Runts, widows, and orphans

ByJohn Brown

A typesetting mystery solved–Runts!

OrphanRuntWindow

And now for something for your typesetting hearts.

You know what orphans are–A short line appearing at the bottom of a page. Sometimes the first line of paragraph appearing at the bottom of a page.

You know what widows are–A short, paragraph-ending line appearing at the top of a page.

But what’s the last word or part of a word of a paragraph stranded by itself on a line?

I went to the store, looking for
Paul.

I could never find an answer. Some called it an orphan as well.

But David Blatner revealed the name in the comments of his post What Are Your Favorite Word and Character Space Settings for H&Js?

He actually coined the term years ago when he couldn’t find a name, and I love what he came up with and am going to use it forever.

He calls them “runts.”

Ha!

Hyphen Control

BTW, those settings he mentions in that article are awesome. Drastically reduced weird hyphens, which reduced time formatting.

What do the big boys control for?

Furthermore, I noticed something in the big time author Stuart Woods volume I happen to be reading. And then I checked it against a James Patterson and a Lee Child.

1) They don’t care about most runts. As Blatner said, there’s a runt zone, but the zone where they control for runts appears to be less than 5 characters if that includes the end punctuation.

For example, I just opened a random page of the Woods book and see the following runts:

a) results.”

b) entry.”

I flipped to another page and saw:

a) said.

b) trunk.

c) them.

And the thing is that I DIDN’T notice them in the least while I was reading. Only when I started looking for them.

Of course, there were no runts that were smaller than those. Nothing like “tie.” or “do.” or “for.”

2) They don’t control for orphans either.

3) They DO control for widows. However, when you’re not controlling for orphans and most runts, controlling for widows is easy. And sometimes the control is just to increase the tracking just a tiny bit to make it span the whole line.

I spent a number of hours on Saturday formatting my book only to find when I finished that I had set the leading at 18pt instead of 16pt. That meant I had to reformat the whole bleeping thing.

But I adopted the Big Boy rule, allowing all runts that end at or beyond the first line indent of the paragraph. I ignored orphans. And I controlled for widows. And it took me a fraction of the time and still looks great.

Here’s to runts and orphans!

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    Writing Update: 5/28/11 – Freewrites, Storylines, Proportion

    ByJohn Brown

    I finished the next chapter of my outline, which turned into three chapters. Hurray for making progress. However, I’m going to need to make more time on a weekly basis if I’m going to meet my goal.

    I’ve kept stats over the last four novels. My average is 500 words per hour during the drafting stage. That includes revising and doing quick researches etc. So sometimes I will write a smoking (for me) 800 or 900 words per hour. Sometimes I won’t finish a thing. When I’m all done it averages out to 500 words. I’m going to see if I can’t get 20 hours this next week and finish 10,000 words. 

    Addition to last week’s post

     Do you remember last week’s post about the process of making it come alive in my mind first? Orson Card illustrates this as he describes how he prepared to write a story in his essay “How One Story Can Give Birth to Another“.

    Spideysense, farmer’s faith, and freewrites

    Last week when writing chapter 7, I finished, but felt something was off.  Years ago I would have freaked about writer’s block.  I would have told myself I sucked because the chapter was glucky. But not now.  It’s a gift.  So I stopped and talked to myself in a freewrite.  I had farmers faith that if I just kept working on it, something good would result. 

    Here’s what I wrote in that freewrite. It’s an awful read for you, but it shows you just how sloppy and cryptic and freewheeling my freewrites are.

    Okay, so I’ve written the stuff below and I could tweak it, I guess. But I keep having this nagging feeling that it’s not good. It’s not a compelling villain. I think he’s creepy and evil. And, truth be told, I don’t want to make him into something other than what he is—a total thrall to the Glory and the mother. So as the “pet” of the mother, what else could he be called? I don’t know.

    I shall call you endless because you will be spared, you shall continue, whereas the rest will not. Blessing. Blessed. Grateful. What would you call a thing that did you bidding reliably? But enthralled. I am part of you, you are part of me, and so you may take my name.

    He WOULD think—I am not like them. I am GRACED by the Mother’s touch. I have taken her into myself. Or she has graced me and so I have become more than I would be otherwise. I am obedient.

    What else do you call pets or tools. Maybe that’s what she calls him. My skir master. The skir lord. My trowel. Harvester.

    He’s over the harvest. Reaper. Or he’s the one that supplies food. Supplier. Gatherer. Cook. Chef. Hunter. Provider. Butcher. Slaughter.

    So I like Endless with the whole part of him being part of her. But he could use that—”you’re just like us” “no, we are part of the XXX (what was the name I had for them?) endless. You are meat”

    Devourers, Mothers, Sublimes

    Okay, so do I go with Endless or Harvest Hope. Endless it odd, neat. What could I add to Harvest to do the same. Harvest Lord, King, Overseer, Meatman, Food provider, Feeder, Harvester, Harvest, Rancher, Collector, The Harvester. Harvest.

    I think when you’re raised, you get a new name.

    Rebellion.

    Soul collector.

    The Shepherd.

    Harvest Prime

    Bald Head

    Laughter

    Everlast

    DIVINES

    ID HIM AS THE MAIN HARVESTER

    RIGHTEOUS ANGER

    The issue was that his motive wasn’t working.  I had a feel for what I wanted him to be, and my Spideysense was telling me it wasn’t working, wasn’t interesting.  Thomas McCormack in his book calls this feeling for what you want in your story a “prelibation”.  What an odd term.  But it’s real. 

    “Prelibation.  The desire for a certain effect on the reader.  It may or may not be followed instantly by an intuition of what item of narrative will cause that effect, and it’s important to see that intuition and the prelibation it is trying to serve are not the same thing. The intuiting of the narrative that will produce the effect-wanted is the work of the imagination” (p153 The Fiction Editor, The Novel, and the Novelist)

    There’s more in his book. I recommend it highly. So, after that freewrite, I didn’t have a solution, but I’d pinpointed the issue, the prelibation. I took a break with kids into the big city. Came back and had my solution for a narrative that would do the trick.  Luckily, it was something I’d cut out of the outline. Back it went with some significant tweaks and was better than before.

    Storylines & the Size of this Presentation Phase

    For those who have read my series on suspense, at this point, the presentation of the problem for the main story and many of my sub-stories is complete.  Depending on how you categorize them, I have nine to eleven story lines (which makes it impossible to write this book in 100k words).  There’s one main story line that touches everyone—the Mokaddian threat.  Then there are other questions and issues I raise that set the reader up with the expectation for a resolution.

    1. Talen
      1. Mokad/Nashrud (external threat)
      2. Lusts (internal threat, mystery)
      3. Sugar (relationship)
    2. Legs: Vulnerability
    3. Sugar
      1. Talen (relationship)
      2. Urban (relationship)
      3. Ancestors (relationship, mystery)
      4. Mokad (external threat)
    4. Argoth
      1. Mokad (external threat)
      2. Nettle (relationship)
      3. Bone Faces (external threat)
    5. Eresh
      1. Flax (conflict relationship)
      2. The Creek Widow (relationship)

    So most of these story lines have been presented, although not all. It took about 30,000 words to finish the presentation phase. I’m estimating 170,000 words, so that a presentation phase of roughly 18%.

    There are a lot of story lines and characters to juggle. Sometimes I kick myself for having so many. Of course, I love them, despite the challenge they present. Nevertheless, I AM looking forward to writing that thriller with a limited cast.

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  • Indie Thoughts: What drives book sales?

    ByJohn Brown

    gallup-poll-how-readers-select-booksWhat are the biggest factors influencing which book a person will read next?

    Many surveys have been conducted over the years to answer just that question. I’ve pasted one on the right and summarize the results of others here. One factor sits at the top of almost all of those surveys. Did you look at those other surveys? According to these surveys, folks tend to buy books by authors they already like.

    This phenomenon is called a lot of things. One of the most common is “brand loyalty.” Some might be wondering how you define a brand and what could be branded in publishing. KKR has a great piece here that answers those questions.

    So brand loyalty. How does it develop? Well, any time you please readers, their loyalty grows and inches them toward the loyal fan end of the spectrum. Your brand may not have the power of a Dean Koontz because you don’t have near the number of loyal customers as Koontz, but you still have a brand. And people who like your stuff are going to be loyal to some degree, but not the same degree.

    I think that last point is important to remember: readers that know and like your brand won’t all have the same degree of loyalty.

    You have hard-core fans who are totally dedicated to you and make an effort to know what’s happening. You’ve pleased them so much, your brand is gold to them.

    You have others who will buy your book the minute they hear it’s out, but don’t make an active effort to keep up to date on things.

    There are others who will mark it to be read when they hear about it, but don’t make a big effort to get it unless it’s convenient.

    You have others who like your stuff but are still in that period where they like but haven’t yet committed to being a fan. That sometimes may take a few books.

    That’s how it was with me and Lee Child. I read the first and liked it. Some time later I saw another and was predisposed to like it. I read that one and liked it too. I wasn’t a Child fan yet. But then I read the third. And that’s when I became a true fan. I’m not hard-core. But I now read everything he puts out within a few months of the release.

    From what I can see, branding and brand loyalty matter no less in publishing than they do in any business where you’re relying on repeat customers.

    JD Robb Celebrity in DeathI see the effect of brand loyalty all over. It was the force behind the dramatic explosion of sales when it was revealed that Robert Galbraith, the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling, was J.K. Rowling. It was the force behind the midnight book store events when Stephanie Meyer would release a Twilight book (and the Twilight balls). And other similar events with many other authors. It’s the reason why publishers make the names of a lot of authors so prominent on the cover. Good grief, sometimes that’s all you need. Look at some of the Nora Roberts or JD Robb covers. On many of those the name, the brand, takes up 75% of the cover. You can see customer loyalty blossoming in reviews on GoodReads and Amazon and elsewhere where readers say in essence, “I loved this author and I will be looking for the next book.”

    Building a base of loyal customers is they goal in businesses that rely on repeat sales. Because not only do those folks come back for more, but the also tell other folks about the product.

    Go back an look at those surveys. What was usually the number two reason someone selected a book?

    Word of mouth.

    Word of mouth comes in many forms. Recommendations from folks you know. Recommendations from other influencers–folks like Rush Limbaugh or review sites you frequent. Recommendations from some other type of social influence mechanism like a bestseller list on Amazon.

    The key takeaway for me is that top two factors driving book sales all stem from a loyal customer base. Which means building that base should be one of my main goals as a writer.

    So how do you do that?

    The same way everyone else in a repeat customer business does it. At a general level, you:

    1. Create a product (a book in this case) that’s likely to delight a certain set of consumers (readers).
    2. Let those consumers (readers) know about it.
    3. Make it enticing for them to give it a try.
    4. Make it easy for those who liked it to know when they can get another.
    5. Get more product (another book that’s similar to the last) out the door so your repeat customers can come back for more.

    I’ll be sharing more of my ideas about aspects of those five steps in upcoming posts. And I’ll be wanting to hear what you’ve found that works. Because ultimately we’re all testing various strategies. And the more we share with each other, the more we’ll each benefit.

    While you’re waiting, you might want to look at an awesome book on customer loyalty called The Loyalty Effect by Frederick F. Reichheld.

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  • In writing, profanity is a tool, but not the only tool

    ByJohn Brown

    In this week’s Writing Excuses comments, a poster named Sam asked:

    How do you, as writers, get past your own inhibitions concerning the use of profanity in order to write a character who does use it?

    Why get past them?

    Any given audience has values (as do you as a writer). Stomp on the values too much and you will make the readers so uncomfortable or angry that their discomfort will outweigh the draw of the story. They will put you down and never read you again. For one audience it’s gore. Another it’s explicit sex or vulgarity. For another it’s the bashing of a political stance or a particular demographic.

    If you or your audience is uncomfortable with profanity then say “he swore” OR find another way to convey the information the profanity does.

    Writing works by evoking types in the reader’s mind (as well as type resistors for surprise, curiosity, humor, etc.). Trigger a type and all the data associated with that type comes with it. Profanity is one way to trigger a type (or work against type) in the reader’s mind. But there are many other ways to evoke that same type, many ways to produce the same effect. Language, especially profanity, is a powerful and efficient method, but it’s not the only one.

    You want a mean cruel man? You can have him call his wife a “cu**” all the time. OR you can just show him doing something cruel to her or slapping her, e.g. he grabs her by the neck and makes her look at the food on his plate up close like some pet owners do to dogs when they crap where they shouldn’t–”Does that look like beef stroganoff to you? Stupid whore.”

    Look at Prison Break. Teddy needed to be scary. Profanity could have helped trigger his character. After all, cons use a lot of profanity. But Prison Break was prime time so the writers used other things to evoke the types they needed. Teddy worked for the purposes of that story. All of the cons did. They were believable. And all that without a deluge of profanity.

    Stay away from replacement profanity that evokes a different type. For example, if you had Teddy using “darn it” all the time, unless it was part of some particular character attribute, it would have not been believable because it evokes the wrong type, e.g. Ned Flanders.

    So if you don’t want to use profanity, don’t. Think about your objective and find another type trigger.

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    Brain Nazis and Feeling Good by David D. Burns, M.D.

    ByJohn Brown

    Have You Got a Brain Nazi?

    If you’re conscious, you’re monitoring your environment. You have to. It’s how you survive. This is not something you can turn off. It’s just one of those systems that runs automatically, like your liver. You’re always appraising the situation.

    And as soon as you encounter something that’s likely to be of importance to you or yours, your monitor kicks off a physical response to prepare you to deal with or take advantage of it.

    The problem is that sometimes a Nazi propagandist worms his way into the monitoring station. And like any good Nazi, he distorts reality.

    Sometimes those distortions lead to burning resentment, sometimes to unwarranted shame or anxiety, sometimes to eating disorders, sometimes to grave depression. When I heard of the tragic suicide that occurred in our community a few months ago, my heart went out in sympathy to the girl, her family, and friends.  I’m not a doctor. I don’t know the situation. But I’m positive she was dealing with one of these villains.

    I wished I’d been able to share something that’s been a literal life saver to me. Now, it might not have changed anything. But hopefully it can change things in the future for you and others you know who may have to deal with a Nazi in the brain.

    And you will have to deal with a brain Nazi at some time.

    This is not something that affects a miniscule portion of the population. In any given year you can expect more than 15% of a population to experience some form of this [1]. That’s roughly 238 of the estimated 1,592 people 18 years and older in the little county where I live [2]. Rates for teens are similar [3]. Besides, you don’t have to have a full-blown case of a depression for distortions to affect you. How many of us haven’t made faulty comparisons with others? “Oh, she’s so thin and has such great hair; I’m so dumpy.” “Oh, he’s doing so well, and I’m not. I’ll never be a success.”

    The question is not whether you or someone important to you will have to deal with it. The question is how prepared you’ll be when you do. Everyone deals with distortions now and again.  Which means everyone can find a little more enjoyment in life by showing their brain Nazis the door.

    So how does it all work? How do you show the villain out?

    I’m going to summarize it below, but I’ll tell you right now that the book that saved my life was Feeling Good by David D. Burns, MD. This isn’t positive mental attitude. It’s not neuro-linguistic programming. It’s not the mumbo jumbo of Freud and Jung. This is practical and proven. It is the most prescribed intervention for dealing with these issues in the current medical community. It’s prescribed because it works.

    Your Brilliant Appraisal-Emotion System

    To understand this, you have to understand how emotions work. As I said before, you’re always monitoring your situation. You hear a buzz and see a rattlesnake on the path two feet away. Your monitor immediately responds. Alarm, adrenaline, increased blood flow–all of that to get you ready to deal with the situation. Your monitor writes “alarm” on your face to communicate it to those around you–to warn and ask for help. This happens in less than a blink of an eye.

    But this doesn’t just happen with danger. It happens when we encounter unfamiliar things. When we encounter positive things. You see a great friend who makes you laugh all the time. Boom, your monitor responds. You smile. Feel. Focus. You do so because you not only want to avoid dangers, you also want to seek out the things that make you happy.

    Our emotions prepare us to fight, flee, seek, and pitch woo. Our little monitoring and physical response system is brilliant.

    But there’s more. We don’t rely on just the automatic subconscious monitoring. We also have a cognitive (conscious thinking) part. Let’s go back to the rattlesnake. You walk out into the garden, step on a slither, and immediately go into alarm mode. Then you look, consciously see the slithery thing is not a snake, but the garden hose. You relax. Laugh.

    The quick subconscious appraisals keep us alive, because with snakes and other things, if you’re slow, you’re dead. We don’t have time for thought. If you touch a hot stove, you want an immediate reflex. You don’t want to ponder it for a second or two. On the other hand, the cognitive appraisals help us further appraise a situation. They bring more of our resources to bear on the situation.

    How Does the Nazi Get In?

    So there are three parts of the appraisal-emotion system: the subconscious appraisal of the situation, the physical response, and the cognitive appraisal. Each of the three parts affects the other two. And when things are running smoothly, we don’t have problems. But sometimes we get a distortion mucking up the works. We make a faulty appraisal of the situation. And therefore have a faulty physical response.

    For example, you’re a mother. You’ve had a hard day. The kids make a huge mess with flour in the kitchen. You yell, freak out. When they’re cowering in their rooms and you’re cleaning up the flour, you think, “There I go again. I’m a total failure. I can’t stand it! I never do anything right! I’m a terrible mother.” These thoughts make you even sadder.

    And that’s the propaganda. That’s your brain Nazi with his all-or-nothing thinking, telling you that you either perform perfectly or you’re a failure.

    But is that true? No, it’s not. You might be a B+ mother, filling the lives of your kids with all sorts of goodness. You might have just had a great time reading with the kids not thirty minutes before. But the brain Nazi tells you to forget that. “Vatch dis film,” he says, “und see de horrors of vut you are!”    

    And the all-or-nothing thinking gambit is just one of ten common weapons he uses. Furthermore, this happens so quick that we often don’t notice it. In fact, we’ve often repeated some of these distortions so often than they’ve become almost automatic.

    Mr. Nazi, Meet Mr. Bazooka

    The good news is that you can pull the lid off the lies. You can open the door, spot the brain Nazi that slipped in, and take him out. You can do this because one of the three parts of the system is our cognitive appraisal. This means you can consciously stop the movie, pin the distortion on the wall, and uncover the truth. Once you do that, it’s like the rattlesnake scenario above—oh, it’s a hose, we realize, not a snake, and the appropriate emotions immediately follow.

    But you need to know how to stop the movie. You need to know how to spot the lies. David D. Burns, MD tells you exactly how to do this in his book Feeling Good. (By the way, DON’T get this book confused with his Feeling Good Handbook–you DON’T want the handbook; you want Feeling Good, the book.)  In the book, Burns talks about the theory, the results, and then gets right down to the practical techniques used to blow the brain Nazi to kingdom come.

    A few years ago I hit a bad patch with a brain Nazi that had taken up residence. A very bad patch. He’d been there for quite some time. This book and a good counselor saved me. I thank the Lord for that. By the time I went to see a medical doctor to assess whether chemical issues might be playing a role, I was stable. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but I had opened the lid and found the villain at the controls. I used the techniques Burns gave me, and I’m happy to say that while the brain Nazi still comes round every once in a while, I can spot him. And I can take that sucker out.

    Go to the library and check out the book and take the assessment test. If you, or someone you know, scores in the mild range, maybe you’ve just experienced a very sad event. But maybe you’ve also got a villain in residence. Get the book. Read it. Be happy. Nobody needs to live with a Nazi at the controls.

    For Authors

    By the way, fiction authors should pay special attention to this stuff. Not because we’re more susceptible to brain Nazis than others, although we do have to deal with our fair share as we develop and share our stories. No, we should because the emotion process is exactly what we’re trying to tap into. Knowing the principles can be very useful indeed. Let me recommend you read the books on emotion listed on the Learning With Pros page.

    Sources

    1. 1. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml
    2. 2. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/49/49033.html (find your state and county and see how many folks are likely dealing with a brain Nazi in your area)
    3. 3. http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/2k5/youthDepression/youthDepression.htm
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  • Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp

    ByJohn Brown

    If you want to learn how to write stories that move and entertain, you will do whatever it takes–crawl across broken glass, mortgage your dog, eat brown bananas–to get into Card’s week-long, literary boot camp. 

    This is the workshop that changed everything for me. And while Card will say it had nothing to do with him, he’s just trying to keep his head from bloating and making it so he can’t walk straight. I’ve spent almost the last 20 years in some form of teaching. Card’s workshop employs all the key principles that make it a killer environment for learning complex cognitive skills, i.e. writing fiction. And this  year it’s in San Diego.

    Apply! Do not delay! 

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  • Writing a tie-in

    ByJohn Brown

    I read this article today, laughed, and then thought a while. Don’t know if tie-ins will ever be in my future. I would hope to do it just once for a series or film I love. In the meantime, it’s great fun reading about someone else’s experience.

    ‘Burn Notice’: The Novel
    Does a real writer accept a gig doing books spun off from films or TV shows? A real writer found the answer to his own question.
    By Tod Goldberg, Special to The Times
    August 24, 2008

    http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-tie-ins24-2008aug24,0,1463672.story 

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2 Comments

  1. I do the same thing using InDesign for page composition for my paperbacks. I only control for widows unless the orphan is on it’s own page, then I will pull it back into a larger page using leading the exact same way you do.

    Great minds think alike!

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