will be. Having detailed notes will also help you keep facts straights. Remember, your readers will notice discrepancies in the story very quickly (cough cough, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, cough cough).

If you aren't technically inclined, then use a spreadsheet or database. LibreOffice is your friend, and its much cheaper than MS Office. Having all of that information laying around will also give you material for building data books you can publish if your works become popular enough. The point is to make the information as accessible as possible so you can quickly look something up on a certain detail so you don't make mistakes. Like how EA messed up the ending of Mass Effect 3, an excellent example of what can happen if you don't pay attention to every detail when trying to tell a compelling story. Had they been paying attention that wouldn't have happened. As I said, this applies to all mediums regardless of whether its a book, a movie, a TV show, or a videogame. Your fans will know when you make such mistakes, even when they're small or when you try to make something up to cover up your mistakes.

I'm looking at you Masashi Kishimoto (author of Naruto)!

Its not unheard of for authors to spend up to a year or more in preparation work for the writing of a novel. Tolkien spent much of his free time hunkered down in the trenches of World War I writing out the details for the Lord of the Rings books. So, don't worry about how long its taking while working on those intricate details. There is no such thing as having too much detail when it comes to this sort of thing. The more there is the richer your works will be.

Using LibreOffice to Create Perfect Kindle Books

Once upon a time, if you wanted to write a book and get it sold you had to be accepted by a publishing company. Getting accepted wasn't always easy. Often it took years and several tries before they'd take a risk on publishing your work. They were the biggest hurdle new writers have to clear in order to become Published Authors.

That is no longer the case today.

With the advent of Amazon Digital Publishing the big publishing houses, the middlemen, have been completely cut out of the equation. Now anyone with an idea can write a book and put it up for sale. The caveat is, you're not publishing a traditional book but an eBook for the Amazon Kindle. On the up side, the Kindle is the #1 ebook reader on the planet (sorry Apple), and in the hands of millions of loyal Amazon customers around the world. An independent author can potentially reach millions of readers by selling their books on Amazon.com exclusively as a Kindle Edition.

Amazon provides only the most basic tools for creating a Kindle-compatible ebook. In fact, the only tool they give you is a command-line based tool for converting MS Word documents to the Kindle format. You don't necessarily have to do this on your own. You can upload a file in various formats and Amazon will do the conversion for you. But, getting the formatting of the document correct is usually the most difficult part.

If you've ever looked into writing for the Kindle you've probably seen a lot of videos on Youtube warning you to not use OpenOffice/LibreOffice. They demonstrate that these do not properly format the documents, making the ebooks come out looking sloppy and unprofessional. For those who don't know, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free, open-source productivity suites that give you the same tools found in MS Office. People have tried using them to create books for the Kindle, and they didn't come out right.

Well, they were doing it wrong. Here's why.

You can create really good looking Kindle books using OpenOffice/LibreOffice rather easily. I'm actually pretty surprised that nobody else has figured this out. The key to properly formatting a documents for conversion to a Kindle book is forced paged breaks at the end of chapters and page formatting to indent paragraphs. That's all it really takes. Nothing could be more simple that that. Putting in a page break is really easy. Just put the cursor at the end of the section of the document you want the page break to occur and then selection from the menu Insert and then Manual Break. The manual page breaks prevent previous chapters from bleeding onto the page of the next chapter, or the cover page or forewords from bleeding in on your table of contents.

Setting paragraph indents in LibreOffice are just as easy. Simply highlight the text you want indented. Goto the menu and selection Format, then select Paragraph... and you will get this dialogue box.

Where it says First Line enter the value 0.40 and click OK. You've just indented every paragraph you'd highlighted, and this will show when the document is formatting to the Kindle eBook format.

Doing a Table of Contents is a bit more complicated, and will be the subject if a future blog. Not all books need a table of contents, so if this is the kind of book your writing then I hope this blog has helped.