Young Writers Society

I don't know about programs other than Word, but I found a handy little tool in microsoft word that can help calm the nagging inner editor. As I'm sure everyone has met their own at one point or another, you all likely know what I'm talking about. You write, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite..........and nothing actually gets done. People say to just push yourself forward, but then the inner editor screams "No! Go back! Fix it!" and can be very hard to ignore.

To help pacify it, I recommend using the comment feature in microsft word. You can find it under insert. When you reread what progress you have (which you will invariably due unless you are EXTREMELY disciplined) instead of deleting and retyping, leave a comment. Does the scene you wrote fall flat? Mark a comment. Does it go too fast? Mark a comment. Too lengthy or wordy? Comment. Got a better scene than what's on the page? Long comment or multiple comments. Critique yourself (fairly if at all possible), but do not alter anything that is on the page. When you finish the peice, then go back, reread it, and judge your comments. Your scene change ideas will be at the scene that need changes, instead of in a random page in a notebook. Make the commented changes (or not) finish the draft (again) making comments where necessary (again). Soon enough it'll be refined into a work you can finally set free into the world.

So, give it a try, and see what it does for you. It helped me quite a bit, because the inner editor had his say and I kept everything intact. Now, back to that work for which I still haven't the faintest idea for a title...

This seems like it would be really good for going over Nanowrimo Novels and the like...Then you just use that to rewrite.

Do you know if you can print with the text, and comments? That'd be rad.

Thanks for the tip I'll use this when I'm hacking apart my novels. (I love yelling at myself.)

I believe you can print out the comments as well, but I've never actually tried. I haven't printed much of my work, and I only found out this little trick recently myself. Nice to hear you find it useful.

Hahaha.. I know about it, but the little red marks it makes on Word makes me want to edit it more.

Thanks for the tip anyway!

And i consider myself to be quite computer technical- i didn't even know about this!

This will help alot for me because i am always re-writing and re-cutting of my story Thanks alot!

If you don't have word and your word processing program doesn't have a comment feature, you can change the text color of "bad" writing to red, "good" writing to green, and your thoughts in whatever other color. (I usually put mine in [purple brackets].)

The only drawback is you spend a lot of time formatting when you could be writing.

Can you change the color in Word?