When writing a book, you may think that you need a specific program to do it, to layout it and make it perfect for printing, sending or even publishing. But actually, you could also use Word to do it. And although it seems something simple, it has "its one" in the sense that you need to configure it. So, do you want to know how to write a book in Word?
Below we are going to give you all the guidelines that you must take into account to write a book in Word and, above all, to get the result to be perfect as if you had written it with a book editing program. Go for it?
Writing a book in Word, is it possible?
Every writer usually uses the Word program (or the free versions that are clones of it) to write a book. It's the easiest. However, when you self-publish, or when you worry about it having the structure of a book, it is necessary to make some changes in the program to make it more similar.
Esto It should always be done before starting to write., because then it can totally change everything and make you have to work twice as much to review it.
Set up Word to write a book
If you have made the decision to write a book in Word and you want to do it right from the start, here are the keys that you should keep in mind.
Página
First of all, as soon as you open a blank document that is going to be your novel, story, short story or whatever you want to write, you must configure the page. As a general rule, the page is A4, that is, what you write will appear on a vertical page. However, as you know, the books do not have that format but the A5, or even with specific measurements.
Well, We recommend that you put the document like this. And how to do it? Go to Layout/Size. There you can choose the measurements you want your page to have and it will be cloned to all the other pages you write.
Paragraph
The next thing to review is going to be the paragraph of the pages. Here you have to check several things. On the one hand, justify the text to make everything look perfect (all words and lines come to the same point). It is what will give it the look of a book. Of course, Word has a small problem and that is that sometimes it lengthens the lines and makes them look very widely spaced. To avoid this, you can ask him to cut words (always using the spelling rules) so that, if the word doesn't fit, he puts a hyphen and separates it.
The next step is the line spacing. Normally it will be 1,5 or 2. It should not be smaller because it will not be seen well and can make it difficult to read.
Lastly, it would remain to remove the space after the paragraph. You will find this in the start menu, next to the different alignments. It is a common failure, and can be easily corrected.
Optionally, you can set the indentation part. In case you don't know, this is the first line of a paragraph and you can make it have a small space. The normal thing is to leave it at 1,25cm and putting it only in the first line. This way you'll always write your paragraphs like this (and give it that book text look).
Dialogues
Surely you have seen many ways to put dialogues. The newer ones use the hyphen, a space and the text. but actually that's wrong. Very bad.
The script must always be attached to the text. In addition, it does not use the normal script, nor the one with the bullets. A little trick is to put the hyphen twice and give a space. That will bring them together and you will have a wide hyphen, which is just the one used. To avoid having to do that every time, you can copy and paste it every time you have to put it.
spell check
This point is very important because, when we write and get into the story, sometimes we don't realize the mistakes we make, and that harms the final result of the book in Word. That's why, make sure you have spell check turned on, including capitalized words, so that they jump in red whenever you consider them misspelled.
This way when you take a look at the page you will know the words that are wrong to correct them. Of course, sometimes they will not be marked despite being wrong, which is why it is important to do a re-reading and a professional correction afterwards.
Another important point here is make sure the document has the correct language as the language; Otherwise, even if you put the spell check, it won't do you any good.
page breaks
Normally, when you go from one chapter to the next, you'll want to start this one on a new page. Y one of the common mistakes is to hit enter as many times as necessary to go to the next page.
The problem is that, when something in the configuration is changed, those spaces that have been given can deform the novel completely.
To avoid it, instead of doing that it is best to give a page break. This will automatically see us on the new page without having to leave scattered spaces.
In addition, allows you that this page break can be to a page with or without numbering (ideal for the first sheets).
number the pages
If you look, almost all novels and books have the pages numbered. Y This is something that we advise you to do at the beginning to prevent the format from breaking you later the design you have given.
numbering You can put it in the center or on one or the other side of the pageIt will depend on your tastes.
Now, maybe in the first sheets you don't want that numbering, so you will have to play with the page format to remove it without losing the numbering on the rest of the pages (usually it is put as the first page and the number will disappear).
As you can see, writing a book in Word is not difficult if you set it up for it. Do you have more suggestions to make in Word to start writing? Tell us in comments.