Story Q & A

Daisy.Rae:

I am writing a story and made a mistake...I have written the whole thing in the first person and for some reason I have now decided that it needs to be in third person. Is there an easy way to change this or is a rewrite the only answer?

Most text editors have a search and replace function (usually called up by Ctrl+F or under the Edit menu) which would let you replace all instances of "I" with the character's name and all instances of "me" with he/she, but this isn't really a great option since it'll mess with your dialogue + may cause tense problems. It might be a good idea to do that as a first step, though (I've switched the tense of a story before and I know it's reeeeally easy to miss things), but figure on having to read through everything very closely and fix a lot of mistakes.

@ battalions
Thanks so much for getting back to me, I figured I would have to do a thorough read through and change it all. I was just hoping there was an easier way.

@ Daisy.Rae
Make sure to check for nicknames. I always forget to switch those.

I hope this is the right place for this question so I apologize if it's not --

I write in Pages on Mac, and I was partly finished with a document when all of a sudden it disappeared. I thought I'd exited out of it by accident but nothing popped up asking me if I wanted to save it before I did that, which it always does. Does anyone know if there's anyway to recover it? It wasn't saved, and to my knowledge Pages doesn't have an autosave feature like Microsoft Word does, but I was hoping someone would know of a downloadable (and safe) recovery program for situations like this.

@ voracek
I don't know anything about Macs, though just logically it seems like there should be a version of it somewhere. You're more likely to get an answer in the General Q&A thread, though (and that's a more appropriate place for computer-type questions).

@ Qhuinn
We don't have a thread like that as far as I know, but you could try asking in the Story Banner Requests thread (might be some of the people who make banners could make an image like you described) and/or the Art thread (might be some of the artists who post there would be willing to take a request).

Thank you so much.

Ignore. Ive been helped.

@ Qhuinn
I suggest asking in the General Q&A thread; you're more likely to get a response. I know we have a few users who speak Spanish, but not everyone checks this thread.

@ battalions
Was just about to strike it out, someone messaged me.
Thank you :)

If I have a story titled 'Where The Wind Takes Us', do I need to uncapitalise 'the' or do I leave as is?

@ swell
You have to uncapitalize it. Articles, conjunctions, and prepositions shorter than four letters don't get capitalized unless they're the first or last word of the title. The story guidelines has a semi-complete list.

@ battalions
Thank you for clearing that up!

Do recommendations on stories really make a difference? What do they do?

@ world
When someone recs a story, it puts it out to other users who may not have seen the story before and can provide new readers to the story.

@ the undead's vessel
Oh I understand now, thank you!

We had been together for most of the day, me and him, doing some talking. Should that be him and I?

@ fairyfeller

Technically, since it's a subject instead of an object, it should be "he and I."

@ i saw sparks
Thanks!

I'm writing a story in present tense, and the main character has a flashback. Should I write the flashback in past or present tense (which one is more gramatically correct, I guess I'm asking?)

@ swell
Generally they are written in past tense, but as long as it's in italics or somehow obvious it's a flashback I think you could get away with present tense if it's important.