Jerry W Stewart

I was approached recently by some one who had recognized themselves in something I wrote. The person that confronted my was angry and hurt by what I had written. She asked that I remove her from my work, so I reread the post to see what exactly I had said to warrant such a response. After reading the post carefully, I decided that I had not viciously attacked the person or slandered in any way. I respectfully declined to change anything about the post (except a few typos I found), and I stand by that decision. If you want to read the post and judge for yourself, you can find it here. After this encounter, I decided that my stance on the matter would be helpful advice for writers. Before I give you my stance, I give you this disclaimer, first. Truth and spite are not the same things. Spite leads to slander, malice, or liable, and those things can lead to lawsuits. Be forewarned.

TELL THE TRUTH WHEN YOU WRITE!

This is important. I can’t stress it enough. If you want to write well and you want people to read what you write; you must, at all costs, tell the truth. I don’t care if it’s fiction, (auto)biographical, non-fiction, or a blog post. If you don’t tell the truth to the best of your ability, your readers will see right through what you’ve written and lose faith in your writing. With so many options available to your readers, the most detrimental thing you can do is lose their faith. Readers are fickle and that is their right. They will exercise that right by choosing something else to read. As authors (or aspiring authors), our goal is to write the story we have to tell and hope that it will find an audience. We don’t write a story only to lock it away in a filing cabinet somewhere to collect dust through the years. We send it out into the world and try to find an audience to read it and take with them what they can from it. Yes, I know there are exceptions to my generalization, but I’m not referring to those exceptions. I’m referring to the majority of authors who write to be read.

What do I mean when I say, tell the truth? In writing, it may seem confusing to tell the truth all the time. For example, how do you tell the truth in fiction? When you write fiction, you are telling a story that takes life in your imagination, not in the Real World. To me it doesn’t matter whether the tale you write is from the Real World or the imagined one. The important thing is to tell the truth about the story that comes out of either world. If your imagined character would swear like a sailor, then her dialogue should reflect that. Don’t substitute a euphemism in your characters speech because your afraid that your sweet-old-primary-school-teacher or [insert family member here] won’t approve or think less of you for putting it in print. This is writing. Either write with a spine and stay true to your story or don’t waste your time trying.

If you’re telling a story from your past, you don’t have to mention the person’s name that wronged you, but if it’s important to the story you have to be able to convey how badly they wronged you. You may choose to be vague and leave the details to the readers imagination, but the story won’t ring true if you slap some fresh paint on it and call it something else. It should be absolutely clear that you were wronged by said person and that you are not happy about it. This is the truth, this is what readers want to read. A reader wants to be a part of the story, and leaving out the good parts to save some one’s feelings robs the reader of the full experience. If the story is worth telling then the parts that may offend some one, are usually the same parts that make it an interesting story to tell.

Be true to your story, tell the parts that need to be told, and let the people who will get offended find a way to cope. Remember, that if they do get offended then they are either guilty of something or some one that you will never see eye to eye with, anyway.

Some writers are comfortable with a simple text editor like notepad, while others prefer a word processor like Word or Openoffice. A few, like me, prefer applications that are designed specifically for writing fiction. I’ve looked at many of the applications designed with fiction authors in mind, but I haven’t found anything I like until recently. Introducing Liquid Story Binder XE brought to you by Black Obelisk Software. This software is great for writing long works of fiction such as novels, series, or collections of short stories. There are so many options I’m going to cover some of my favorites, and for more detailed information you can check out their site here.

One of my favorite features is the ability to tie media to a project. You be thinking, What’s the point in that. The answer: INSPIRATION. You can find imagines on the web that inspire you or remind you of your characters, creatures, or locations and use those to build a dossier complete with images. If you like to do a lot of pre-planning this should prove invaluable to your writing process. You can also add music to your projects and create playlists for different scenes – love songs for that scene were your two lovers first admit to each other they’re in love or fight songs for that really violent scene where the heroine takes out a predator of the night. The possibilities are there, and the best part is they’re optional. If none of that appeals to you, you don’t have to utilize it.

Another feature I like is the writing area. You can write comments in the flow of your story as long as you start them with two periods. These comments are great for searching through your document for places you skipped to write later or to clarify points in your plots as you write. When you print the comments will not be printed, so you don’t have to worry about taking them out. At the bottom of the window there is a useful status bar that tells you how long you’ve been writing this session, word count, and goal progression.

List of Features Mentioned on the Website:

• Dossiers – Create Dossiers for major characters and settings.
• Timelines – Plot your novel by organizing cards along colored timelines.
• Storyboards – Combine images and text to create a visual reference board.
• Journals – Create a writing journal, or even fictional journals for each one of your characters.
• Outlines – Create a collapsible tree of plot ideas.
• Image Galleries – Organize your reference images into galleries.
• Builders – Organize complex scenes using titles, descriptions, and color indexing.
• Position Memory – Liquid Story Binder XE remembers just where you left off.
• Manuscript Building – Combine multiple chapters into a single manuscript automatically.
• Printing – Preserve your font and paragraph editing with Format Printing.
• Workspaces – Preserve your favorite window layouts for quick access.
• Project Goals – Words per day, words left to write, days remaining, multi-document word counts.
• Color Schemes – Create the perfect writing environment with your favorite window colors.
• Recordings – Record yourself reading your own novel. Test for pacing and time.
• File Listings – Organize all your files into easy-access file trees.
  • Backups – Every Chapter has its own backup repository. Never lose a single word with automatic version and session backups. Compress your whole archive into a single ZIP file.
• Shortcuts – Quickly access your favorite external software and documents.
• Statistics – Times, Word Counts, Goals, Sessions, Versions, Days.
• Reader – Read over your work in a easy to view columned window, free of editing distractions.
• Music Playlists – Add your MP3s and sort them into playlists. Set the mood for writing.
• External Editing – Open your work outside of Liquid Story Binder.

If your interested in this product you can try it free for 30 days by following this link. If you’re already sold and want the full version you can buy it here.

Artist: Lady Sovereign
Album: Single
Song: Chi Ching (Cheque 1 2)

–Jerry