Recently, a reader took exception to our blog about book design. This raised a good point: Why not just design your book yourself, in MSWord?  He said,

“While not everyone has the time, knowledge or talent to format a book, it can definitely be done with Microsoft Word, not only with more specialized software. It’s very easy to convert a Word file to PDF for printing, and takes just a few minutes of mouse clicking. A great many books are formatted with Word. Some of them look terrible, but that’s usually due to the limitations of the person doing the formatting, not limitations of Word. I’ve used it for eight books, so far.”

He may be right, particularly as he is self-publishing ebooks. But what is best for writers of memoirs and family histories?

We certainly value MSWord for word processing, and if your book contains text only, Word might be sufficient. (A little design know-how never hurts in Word, either.) However, the design of memoir and family history books usually features many images: precious family photographs, scanned artifacts, and other illustrations. The quality of the images is crucial to the success of the book.

If you have ever tried formatting images together with text in Word, you know how frustrating it can be, and how awful the results inevitably look. That’s why we design books in Adobe InDesign. It offers many superior options to control the quality of images and page layout.

A lot of the people we talk to about creating memoirs or family history books say that organization is their chief stumbling block. But when we talk with them a bit more it becomes clear that they haven’t really generated ideas for stories they want to include and sorted which are best and which might be better left out.

When writing theorists discuss the first step of the writing process they talk about pre-writing. At Stories To Tell we call the step Reflect. The idea is to begin recalling and collecting stories from your life or those of the ancestors you plan to include in your family history. Exercises and writing prompts can help trigger memories. Looking at old photos or family documents may trigger associated memories. Conversations with family members or friends may uncover stories you never heard. In any case, the more ideas you accumulate, the better. This process is an uncritical one. Don’t evaluate the stories yet. More is better.

When you have generated as many possible stories as you can, then you begin to make critical judgments. As you review the stories you have you gain insights as to how to organize them. Maybe a straightforward chronological organization will work fine. But maybe you will notice certain themes recurring in the stories – the immigrant experience in coming to America, the importance of family, the importance of hard work, the value of education in improving oneself, or the importance of faith in overcoming adversity. Organizing the stories around these themes may be much more effective than a straight chronological approach.

It’s hard to make a decision about organization until you know what you are going to organize. A writer who does a reflects carefully about her potential subject matter and has lots of stories to tell will generally have less difficulty organizing her book than an author who decided ahead of time on an organizational plan and then tries to make the stories she generates fit that plan.