The Anatomy of the Good Gene #5

As I was finally well into the writing of The Good Gene, the story was getting long enough that I was having trouble remembering where certain characters did different things. When I'm writing, I use MS Word. With a little research, I found out a neat trick. If I inserted tag lines, in front of a paragraph I'd need to reference later, using a "header" style, then those would show up in the navigation pane. This allowed me to easily find past sections of the story I needed to review.

My MS Word navigation pane then consisted of my chapter titles with the major events of that chapter, I'd inserted along the way, nested below. As the story developed into hundreds of pages, this was a very handy tool for me as I jumped back and forth to be sure I kept consistency throughout. These comments, I'd inserted along the way, were easy to remove en masse once I had completed the story and needed to print it. :-) For all of you experts out there in MS Word, this technique I used is probably part of your basic skill set. For me, it was a great find that made the writing process a bit easier.

I'll pick up the next phase in my next blog post... stay tuned and have a great day - Dave