Author: Miriam Drori

Author, editor, attempter of this thing called life. Social anxiety warrior. Re-Connections, a collection of short stories, published with Ocelot Press, 15/10/2025.

Books The writing process

I’m a Naughty Girl

It’s time to admit it. I broke three rules. Yes, three rules of writing, possibly more. And all in one book: Cultivating a Fuji, out tomorrow. Here are the rules:

Minor characters don’t have backstories.
Always begin with something exciting that draws the reader in.
No head-hopping.

BUT rules can be broken, as long as the writer understands the rules and breaks them knowingly. What do I mean?

Minor characters don’t have backstories

In this story, it was important to me for readers to understand these characters. I didn’t want readers to view them simply as villains who mistreat Martin. They are all people with lives of their own. Like most of us, their minds are mostly occupied by their own problems. When they encounter Martin, we need to remember that they don’t have the emotional space to handle such an alien character. And sometimes, something in a minor character’s life causes them to act in a positive way.

Fortunately, the first two reviewers liked the fact that minor characters are developed.

Always begin with something exciting that draws the reader in

This simply didn’t work. When I tried rearranging scenes to accomplish this, I found myself breaking a different rule: The main character’s point of view should come first. I think the story begins in an interesting way, but it’s not exciting because it’s reflective. Martin begins by looking back on his life.

No head-hopping

This is an important rule. When a writer doesn’t understand this rule, changes in point of view can be frustrating for a reader. But if done properly, it can work well. Virginia Woolf accomplished this in To the Lighthouse. In Cultivating a Fuji, there is one chapter in which two people meet, and it’s important to know what each of them is thinking. I think I got it right.

There. I’ve admitted to my misdemeanours. I hope you agree they were in a good cause!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CULTIVATING A FUJI is released tomorrow, Wednesday, 15th May, but there’s no need to wait. This is what you can do now:

Order the paperback.
Pre-order the ebook.
Join the online party for fun, information, music, photos and a competition with prizes.

Tags Cultivating a Fuji, head-hopping, minor characters, point of view, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, writing rules

Books Bullying Social anxiety

Body Image and Mental Health

Post author By Miriam Drori
Post date May 13, 2019
No Comments on Body Image and Mental Health

In the UK, today is the start of Mental Health Awareness Week, and this year’s theme is: body image.

I know, mostly through meeting social anxiety sufferers online, that body image is huge among the causes or aggravators of social anxiety. People worry that they’re too tall, too short, too thin, too fat, too ugly. It doesn’t matter if these self-perceptions are true; they’re very real for their owners. For people with social anxiety, poor body image is another reason – sometimes the main reason – for them to cover up and hide themselves as much as possible.

And yet, there are other people who are just as tall, short, etc., who are happy with their bodies. Eurovision viewers are about to get another look at Netta, who seems perfectly content with hers.

Here’s a quote – from one of the many who kindly agreed for their words to be published anonymously in my non-fiction book, Social Anxiety Revealed:

I was told I was funny looking, ugly and weird and people laughed at me and I haven’t been able to shake it off, no matter how hard I try. Deep down, I know I’m not ugly, but when I’m in social situations my mind completely changes and there are those doubts and comments that people have made to me creeping around, and I begin to think I’m the ugliest person there.

Martin, the main character in my new novel, Cultivating a Fuji, doesn’t worry about the way he looks. He might have scolded himself for wearing the wrong clothes at a party, but he’s presumably fine with his body, because it’s not something he thinks about. The reason for that is probably that body image is not one of the things he was teased about at school.

For the person quoted above, it probably did start at school. Children can keep laughing at the victim for something that isn’t true, with no idea that this often causes poor self-image that can last for the rest of the victim’s life. This is why adults, who hopefully know better, need to intervene.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CULTIVATING A FUJI is released this Wednesday, 15th May, but there’s no need to wait. This is what you can do now:

Order the paperback.
Pre-order the ebook.
Join the online party for fun, information, music, photos and a competition with prizes.

Tags body image, Cultivating a Fuji, Eurovision, Mental Health Awareness Week, Netta, schoolchildren

Books The writing process

Word Tip 5: How Not to Indent a Line

Post author By Miriam Drori
Post date May 10, 2019
No Comments on Word Tip 5: How Not to Indent a Line

Welcome to the next in a series of tips on using Microsoft Word, geared towards authors.
Most Word advice is rather complicated and full of things you’ll never need to know.
I shall do my best to keep it simple, because you’re not stupid… just busy.
Please note:
– Not all versions of Word are the same, but most are near enough.
– There are different ways of doing the same thing. I shall demonstrate just one (or two).

Your next line is the start of a new paragraph and you’ve decided you want the first line of the paragraph to begin further in from the margin… indented. So you press the space bar a few times and the paragraph’s first line is indeed indented.

No! That would have been fine on a typewriter. But nowadays we use fonts that have proportional spacing. We might change fonts in a document. The space taken up by six spaces at the beginning of one line might not be the same as the space taken up by six spaces at the beginning of a different line. You’ll struggle and fail to line up your indentations. Your document will look messy.

A better method is to press the Tab button. That will jump to the same place every time, providing that all tabs are defined the same way for all your paragraphs.

An even better method is to modify the style, which, unless you’ve changed it, is called the Normal style. Here’s how:

With the cursor on a paragraph, click the little arrow in the bottom right corner of Home → Styles.
Hover over Normal in the Styles box and click the arrow that appears.
Click Modify.
Click Format → Paragraph.
Click Indents and Spacing
Click the arrow under Special: and choose First line.
Under By:, set the amount of space you want to leave on the first line of each paragraph. (Mine is set to 1.27 cm.)
Click OK twice.

Every Normal paragraph will have its first line indented by the amount you defined.

Next week we’ll look at Track Changes and Compare.

Questions and suggestions for future topics are welcome in the comments below.

Links to Previous Word Tips

Tip 1: A Matter of Style
About heading styles.
Tip 2: Make Your Novel a Trampoline
How to jump swiftly and gracefully between chapters.
Tip 3: That’s Not What I Wrote
How to stop Word making changes you don’t want.
Tip 4: How Not to Jump to a New Page
Press Enter until a new page appears? Please don’t.

Tags indent, indentation, indenting

Books The writing process

Word Tip 4: How Not to Jump to a New Page

Post author By Miriam Drori
Post date May 3, 2019
No Comments on Word Tip 4: How Not to Jump to a New Page

You’ve reached the end of a Chapter 1. You want Chapter 2 to begin on a new page. So you keep pressing Enter until, lo and behold, “Chapter 2” is on the next page.

No! Don’t do it! Here’s why:

Every time a change is made in Chapter 1 that affects the number of lines in the chapter, Chapter 2 will no longer appear at the top of the next page. If you’ve done this for every chapter in the novel, you’ll have to go through the document correcting the number of Enters before each new chapter.

What should you do instead? I’m going to mention two methods.

Method 1

Word Show-Hide Button — Show/Hide button

Choose Insert and then Page Break (or just press Ctrl/Enter). This jumps to the next page, solving the problem. But you can’t see the page break unless you press the Show/Hide button on the Home tab. This means you (or someone else) might inadvertently add something before the page break that should go after, or vice versa. This is why I prefer…

Method 2

Remember the styles I mentioned in Tip #1? If you defined your chapter headings with Heading 1 style, you can define the Heading 1 style to always begin on a new page. Here’s how:

With the cursor on a chapter heading, click the little arrow in the bottom right corner of Home → Styles.
Hover over Heading 1 in the Styles box and click the arrow that appears.
Click Modify.
Click Format → Paragraph.
Click Line and Page Breaks and then Page break before.
Click OK twice.

Every Heading 1 paragraph will now appear at the top of a new page.

Of course, while you’re doing that, you might find other Heading 1 definitions to change.

Method 2 might look longer than Method 1, but you only have to do this once in order to make every chapter heading start on a new page.

Questions and suggestions for future topics are welcome in the comments below.

Links to Previous Word Tips

Tip 1: A Matter of Style
About heading styles.
Tip 2: Make Your Novel a Trampoline
How to jump swiftly and gracefully between chapters.
Tip 3: That’s Not What I Wrote
How to stop Word making changes you don’t want.

Tags chapter headings, new chapter, new page

Books Holidays

Cherry Blossom

The Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto, Japan is renowned for the cherry blossom that adorns the cherry trees that line its route.

Martin and Fiona get to visit it towards the end of their story, but they have to imagine the blossom. It’s autumn, not spring.

My husband and I also enjoyed our walk along this path, five years ago, in autumn. We didn’t see the cherry blossom either, but we did get to taste a Fuji apple on our trip. Martin and Fiona also experience the sweet, juicy taste of a Fuji apple.

Why am I telling you all this? Read my novel to find out.

CULTIVATING A FUJI is released on 15th May, but there’s no need to wait.

Order the paperback now.
Pre-order the ebook now.
Join the online party for fun, information, music and a competition with prizes.

Tags cherry trees, Cultivating a Fuji, Fuji apple, Japan, Kyoto, May 15, Philosopher's Path, Philosopher's Walk

Books The writing process

Word Tip 3: That’s Not What I Wrote

Post author By Miriam Drori
Post date Apr 19, 2019
3 Comments on Word Tip 3: That’s Not What I Wrote

Sometimes the text in your Word document doesn’t look the same as what you typed.

I’m not talking about typos. We all make those occasionally. I’m talking about words that Word changes off its own bat. Microsoft calls this AutoCorrect. The idea is that it can change some of your typos and spelling mistakes automatically, because it knows better than you what you meant to write, or it thinks it does.

What if it doesn’t? What if you wanted to make up a word in your novel? What if your character talks funny and you wanna show some of her peculiar jargon, ini’? You don’t want Word to automatically change any of your carefully-chosen quirks, do you?

Personally, I know of very few words that I want Word to change automatically. I don’t mind seeing squiggly lines around my novel, but I think, apart from rare cases, making automatic changes is a step too far.

How do you stop Word making automatic changes?

Choose the following sequence of options:

File –> Options –> Proofing –> AutoCorrect Options… –> AutoCorrect

There’s a box called Replace text as you type. You can untick (uncheck) it. Then Word won’t change anything automatically. But what if certain automatic changes might be useful?

I decided to keep that box ticked (checked) and delete most of the strings it was changing. These are the ones I kept:

Questions and suggestions for future topics are welcome in the comments below.

Links to Previous Word Tips

Tip 1: A Matter of Style
About heading styles.
Tip 2: Make Your Novel a Trampoline
How to jump swiftly and gracefully between chapters.

Tags AutoCorrect, Automatic changes

The writing process

Word Tip 2: Make Your Novel a Trampoline

Post author By Miriam Drori
Post date Apr 12, 2019
No Comments on Word Tip 2: Make Your Novel a Trampoline

Your novel becomes a trampoline when you’re editing. You need to be able to see its structure at a glance and quickly jump between chapters and sometimes sections of chapters.

This tip only works if you have defined heading paragraphs as shown in Tip 1.

Press Ctrl/F, which you probably use for searching in the novel.

The window that appears has three tabs: Headings, Pages and Results. Click on Headings. You’ll see all headings in the novel. If you’ve defined sub-headings, these will appear, too, and you can expand and collapse headings using the arrows, as you would for file names in Explorer.

I like to give my chapters names, even if these won’t remain in the final version, because the names show up in that pane on the left. And sometimes I separate a chapter into sections and give them names, too. Just so that I can see the novel’s structure at a glance.

How do you jump to a specific chapter or section in the novel?

Just click on it.

Questions and suggestions for future topics are welcome in the comments below.

Tags jumping, Microsoft Word, Word for authors, Word tips

The writing process

Word Tip 1: A Matter of Style

Post author By Miriam Drori
Post date Apr 5, 2019
No Comments on Word Tip 1: A Matter of Style

Welcome to the first in a series of tips on using Microsoft Word, geared towards authors.
Most Word advice is rather complicated and full of things you’ll never need to know.
I shall do my best to keep it simple, because you’re not stupid… just busy.
Please note:
– Not all versions of Word are the same, but most are near enough.
– There are different ways of doing the same thing. I shall demonstrate just one (or two).

You might think this one is a bit complex for a first tip. But I will be mentioning styles in most of the other tips, often along with alternatives, so I had to start by explaining what they are.

If you’ve never used styles, the chances are that everything you write uses the Normal style. The chances are that you just started writing using the font, font size, indentation and spacing that were defined for the Normal style. What did you do when asked to send your file in a different format? You selected the whole document (hopefully you know that Ctrl/A does that) and changed the font and size.

But what if you have headings (chapter headings or short story title)? Changing everything at once changes the headings, too. You might have to go through the novel, changing all the headings back to the way they were.

Instead, you can define the Heading 1 style for your chapter headings and keep the Normal style for the text. Here’s how:

Click the arrow in the bottom right corner of Styles, which is in the Home tab. The Styles box appears.
Styles Box
Hover next to Heading 1 and click the arrow that appears.
Choose Modify. The Modify Style window appears.
Click Format (at the bottom) and choose Font.
In the Font window, you can change Font style, Size and other details.
Remember to click OK at the end.

Similarly, you can change the Normal style.

How do you define a chapter heading as Header 1? Here are two possible ways:

Click in the header and click Header 1 in Styles.
Click in the header and press Shift/Alt/←

You can also use the Heading 2 style for sub-headings. Next week, I’ll show you why that might be useful when editing a novel.

Questions and suggestions for future topics are welcome in the comments below.

Tags Microsoft Word, Word for authors, Word styles, Word tips

The writing process

Word Tips for Authors

If you’re an author, you will probably use Word at some stage. Even if you don’t use it to create your novel or story or non-fiction book, you will probably use it when interacting with an editor.

There are plenty of Word tips out there, but these contain so much information that they look too complicated to authors who have limited time for technology and a limited number of things they want to do with Word.

And yet, there are features that would make their Word experience much more pleasant, if only they knew about them.

I’m going to try to make those features clearer by posting a tip once a week on Fridays, starting next week, 5th April. I’ll be using the hashtag #MSWordTipsForAuthors. See you back here.

If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, that’s what comments are for.

↓↓↓

Tags Microsoft Word, Word for authors, Word tips