Monday, April 28, 2025

Reflections on Good Writing and Good Writers

What makes good writing, and how do I become a better writer?  
If you are a writer you have likely considered these questions.
Certainly I have, as a writer and as a teacher of writing for many years.

Surely writing is one of the most complex things we do as humans,
and pinning down what makes good writing
is as slippery as trying to catch a pollywog in a stream.

We know good writing when we see it, but understanding what it is
and applying that understanding to improve our writing is an ongoing challenge.

Not everyone takes up that challenge the way that writers do.
Many people learn enough to be proficient writers
for their chosen path in life, plumber or phlebotomist.
And that's okay.  It's practical and proactive.
But for those of us who have chosen to write, that challenge is a lifelong passion.

Morning Pages
Aurora, Colorado, USA
June 29, 2024
© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue. All Rights Reserved

Do you remember the childhood magic of discovering
that you could make marks on paper and tell a story?
Few of us do because we were so young, perhaps as young as when we were toddlers.
I don't remember a time that I couldn't read or write,
but I have spent enough time in the company of young children
to see the wonder and delight in their eyes when they realize 
they can tell a story by making marks on paper with pencils, crayons, or markers.
I think storytelling must lie at the heart of what it is to be human. 

Just Scribbles?
This is my sister Bertie's earliest preserved writing at 2 years and 3 months old.
Lac Seul, Ontario, Canada
Circa June 1961
© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue. All Rights Reserved

At its simplest writing is visibly forming symbols
on a surface to communicate thoughts and ideas.
Whether it was a prehistoric man scratching with charcoal on a rock wall 
a Sumerian pressing a reed stylus into damp clay,
a Medieval scribe putting quill to parchment, 
or a contemporary person writing with a ballpoint pen on a notepad
or thumbing words into an iPhone,
humans have been compelled to communicate and to preserve their thoughts and ideas.

These intentions often start when we are very young.
Just scribbles?  
Take another look at my sister Bertie's earliest preserved writing,
a letter to our father.
Perhaps you missed the face, the body, or the arms holding something.
I was stunned when the scribbles first resolved into a definite image for me many years later.

Twenty-seven-month-old Bertie worked very hard on the middle section of her letter, 
and I am convinced that the person is holding our dachshund Gretchen in his or her arms.
I can see Gretchen's nose, eye, ear, and front paws.
Of course, as a reader, I am bringing my knowledge and ideas to her story,
but that is what readers do.

Bertie grew up to become a teacher,
but also the author of two published books, one fiction and the other nonfiction.
The intention to tell a story was innate in her, as it is for many writers.

Author Roberta (Bertie) Heembrock Shares Her Book Oscar the Herring Gull with Penny Graham
Penny has been a friend of our family for over 50 years.
She owns Mariner Cruises, a popular whale-watching business on Brier Island in Nova Scotia.
On the Bay of Fundy out of Westport, Nova Scotia, Canada 
July 31, 2014
© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue. All Rights Reserved

When we write we have the intention of communicating effectively.
The general consensus is that good writing includes structural and stylistic components,
with an additional literary component if the writing is creative. 

As writers we want to connect with our chosen audience in a meaningful way.
We want to engage readers, impact them, make them remember our writing,
whatever form it takes.

Good writing also has an emotional component, especially in creative fiction or nonfiction.
Connecting with an audience emotionally
makes writing more compelling, meaningful, and memorable.

Some might argue that Bertie's scribbles aren't true writing, 
because she is not using a recognizable language and its conventions.
Perhaps, but for its intended audience, my father, 
Bertie's scribbles would have had a lasting emotional impact.
He was flying around Northern Ontario in bush planes visiting remote Indian schools,
while my mother, we five, and Gretchen were living in a fish camp on Lac Seul.
Our father missed us terribly and was dreadfully lonely.

Portrait with Fish
Barbie, Me with my arm around Bertie, Roy, and Donnie
with three lake trout
Two Point, Lac Seul, Ontario, Canada 
Late June 1961 
© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue. All Rights Reserved



Gretchen with Roy, Me, Mom and Bertie
We don't have a lot of photos from this time ~ Film was expensive to buy and to process.
Attawapiskat Lake, Northern Ontario, Canada 
Early June 1961
© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue. All Rights Reserved

It is the emotional impact of Bertie's "story" that makes it unforgettable for me,
long after the death of my parents and our beloved Gretchen.
It makes toddler Bertie as vivid and alive to me as current Bertie. 
I would argue that her "writing" was compelling, meaningful, and memorable;
good writing.

As an IWSG Admin I have been given this platform to post on now and in the future.
My intention for new posts is to look more closely
at some of the elements of effective writing and how writers can become better writers.

What do you think makes good writing?
How do you work on becoming a better writer?
I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments. 




Till next time ~
Fundy Blue.

 





Monday, April 21, 2025

How to Research When All You Have is Bones and Dirt


Thank you for inviting me to your blog today, Alex, to talk about how I research. I love researching a new book almost as much as writing it, but this is the first time I’ve explained how I do that. Let me know in comments if I miss anything.

Most authors flesh out stories by reading other books or visiting digital and physical sites, but my stories occur in a time before the written word or oral stories, up to 1.8 million years ago. Events from those ancient time frames are mostly rough guesses based on whatever artifacts survived the ravages of time. Nothing preserves about the characters’ dreams, passions, inspirations, or emotions, how they handled illness, worried about threats from vicious predators, or solved problems. For a fiction story, I need to know about family, community, culture, but bones, dirt, and rocks tell little about those. As a result, the story I first wrote was more textbook than life.

It took me a long time and much outside-the-box thinking to answer the questions that would breathe life into my characters. Here’s how I did it:

• I explored the great names in my topic.
I read everything written by topical experts like the Leakey’s, Donald Johanson, Desmond Morris, Ian Tattersall, and Christopher Wills. Each time I came to a question they couldn't answer, I dug deeper, found new experts. For example, (see below), answers about counting from experts didn’t satisfy me so I read the amazing Lev Vygotsky as he explained how different societies did or didn't use numbers and counting.

• I explored academic resources like JSTOR, Google Scholar, university libraries.
At first, the words and phraseology of papers from places like the Library of Congress and the University of Notre Dame sounded foreign, but eventually, I demystified the language. Once learned, it didn’t change.

• I visited museum websites (like the Smithsonian) for early man collections
Not just one—as many as I could access. Each has its own take on evolution with varied shading and nuances. After exploring a dozen (or more), I distilled a personal understanding that breathed life into my story.

• I read raw data from archaeological digs.
It’s easy to rely on a researcher’s opinions in his published work, but I wanted the raw data so I could peek behind the curtain, draw my own conclusions. In my case, this was archeological digs like East Africa's Olduvai Gorge, South Africa's Rising Star cave system, China's Dragon Bones, and many more. 1.8 million year old remains were primarily skeletons, tools, scat, and the animal bones around them, but these told me a lot about my characters’ health and diet, communities, and more. An example is these remains never included pottery which meant berries and water must have been collected in gourds, skulls, or the intestinal sacks of large animals.

• I didn’t just seek answers to questions. I sought understanding.
For example, I wanted to know the food Neanderthals ate. Scientists provided clues from what they found in teeth and bones, what was indigenous to the land, how climatic changes drove early man one direction or another, animal routes based on land bridges that came and went. I kept at it until a picture formed in my mind of the characters' lives, what inspired their movements, what shaped their decisions. Was it herds? Water? Or maybe a search for salt?

• I became them.
When writing about our oldest human species, Homo habilis, though they are extinct, their evolutionary predecessors (chimpanzees and Great Apes) remain much unchanged today. I postulated that understanding these creatures would bring sense to earliest man. So I read everything about them from the authorities like Jane Goodall, Birute Galdikas, and Dian Fossey.
Additionally, my early man characters were primarily hunter-gathers, so I explored living tribes who still practice that way of life. I read everything possible about the San, Pirahã, Pygmies, the American Indians (OK--no longer hunter gatherers, but much is written about their early lifestyle). I spent hours--days--watching videos, walking in their footsteps, hunting for food and digging up roots with them, finding water where there seemed to be none.

• I made myself aware of their surroundings.
For example, necklaces and wall paintings didn't exist in man's evolution until Neanderthals arrived. Then, something in their brains made it important to string teeth and feathers around their necks and paint symbols on the walls of their caves. It was intriguing that they'd evolved as a genus to consider those important (for reasons we don't yet know).
“The content presented in this blog are the result of creative imagination and not intended for use, reproduction, or incorporation into any artificial intelligence training or machine learning systems without prior written consent from the author.”

• Google Earth has a time slider that will take you back 100 years into the past so you can see what the land looks like. This didn’t work for me, but if you're writing about that era, it is a boon.

Overall, researching what will primarily be raw data is both exhausting and exciting, challenging and gratifying. I would always choose to find my own connections over using someone else's.



Jacqui Murray
is the author of the popular prehistoric fiction saga, Man vs. Nature which explores seminal events in man’s evolution one trilogy at a time. She is also author of the Rowe-Delamagente thrillers and Building a Midshipman , the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. Her non-fiction includes 100+ books on tech into education, reviews as an Amazon Vine Voice and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics.
Find Jacqui - Amazon, blog, Pinterest X, and website


Badlands:
Print, digital, audio
Badlands trailer

Monday, April 14, 2025

How to Prepare an eBook in Word

Getting a manuscript ready to convert into an eBook isn’t difficult, but it’s easy to miss or skip some important details. A checklist helps. Even if you’ve never formatted one at all, this will be a great step-by-step guide.

Step 1 – clean up the manuscript

Remove any headers or footers.
Single space with no spacing before or after. (Unless it is non-fiction – often there is no indent, so spacing between paragraphs is needed.)
Justify all of the text. (You’ll adjust chapter titles later.)
While the text is highlighted, select a standard font for it. (NEVER use Times New Roman!)
Also while highlighted, set it for size. (11 is a good place to begin.)

Turn on the Show/Hide in Paragraph and look for these issues:
* Tabbed indents – use Replace to get rid of all of them and set the indentation in Paragraph instead. (.3-.4 is good, unless for non-fiction – then NO indents.)
* Two spaces instead of one between sentences. Again, use Replace to get rid of the extra space.
* Extra spaces at the beginning of paragraphs. (They will indent a space too many.)
* All paragraph returns end with the giant reversed P, not the arrow sign.
* Extra spaces anywhere (two or more) and extra tabs removed.
* Any other strange formatting fixed or removed.

Step 2 – format

With an eBook, no space is needed before the name/number of the chapters, so you can start near the top.
Select a font for your chapter titles. See list below of standard ones.


Under Styles, select one that says Heading. Then, go in and modify it – centered, no indent, font, color, spacing, etc.)
Highlight your chapter one title and click that new heading you just created – do that for every chapter title.
Now, select the first letter of the chapter. Find a fancy font that fits the mood of the book well. Make it larger than the rest of the text. Then go into Paragraph and remove the indent. Do this for every first letter of a new chapter.
Once chapters, first letter, and their spacing is set, you need to add a page break at the end of each chapter.
Place curser under last sentence in a chapter. Go to Layout, select Breaks, and then select Next Page. Adjust the spacing leading into the next chapter and then add breaks at the end of every chapter.


Step 3 – title page


Title (graphic of title used for cover art is best!), author name, publisher name (because even if self-publishing, you should set yourself up as a publisher,) and the website (active link) of the publisher. You can also place your publisher logo above the address.

Step 4 – reviews

The first time you format your eBook, this page won’t be there. But after you have made your eBook and print book and sent them out for review, then you can add those reviews as they come in to this page. You want people sampling the book to see great reviews right away.


Step 5 – copyright page


Set it up as shown in the sample. Some eBook distributors don’t require an ISBN, but it’s always best to buy them yourself from Bowker – then it shows that YOU are the publisher, not Amazon or Draft2Digital. (Red flag to big reviewers, distributors, and bookstores.)
If you are doing both print and eBook, you can register the print book with the Library of Congress and get a PNC number (free Library of Congress control number) that you can use for both print and eBook.

Step 6 – dedication page

Don’t forget to dedicate your book!


Step 7 - table of contents


Type “Table of Contents,” highlight it, go to Insert, and select Bookmark and name it. (TOC works.)
Then type out the chapter numbers or titles. Be sure to include anything extra at the end of the book, such as a glossary, author bio, acknowledgments, etc.
Highlight the first chapter, go to Insert, and select Link. Click on Places in this Document in the popup box, and a list of your chapter titles will appear. Select the first chapter and hit Okay – do this for the remaining chapters. Now your Table of Contents is hyperlinked!

Step 8 – about the author and links

Set up your About the Author page with a short bio, photo (if you want), and links to your sites. Be sure to use the http address for your website & social sites so it hyperlinks directly there.

Step 9 – other books

This can be included either at the end or after the dedication. List your other books and their ISBNs. Do NOT include buy links unless you are creating an individual eBook for each platform. (Barnes & Noble frowns upon books on their site with links to Amazon. Imagine that!)

And there you have it – an eBook formatted and ready to take into whatever program you are using to convert to ePub. If you have someone who formats for you, doing most of this process will greatly help them, too.

Feel free to ask any questions you might have about this process.