Formatting and the Written Page

I got dinged in a contest once because the reviewer took out a ruler and decided that my margins were 0.95", rather than the industry standard (and contest required) 1.0"! Nothing was said about the content of the story, but everything was said about the format.

I've had newbies in my writer's group ask about ms format. I can recite it off the top of my head:

1. 1" margin all around
2. double-space
3. 12-point
4. Courier or Courier New *
5. single-sided
6. chapter starts 1/3rd of the way down the page **

* see this link for using Times New Roman http://agentquery.com/format_tips.aspx In reality, get the agent/editor guidelines and follow them.

** this is a matter of judgment. One site told me 1/2 way down the page. Now I go 3 blank lines, the title line, a blank line, and then verbiage.

Word count is a critical thing. I won't go into the definitions of lengths. The results you get from different methods are all over the place. There are a number of ways of figuring this.

1. if using M/S Word, use the Word Count tab under tools.
2. count the spaces and characters and divide by 6
3. turn orphan off and divide the total page count by 250.

For example. Minus One comes in at 409 pages in Courier New. That works out as 124,446 words in Method #1; 664,142 spaces and characters, which equals 110,735 words in Method #2; and 102,250 words in Method #3. How long do I think it is? Oh, about 100,000 words.

The important thing is to be consistent. I found that going to www.sfwa.org and using their methods works the best, which puts Minus One at 102,250 words, and if you allow for partial pages (i.e. those pages with just a couple of lines on them) you can be fairly close. There's also a method of counting the words per line on three different pages and so on. I'd rather use the tools I outlined.

Now a word about getting things uniform. The margins are easy, but Word, and presumably WordPerfect (I also use Open Office) will do things to the bottom of the page so you don't have the same number of lines per page. Turn Orphan Control off in M/S Word. Do a CTRL-A to select the entire text. Then go to the Format Tab and select paragraph. Then select Line and Page Breaks. Click on the box for Orphan control until it is blank. Exit. You'll find that you the last line on the page will always be in the same place (until the last line, of course). This evening out helps when calculating the word count.

Headings - I do this now so it's automatic. I use Headers, and in the upper right hand corner put in Last Name/Title*/Page #. If this is a chapter, I'll put Last Name/Title*/Chapter #/Page #. So, to pick on Minus One again, this looks like Bretthauer/Minus One/135. *if you have a long title it is permitted to use a key word from the title: Bretthauer/Engage/Chap 3/5 which is page 5 of the 3rd chapter of Engage the Enemy More Closely.

Why the upper right corner? Because the majority of editors and agents are right handed, and would hold your m/s in the left hand. And if they drop it on the floor, or it gets knocked off the desk, this will help them reassemble the story.

Page breaks and end of chapter/story. I use a # for line breaks, centered. This is an old typesetter mark that said line break. At the end I use # # # to indicate chapter or story end. Do I have to say The End? You can, but you don't have to. I did have something get mislabeled because the person posting the story was expecting "The End" and it wasn't there. That got straightened out in a hurry.

Alternatively, use * * * for your scene and chapter breaks. Whatever you do, make it consistent!

Courier New vs. Times New Roman. The former is a fixed-pitch font, the latter is a proportional font. This means that in Courier New, each character takes up the same space. An 'i' is the same width as a 'Z'. I do the former rather than the latter in a submission unless requested otherwise. Agents read for a living, and their eyes get tired. Nobody ever lost a sale by making it easier on the customer. But check Writer's Guidelines or Writer's Market for suggestions. Don't use a fancy font. I know Courier looks boring, but you are not there to jazz it up. That's what the typesetter does. Your job is to get the story in the hands of the editor who will buy it. That's why you check Guidelines. If they want it in Verdana, Arial, Bookman, or New Century, a click of the font tab will give it to them. But you'll find most want it in something easy on the eyes.

What about special characters and formatting? Don't. Okay, so you have to do some things. Use underline instead of italics. Don't use bold at all. Why? Only underline shows up when you use Courier or Courier New. And turn off the conversion thing that converts two dashes -- into an em-dash. Again, you want to make things clear.

None of this applies if it is an e-publishing as those have their own rules and you have to rely upon the editor to convert it to the format he/she wants. It's worth some time to learn a little about HTML. And you can always edit HTML in Notepad.

One final point: You've created your m/s and it comes in as a bloated 156k file in M/S Word. How do you trim out the goo and dribble Microsoft puts in everything? Open it in Wordpad. Save it. Reply yes to the request to save it as a .rtf and then close. Magically all the things that were eliminated but so helpfully kept in the file by Word are gone as they are not supported by Wordpad (which is a bare bones version of Word). You'll have to check your margins again (Wordpad likes 1.25" margins) and your header will have been wiped away. That's easily adjustable.

So now all you have left to do are the ideas in your story.

When you want to be a writer, sit down and write. You'll make mistakes. But you learn by doing, and you'll gradually get better. And after a million words or so, you should be ready to be published.

Happy writing!

Gee, it's nearly the end of October, and what have I been up to? What's new on the writing front?

First, The Minstrel was published in Winter's Night magazine! Payment was typical for an inaugural issue: a free copy. But woo-hoo!

Second, I've been putting the 2009 version of Firestar on Beyond the Far Horizon. This is the expanded version, and comes in at 30 chapters, and 209,000 words. A far cry from what Joshua was looking at. I'll expand on this in a moment.

Third, I've been polishing Minus One. It first came in at 105,000, but now it's up to around 120,000. Mostly I've been cleaning up loose ends and completely rewriting the ending so Jan has a much bigger role in the events. I've also started on the synopsis and pitch letter.

Related to that story is Plus One, which are the stories related to Minus One, but follow what happened afterwards. It also touches on the experiences of the members of the group, her attorney, some DJs who knew her, and her husband. That's at 86,000 words, more or less, but will probably come in at 100,000.

A moment about word count: I know MS Word has a word counting feature. I use that for a rough guess, but my method is twofold: first, I convert the ms to Courier, and count the pages. I take 1 page off for every other chapter, the divide the resultant by 4 (because in Courier with 1" margins you get 250 words/page). I also turn Orphan control off so each page has the same number of lines. Then I use MS Word to tell me how many characters and spaces, and divide that number by 6. That is probably slightly more accurate, and it's kind of interesting how close those two numbers come.

Fourth, I finished Body of Evidence, another Gina Stone story. This one brings in Marge Bergeron and ends with Gina married. This is the first draft, and is around 110,000 words in 15 chapters.

I've also started something new: shape-shifters. I have one I'm 6 chapters into, and am fighting off the urge to stop to do other things. More some other time.

~~~~~~~~~~~

All right, the difference in Firestar is that the one Joshua saw ended with Corey assigned to Morosini's Children. There was to be a story by that name as a follow-on, but it wasn't coming together. So I grafted the last back on to what I'm calling Firestar09, and have been posting that on Gina Wylie's sight. That means that the first one for deadtree is going to be Setosha. I've spent some time with it, and, well, we'll see. I'm probably going to have to trim it as well as rewrite it even more.

While I'm doing that, I'll try to see where I can send Minus One. I have hopes for that story as general fiction, and think it's publishable.

To date, since 1999, I've written 3.2 million words, or so, mostly since 2003. Ironically The Minstrel was written in 1986. And Kalliste, 400,000 words, was between 1999 and 2001. And Kalliste's Storytime was extracted from that. Still leaves 2.8 million words. That's a few.