Tip Tuesday #58

Today's tip was sent in by Anne M. Leone who blogs at Critically Yours. Please read her fabulous tip for finding plot holes and then check out her blog!

I've found most plot holes in my manuscript involve minor characters. Because I'm so focused on my main character, I often forget things such as if a minor character has access to a car, is on a diet, or is angry with someone. One easy way to check for holes: in Word I can go to Edit--> Find, type in a character's name, and click in the box "Highlight all items found". Unfortunately, if I then click elsewhere in the document, this highlighting will disappear. To make it permanent I can highlight the text in a specific color using my toolbar. This makes it easy to skim through my text and focus only on a specific character and make sure her voice and actions are consistent. You could do this for all your characters and make each name a different color. When you are finished with your character revisions you can go to Edit--> Select All and change the highlighting to "None".

The highlight feature in Word is turning out to be a rather handy feature for writers! I think we've seen two or three other tips on how to use it in different ways. Thanks so much for this one, Anne! Very helpful.