I was reading something Lyda Morehouse was blogging about at sfnovelists.com and, as she was making the point that manuscript formatting is important to writers seeking to become published, I thought I would revisit manuscript formatting.
I don’t know if Lyda Morehouse is correct or not that the “Secret Handshake” for getting published is formatting your manuscript correctly or not, but I certainly agree that it can’t hurt. And its pretty easy to do. I work write with the OpenOffice suite and it is quite easy to set up some manuscript paragraph and font styles (I currently use about 30). (I’ve also used Microsoft Office suite, and based on the similarity of the two, I assume this, and the rest of what I’m going to relate here will work in MS Office.) These styles include (for paragraphs):
- Manuscript Default (used for non-indenting paragraphs)
- Manuscript Body Text (used for standard indenting paragraphs)
- Manuscript Scene Break
- Manuscript Section Title
- Manuscript Title
- Manuscript Chapter Title
- Manuscript Address
- Manuscript Note
And for fonts:
- Manuscript Font
- Manuscript Italics
- Manuscript Hidden
- Manuscript Note
- Manuscript Fix
Once started, you don’t need to apply styles very often (as long as you’ve properly defined the desired “next style” for each style), just an occasional scene break, italics, or section title.
If you don’t like working with the standard manuscript font, change it. Changing back is simplicity in itself. Just edit the styles.
Or, there is an even easier way to change styles. OpenOffice allows you to “load styles” from another file. Just create (re-use) a file with the formats you want, then when you need a version of story in strict manuscript file, load styles from there (I usually copy the file before overwriting the styles).
I have styles for my reading group (they like Times New Roman with real italics), for hand editing on printouts (this includes extra space for notes and places that I know I want to fix), or for just reading (two columns, Times New Roman, single spaced).
One of things that I like about using styles is the ability to include notes or otherwise annotate the story and have these notes and annotations automagically disappear when I load a set of styles intended for external consumption.
How do you use styles to write or format or organize your documents?
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February 21st, 2008 at 6:00 pm
“It can’t hurt,” is rather too weak a claim. People who read slush read an *ungodly* number of manuscripts. And they know that Sturgeon’s law most definitely applies to the slush pile, in spades. And people who read slush also know that somewhere in that daunting stack of bad manuscripts they have to winnow through, there’s a chance that something really excellent is lurking. Publishing doesn’t generally pay well enough for people to be there just to turn a buck, so most of your slush readers are true believers. They *want* to find something good. But they are gonna have to wade through a lot of bad to find it. So they develop techniques for identifying the spot where they can give up on a particular manuscript, stop reading, and move on to the next one. Often, they stop after only a few pages. Because experience tells them it isn’t going to get better if it starts out bad.
What all this means to an unpublished, un-agented writer is that it’s crucially important that first impressions are impressive. That means not faffing about with a lot of tedious and confusing set-up in the first ten pages, but getting on to something interesting Right Away to suck the reader in and make them go on. But even before you get to content, it means not shooting yourself in the foot by looking unprofessional. There are good reasons for pretty much all of the requirements of manuscript format, they aren’t hard to learn, and they will keep you off the discard pile that little bit longer. After that, it’s up to you.
Or so says every publishing pro I’ve ever read or talked to on the subject.
February 21st, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Uli- I certainly won’t dispute the fact that the slush pile is a tough filter to get through and that getting the manuscript format is worth paying attention to. There is a great article (I’m sure I have it bookmarked, so I’ll include a link later) giving advice on how to read through the slush pile.
- Fritz.
February 21st, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Here it is Sweeping Back the Slushpile.