What is an "Invisible Style"?  Well, to be honest, the term is one that I've come up with and is a bit of a misnomer.  The debut novel that I am in the progress of writing (shameless plug for Pieces of Silver) is a crime/thriller.  Part of any mystery/thriller is for the story to build up the clues to pull the reader in so that they become increasingly curious and engaged in the story.  My challenge was how to assess quickly, where these "clues" are.  I thought that as an author it would be highly advantageous to be able to view my novel through this filter.

My solution is this, in Microsoft Word, I've created a style called "Clues".  The format of the style is exactly the same as the "regular text" (Normal).  Hence my naming this an "invisible style" as to the naked eye, it would be impossible to distinguish between these two styles.

You may ask, so what is the whole purpose of this?  Well, one of the things that people don't realize is that with Microsoft Word, you can actually search for special characters, characters that are not view-able - not regular characters.  Using this advanced "find" ability with Word, I can also have Word temporarily highlight the text that it finds, so if I search for the "Clue" style, there we go, all of the sections that contain clues are highlighted.   In this link, you can read one of my previous blog entries that also relates to this tip on searching by special characters for more details on how to use it.

One of the dilemmas that I encounter when starting a story is that of the names to give to the characters.  In many of my stories, the names can change as their character evolves through the story - what seemed before to be an appropriate name didn't seem to be the right fit.  Also, in many cases, I just don't have a sense of the character name yet, so I just assign a "place-holder" name in order to keep the creative juices flowing, knowing that I will have to revisit this as the story progresses.

One of my ealier dilemmas was in knowing the best way to change the character name.  I could manually go through and change all instances of Smith to Masterson, for example, but if there are many occurrences, I stand the risk of missing a few.  The other option is to do a global search and replace in my word processor, but the issue with that inadverant changes can be made.  With the example I gave previous, the word "blacksmith" would be replaced with "blackMasterson" unless I confirmed each and every change, which defeats the whole purpose of a global search and replace.

The technique that I have come up with is to add a prefix, suffix or both to my character names if there is any chance that I may want to change it.  I am then ensured that a global search and replace would only impact the names of the characters.  When I originally write the story and where the character name is in doubt, I would write their name as #Smith# and then when I do the search and replace, I simply replace all occurrences of #Smith# with #Masterson#.  Finally, when I feel that I have committed to the character's name, I will do an additional global search and replace of #Masterson# with Masterson.

Image courtesy of Jeroen van Oostrom at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Anyone who uses Microsoft Word is likely familiar with the ability to search and also to search and replace within a document.  What many people are not aware of though is that there is a bevy of very useful, but less frequently options, when doing either a search or search and replace.

By nature, the dialogue box for search and search & replace allows access to the basic functionality.  By clicking on the "More>>" button in the bottom left hand corner, more advanced options are then made available.

I have recently published an anthology of short stories on Amazon and as I was preparing the source document to be uploaded, I discovered that I had manually inserted hard carriage returns between paragraphs and that when I published my manuscript, I ended up with two blank lines between paragraphs.

My first instinct was to go through my document and manually delete the extra paragraph marker between paragraphs, but fortunately, I'm a rather advanced user of Microsoft Word and I knew that there was a much easier way of using the search and replace to do this automatically for me.

It's important to understand that it is possible to see many of the basic formatting commands within a Microsoft Word document as special characters.  To enable this feature, click on the typographical "paragraph" symbol immediately to the left of the list of styles available.  Once you've clicked on this symbol, you'll see visual representations of some of the formatting symbols, such as where the author as pressed the Enter key to insert a hard carriage return.  You'll see to this writing snippet that there are two paragraph symbols.   Looking at this sample, I realized that what I wanted to do was to essentially replace two consecutive hard carriage returns with one, effectively deleting the second one which was the blank line between paragraphs.

In order to do this, I first of all saved my document in case I made a mistake with my search and replace, then clicked on Search and Replace, followed by the More>> button to expand the dialog box.  I then clicked beside "Find What" and instead of typing in the character string that I wanted Word to look for, I clicked on the "Special" push button on the bottom and from the popup menu, I selected "Paragraph Mark".  This resulted in a ^p being inserted in the "Find What" dialog entry.  I repeated this a second time as I wanted to search for two consecutive paragraph marks.  Once this was complete, I ended up with ^p^p in the "Find What".  Next, I clicked on the "Replace With" entry field and then repeated "Special" followed by "Paragraph Mark" but did not repeat it a second time.   The result of these steps was the following dialog box as per below.  Finally, when I clicked on "Replace" or "Replace All", all occurrences of two consecutive paragraph marks were replaced with one - effectively deleting the blank line between paragraphs.