Author: Melissa Bowersock

Melissa Bowersock is an eclectic, award-winning author who writes in a variety of fiction and non-fiction genres. She has been both traditionally and independently published and lives in a small community in northern Arizona. Learn more about Melissa from her Amazon author page and her blog.

Family Stories: Leaving a Legacy of Words

e-Grandma4girlsEvery family has them: stories of Great-Uncle Harold’s time in the trenches of WWI, Grampa’s side trip into bootlegging during Prohibition, Aunt Helen’s wanderlust that took her around the globe twice, Grandma’s ground-breaking work as the first female at Lockheed Aeronautics during WWII. These are the stories that may only get trotted out once a year or so, maybe at Christmas or the infrequent family reunion, but otherwise stay hidden away in shoeboxes at the back of closets or in the dimly-lit corners of an oldster’s mind.

And very often, the story and its teller are, eventually, lost for all time. Why? Because the stories don’t get written down.

There’s a Mandinka proverb that says every time an old person dies, it’s as if a library has burnt down. Continue reading “Family Stories: Leaving a Legacy of Words”

Serving the Story – Part 2

Sycamore tree by Melissa BowersockIn an earlier post, I talked about how the ending — indeed, every part — must serve the story. It may not be obvious, but we writers may actually have several forces tugging at us, and they often don’t agree in either intent or methodology. We have the story, of course. The story is what drives us; it’s what inhabits us until we get it down. In most cases, I would say that the story is outside of us, even though it’s inside of us. What I mean is that it’s not ours — it doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the characters; it belongs to the theme. All we are doing is writing it down. Continue reading “Serving the Story – Part 2”

eBook Formatting 101

Formatting frustration!Formatting a book for publication as an eBook can be easy, but it can also be frustrating. eBooks are much simpler than print books, simpler in that they allow fewer frills and so have more rigorous constraints. Here is a nuts-and-bolts review of the basics for eBook formatting.

Size/Margins

If you’d previously prepared your book for print publication, you can pretty much undo all that. eBooks do not need headers or footers or page numbers, so get rid of all of those. If you had sized your print book to 6”x9” or 5.5”x8.5” with a ¼” gutter, toss out all of that. Format your book to 8-1/2”x11”, normal margins (as opposed to mirror margins) with a 0 gutter.

Justification

Again, if you’d formatted for print and had your text fully justified (lined up on both the left and right side of the paragraph), now make it all left justified with a ragged right edge. eReaders are a completely different animal than print pages, and because your text will flow from one screen to another based on the size of the text chosen by the reader, right justification will only cause you (and your reader) grief. Continue reading “eBook Formatting 101”

Writing, Madness, and Voice

brain sketch3A recent article on the Thought Catalog talked about the relationship between writing and mental illness that sparked quite a discussion. Our own Lynne Cantwell gave a very thoughtful and intelligent response here. For many of us, the most offensive paragraph (of several) in the original article was this:

The common theory for why writers are often depressed is rather basic: writers think a lot and people who think a lot tend to be unhappy. Add to that long periods of isolation and the high levels of narcissism that draws someone to a career like writing, and it seems obvious why they might not be the happiest bunch.

To my mind, this author made many ridiculous and unsubstantiated assumptions, but I’ll confine my response to two of them. Per his paragraph above,

  1. People write because they are drawn to isolation.
  2. People write because they are highly narcissistic.

I have a different theory. I believe people write because that is the voice that serves them best. Let me explain this through my own experience. Continue reading “Writing, Madness, and Voice”