Photo by Oli Dale on Unsplash
Takeaways from Writing My First Novel - Formatting
by Delicia A. Vaz
What’s the point of formatting a blank document? Keeps your writing neat and organized.
Why can’t I format after completing my novel? You absolutely can. However, doing it before writing cuts down your work significantly when you have a 150+ page document.
This is the third installment of my seven-part series—Takeaways from Writing My First Novel. Before I get into it, let me explain why I found it necessary to format my document before I got the first words typed.
It was a habit I developed in graduate school when I had to submit papers fitting APA (American Psychological Association) style. As I reached the end of writing those papers, I was more than ready to upload them for submission. By formatting the document beforehand, I could hit submit after a round of proofreading. Some of you might be familiar with MLA (Modern Language Association) style or CMS (Chicago Manual of Style). The latter is typically used for formatting novel manuscripts by most publishers.
Fixing formatting issues with two or three paragraphs on a page is easy. This ease steadily decreases as the number of pages increases. Furthermore, catching errors becomes more difficult as your eyes get used to seeing the same content over and over again. Selecting all of the text and making formatting changes doesn’t magically correct everything. “Select All” will overlook spaces from erroneously pressed Tab (to indent) or Enter (to start a new chapter) keys along with those areas where you tapped the Space key while planning your next sentence or paragraph.
By setting the format criteria on a blank slate, you are saving yourself from encountering the aforementioned issues and many more. Consider spending less than thirty minutes of time to format before writing instead of spending hours finding and fixing formatting errors in your novel manuscript. Save your blood, sweat, and tears for writing, revising, and editing.
Formatting involves a tiny investment of time in comparison to the hours/days/months you will spend on your manuscript. Here are my top five takeaways from this stage of the writing process:
1. Follow Guidelines
There are numerous articles which tell you how to format your document. Follow them. Don’t deviate from the norm. Agents and editors will simply refuse to spend their time on a manuscript which is formatted incorrectly. You want to address the items in Figure 1.
Note: I will say that you are absolutely free to format at the end of writing your novel’s first draft or before submitting to literary agents or publishers. If you prefer having multiple font colors, adding fancy borders or using Segoe Script instead of Times New Roman to stimulate your mind, then do it. But, do not submit your manuscript as a creative project that would make your fifth-grade-self feel proud.
2. Don’t Fret, It’s Easy
Work your way through the Paragraph and Style galleries in your Word Processor. After completing your first chapter, do a quick review to ensure your settings are doing what they should. Put in the time to set your document and don’t worry about it. The settings will not sabotage you unlike the nefarious characters of your novel.
3. Save the Template
You can go one step further and prepare for future endeavors. After matching the settings in your blank document to the guidelines, save them as a custom setting. If you are using MS Word, then you can do this in the Styles gallery. Every time you begin a new story, you can choose this preset style and dive into writing. No need to make your selections again.
So, your initial thirty-minute investment is really becoming worth your while.
4. Get Acclimated with the Software
Regardless of what program you are using, be it Google Docs, MS Word or Apple Pages, familiarize yourself with its tools. Learn tricks and shortcuts to make your writing smoother. There are tons of tutorials and tips available online. In the unlikely event that your document glitches, you should know how to navigate through galleries and review your selections.
5. Be Mindful of Chapter Lengths
You might have a rough idea of how long your chapters are based on how detailed you got for story development and planning the layout. You won’t be able to confirm it until you are a couple of chapters into your writing. See how this length fits with your plan for your story’s layout. Find the length that works and apply it to the remaining chapters. Don’t alternate between four-page and sixteen-page chapters. It disturbs the flow of the story and can ruin the reading experience.
Note: You can have a shorter or longer chapter compared to the rest if you have a compelling reason. It must make sense with the whole story, and your readers should be able to understand it without an explanation from you. Long chapters can be broken up with scene breaks to signal your readers of a shift in the story.
Each chapter doesn’t have to be exactly the same number of pages. Some chapters can be one or two pages shorter or longer than the average chapter length. It’s a number to keep in mind as you type away and helps your novel manuscript appear uniform.
Concluding Thoughts:
I hope these takeaways help smoothen the process of setting up your document. It reduces the hassle of formatting from the get-go.
After formatting, you are ready to start writing the first draft. It’s exciting and won’t be too nerve-racking since you’ve done the groundwork in Preparation. In the next article of this series, I’ll be addressing the takeaways from writing.
--
This article originally appeared on my LinkedIn Dashboard on August 25, 2021 here.
