Formatting Your Manuscript

No, I am not going to talk about how large your margins should be, etc, especially since Anne Mini has done such a great job with the subject on her blog. No, what I am going to do in this post is teach you how to get around the annoying fact that everyone wants something different from your manuscript. Agent 1 wants it in Courier. Agent 2 wants it in Times. Agent 3 wants all your blockquotes to be in a different font from the rest of the manuscript. Agent 4 wants your character's thoughts in italics. Agent 5 hates italics.

This lesson assumes you use Word, since it's the most popular word processing program (and the one I use). (The pictures in this post are from a Mac, but Word works the same way on both platforms.)

The first thing you need to understand is how Word deals with "Styles".
If you don't have a formatting toolbar at the top of your document, look under your "view" menu and select it. Now, up in the upper left of the picture you see something that says "normal." If you click on that, you'll see a drop-down menu of styles.

Each "style" has a format all its own and you can use separate styles throughout the manuscript for things like blockquotes, protagonists' thoughts, etc. When Agent A says "use underlines rather than italics," you change the parameters of the style you're using for protagonists' thoughts and *poof* all the parts of your manuscript tagged that way change automatically.

So, how is this magic accomplished? Let's take it step by step.

First, decide how you like to write. Me, I want the first line of each paragraph indented .5 and I like to read my text spaced 1.5 lines apart rather than double spaced. So I created a style called "Indented Normal", which is what I use for most of my manuscript. Here's how:

First, choose Style under the Format menu.
On the window that opens, choose "New". Another window will pop up asking you what you want to name your new style and some other questions. Name your style whatever you like but leave the rest of it alone for the moment.

Now you're going to tell Word what you want your style to look like as you type. You can always change your mind later. To do this, you want to click Paragraph under the Format drop down menu at the bottom of the window.


A new window will open asking what you want your paragraph to look like. This is where you can tell the program that you want your first line indented .5 inch and that you want to look at it double-spaced or whatever.

You can go back now and choose what font you want, whether you want it italicized, underlined, etc, by choosing font where you chose paragraph earlier.


To change the style of a piece of text, highlight it and choose the style you want from the dropdown menu at the top left. The style will automatically be applied to the highlighted text.



OK, so that looks really complicated. But you only have to do it once per style. So think about the styles you'll need. Me, I use Indented Normal, Blockquote, Chapter Heading, and Thoughts. (I have other styles for other kinds of documents, but those are the fiction ones.) When you find out that your new agent prefers Courier, all you have to do is go back to the "format style" option, change the font once, and your entire manuscript will change. Likewise, since you probably need to double-space every "normal" part of your manuscript, just go back and change that setting and only the normal parts will change, leaving the blockquotes, etc, alone.

There are lots of other options you can change for styles, but with luck this brief summary will provide you with what you need to get started. This is an incredibly powerful tool. If you have questions, please ask. I'm always trying to make things clearer.

Still to come: how to make your chapters fit together and how to put page numbers on all but the first page and how to switch your m-dashes to double n-dashes and back.