Author! Author!

Hello, campers –

Every so often, I like to make a quick tour of blogs that have linked to mine, just to see if we here at Author! Author! have sparked interesting discussions or raised new questions elsewhere. I’ve gotten many ideas for new posts this way. Today, I was doing a spot of surfing and came upon a very engaging manuscript-reviser’s cri de coeur at Thoughts in Yellowwood Forest, appropriately entitled “arrgggrrrrggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg.” In it, the author mentioned having applied some archived advice of mine, then observed,

I’ve just got to stop doing research about writing. It’s driving me nuts. I want this to be the very best it can be, but trying to follow all of everyone’s rules is driving me nuts.

I find this excellent, a truly healthy attitude toward revision: there is so much advice out there, and so much of it conflicting, that I can easily imagine that an attempt to avoid every possible decried pitfall — or even to try to form a single, coherent plan based upon all the advice floating around out there — could eat up years of an aspiring writer’s time.

In fact, hardly a week passes here at Author! Author! when I don’t hear from some frantic soul who has, bless his or her heart, been gobbling up online writing and marketing advice like Cookie Monster in a well-intentioned attempt to understand the publishing industry — only to find her/himself stymied by two or more of us writing gurus decreeing opposite modes of approach.

In defense of my tribe, it is honestly quite difficult to give generalized writing advice at all, especially based upon reader questions, which are seldom accompanied by actual examples. As they like to say in the industry, it all depends on the writing. So without actually seeing the manuscript itself, it can be very difficult to give a helpful answer — and impossible to formulate one that is applicable to every similar case.

Yet what often seems to happen is that one of us will post an answer to a reader’s specific question, and violà, through the magic of the Internet, that innocent piece of advice suddenly turns up all over the place as a general axiom, to be applied everywhere, every time. Sometimes, too, the advice gets mutated a bit through repetition, as in the children’s game of Telephone, until the version being shared between participants at writers’ conferences bears little resemblance to the original advice.

And don’t even get me started on all of the many areas where experts legitimately differ, matters of individual literary taste, and competing schools of thought. Gobbling all of that up together, no wonder Cookie Monster sometimes finds himself with a tummy ache!

Do bear this in mind the next time you discover conflicting advice — as you inevitably will, if you are looking online for it, attending conferences, and/or taking a lot of writing classes. Not every piece of writing advice out there is necessarily applicable to YOUR manuscript — and not every self-proclaimed rule being bandied about is universally accepted, even amongst the pros.

Good writing requires far more complex alchemy than that, after all. Use your judgment, and when what any advice-giver says doesn’t make sense to you, track down the original source and start asking questions BEFORE you accept what any of us say as Gospel.

Yes, even if I’m the one who gave the advice. As far as I’m concerned, the object of this exercise is to help you improve your submissions, not to bend the masses to my will. (The latter will have to wait until my ongoing plot to rule the universe finally comes to fruition. I’ll keep you posted.)

That being said, do I think it’s worthwhile for EVERY writer to take the time learn what the most common rejection reasons are? Yes, because constantly submitting a manuscript containing easily-rectified problems can also suck up years of an aspiring writer’s time. Ditto with the rules of standard format, basic principles of pacing, characterization, marketing, etc. Doing one’s homework can ultimately save quite a bit of time.

But please, don’t make tracking down and following advice your life’s work. If you’re a writer, you already have an avocation, the grandest there is.

In this spirit, I’m re-running a post from last December, one I wrote in response to a reader’s expressed grumpiness (and who could blame her?) about the prospect of changing her manuscript from one space after each period and colon to two, as I had advised and indeed the vast majority of the industry prefers. But I’m not going to lie to you: even amongst agents, preferences do differ on this particular subject; although I’ve literally never heard of an agent’s asking a client to remove that second space, not every agent will tell his Millicent to take umbrage at its not being there.

So here, for your perusing pleasure, is my take on one of those areas where advice does legitimately differ. Enjoy!

After yesterday’s post, an intrepid reader Paula wrote in to take issue with my stand about the burning issue of whether the language has, without the intervention of the English professors of the world, spontaneously changed to require only one space between sentences and after colons, rather than two. And, as you may perhaps be able to tell from that last sentence, it’s a topic upon which, as an editor, I have some fairly strong feelings.

After I was well into my fourth page of response, it occurred to me that the comment sections aren’t subject-searchable. So I’m going to put off the next installment in my series on how and why standard format is so easily recognizable to professional readers in order to devote an entire post to the issue, where future readers will be able to track it down.

Fasten your seatbelts; I’m about to go to town.

Every time I do a post on standard format, readers write in to tell me that the rules have changed, on this point or on others. And frankly, they SHOULD be commenting, if they believe I have misspoken, or even if they feel a particular point requires further elucidation: false modesty aside, quite a few people do read this blog on a regular basis, and the last thing that I want to do is lead anyone astray inadvertently.

So please, folks, keep sending in those constructive comments.

Apart from the community-support reason to ask follow-up questions, there is another, more self-interested reason that you should consider giving a shout if you think I’ve just told a real whopper: no writer, aspiring or otherwise, should apply a rule to her book without understanding WHY its application is a good idea.

Yes, even with something as basic as standard format. If a particular suggestion doesn’t make sense to you, PLEASE don’t do it just because I say so. Do it because you have thought about it and decided that trying it might help you market your writing.

I know, I know: life would be a whole lot easier if it came with a foolproof set of directions, and nowhere is that more true than in one’s first approaches to the publishing industry. It’s definitely confusing to a newcomer, fraught with unspoken expectations and counterintuitive requirements. As someone who has spent a lifetime around it, I could just give you a list of standard format requirements, dust off my hands, and traipse off to finish my holiday shopping.

That’s not my style, however. I like to take the time to explain the rules, both to render submission less of a big, ugly mystery and to give my readers a chance to make up their minds for themselves. Call me wacky, but in the long run, I think my way helps people more than pronouncements from on high.

Speaking of pronouncements from on high, my correspondent began, charmingly, by quoting one of mine:

“In fact, in all of my years writing and editing, I have never — not once — seen a manuscript rejected or even criticized for including the two spaces that English prose requires after a period or colon. ”

Have you heard of a manuscript being rejected for using only ONE space between sentences? Within the past five years or so?

Isn’t that a trenchant question? Isn’t it about time I stopped yammering about the desirability of discussion and got around to answering it?

Here’s the short answer: rejected SOLELY upon that basis, no; criticized as unprofessional, yes, often. Knocked out of finalist consideration as contest entries, absolutely. And I’ve certainly heard it listed among several equally subtle points that led to rejection at agencies; basically, like the other minor restrictions of standard format, it’s contributes to the sense that a writer just doesn’t know the ropes.

The irony, of course, is that the sources that claim the language HAS changed — and permanently, at that — tend to insist that skipping the second space after a period or colon, as our dear old white-headed English teachers taught us to do, automatically stamps a manuscript old-fashioned, obsolete, and generally silly.

How do they justify this? The logic, as I understand it, runs thus: since printed books, magazines, newspapers, and to a great extent the Internet have been omitting these spaces in recent years, the language must therefore have changed. So much so that not only is leaving out the second space now permissible — which it definitely was not until very recently; Paula’s estimate of the last five years is pretty accurate — omitting it is now REQUIRED.

That sounds very serious, doesn’t it? Scary, even. The problem is, if it is required, why isn’t the industry enforcing it in the ways that formatting restrictions are generally enforced, by agents and editors asking writers to change their submissions accordingly?

I’m not being flippant about this: while this rather radical formatting rule change has been popping up in a lot of fora that give advice to aspiring writers over the past five years, the actual practices of the industry have not seemed to be the engine behind the change. I have literally never seen (or heard) an argument in favor of omitting the second space made by anyone who works within the publishing industry — although I have chatted with a number of agents (including my own), who don’t mind the single space omission.

So it’s safe to say that the doubled space is still the norm — as long as we’re talking about MANUSCRIPTS.

Printed books, well, those are a different story — and here, I think, is where the confusion lies, because many publishers have made this change in their newer releases. Essentially, the proponents of eliminating the second space between sentences are arguing that what one sees in print is what one should reproduce on the manuscript page.

As I pointed out yesterday, publishers have made this shift in order to save paper. Which, as those of you who followed this summer’s Book Marketing 101 series already know, is most emphatically NOT the goal of manuscript format, which aims toward ease of reading and hand-editing.

Omitting that second space does, as I mentioned yesterday, render it considerably harder to write corrections on hard copy. It may not seem like a lot of room, but believe me, when you’re trying to make four grammatical changes within a single sentence legibly, any extra bit of white space is a boon.

Hey, carrots are room-consuming. So are scrawls that read confusing, expand this, or Aristotle who?, all of which editors have bestowed upon my manuscripts at one time or another.

I suspect that the underlying assumption of the second-space elimination movement is that editing on hard copy has gone the way of the dinosaur (it hasn’t), just because it is now feasible to send and edit manuscripts electronically. But just because it is technically POSSIBLE to eliminate paper from the process doesn’t mean that it occurs in practice all the time, or even very often.

Remember when Internet-based shopping first became popular, and technology enthusiasts assured us all confidently that the supermarket and shopping mall would be obsolete within a decade? Turns out that a lot of people still wanted to squeeze melons and try on clothes before they bought them.

Who knew?

Also, for the argument that the extra spaces are obsolete to makes sense on a practical level — or, at minimum, to generate the levels of resentment amongst agents and editors that its proponents predict — the industry would have to expect that every submission would be camera-ready by the time it hits a prospective agent’s desk.

In other words, in EXACTLY the format that it would appear in the finished book. Anybody seeing a problem here?

As those of you who have been following the current See For Yourself series are already aware, standard format for MANUSCRIPTS has little to do with how BOOKS are formatted. As I have been demonstrating for the past few days, manuscripts differ in many important respects from the format the Chicago Manual tells us to expect in a published book, or that AP style urges us to produce in a magazine or newspaper.

Which prompts me to ask: is it really so astonishing that spacing would also differ? And why would a change in publishing practice necessarily alter what professional readers expect to see in a manuscript — especially when that alteration would unquestionably make their jobs harder?

And that, in case you were interested, is why I don’t embrace the practice of eliminating the second space between sentences in manuscripts. Until I see strong evidence that agents, editors, and contest judges have begun to FROWN upon the extra space, I’m going to continue to recommend it.

So there.

I can certainly understand why aspiring writers who had gone the single-space route would be miffed at this juncture, though; changing that fundamental an aspect of a text could eat up a LOT of time. As, indeed, my insightful correspondent pointed out:

It took a lot of effort to train myself to STOP using the two spaces. It’s one of those grammatical rules that seems to have all but disappeared (much like the rather perplexing fad to omit the comma before the word “too”). If it’s necessary, I suppose there’s an easy “find and replace” way to correct my manuscript to add an additional space between sentences?

I’m very glad that the commenter brought up the comma elimination fad, because it provides a perfect parallel to what has happened with the spaces. Just because a rule of grammar’s relaxation becomes common doesn’t mean that the rule itself has disappeared; it just means that breaking the rule has become marginally more acceptable.

For instance, these days, few people other than my mother would stop a conversation in order to correct a speaker who referred to “everyone and their beliefs,” but technically, it remains incorrect. To preserve subject-object agreement, it should be “everyone and his beliefs” or “everyone and her beliefs.” The reason for this shift is primarily sociological, I suspect: when American businesses (and television writers) began to take active steps to make language more friendly to women, the incorrect version sounded less sexist, and thus became widely accepted.

Does that mean that “everyone and their beliefs” magically became grammatically correct overnight? Not on your life. And the better-educated the intended reader- or listenership for the sentence, the more likely that the error will raise hackles.

Had I mentioned that Millicent, along with pretty much everyone who works in her agency, was probably an English major? Heck, she probably wrote her senior thesis on this kind of colloquial speech.

The fact is, the grammatical rule about the requisite number of spaces between sentences and after colons HASN’T changed — the PRACTICE has in many published works; in manuscripts, academic work (almost always the last to accept any sea change in the language), and private writing, the rule most emphatically has not.

And, as with splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions, while most people won’t care, the ones who DO care feel very strongly about it indeed. To them, it’s more serious than formatting: it’s a matter of literacy.

Don’t believe me? The next time you’re at a book signing by a Grand Old Literary Figure, walk up to him or her and speak a sentence ending with a preposition. (”Which college did you go to?” would suffice, for experimental purposes.) Then count the number of seconds of wincing before the GOLF can compose his or her features enough to respond to you with the courtesy due a long-time fan.

That may seem surprising, given that most of the aspiring writers who have embraced the practice of eliminating the second space report that they are doing it because some apparently authoritative source told them to make the switch — but tellingly, those sources’ certainty on the matter didn’t stop howls of protest from the professional reading community when Miss Snark (among others) suddenly started advising aspiring writers to leave it out.

Props to Miss S, the result was pretty dramatic: mysteriously, half the submissions agents received were harder to read, and the change happened more or less overnight — and since most agents don’t read even the major writing blogs, it seemed to come out of nowhere.

How loud were those howls, you ask? Suffice it to say that the grumbles continue to this day. No one who edits text for a living would vote for this particular change. To most professional eyes, it still just looks wrong.

To get return to my correspondent’s last comment, I don’t know of an easy way to make the change universally, alas; Word’s grammar checker currently accepts both single and double spaces between sentences as correct, treating it as a stylistic choice rather than a grammatical one. (If the language had actually changed to require only a single space, presumably Word would follow, eventually.) Like most of the population, the good folks at Microsoft seem perplexed by the dual standard.

Yes, it’s a pain for the writer — but as you have probably already noticed, the industry is not exactly set up to minimize effort for writers. Sorry. If I ran the universe…well, you know the rest.

If anyone reading this HAS figured out a simple way to make the change universally throughout a document, PLEASE write in and share it with the rest of us. Aspiring writers the world over will bless your name, and who wouldn’t want that?

A wiser person would probably sign off now, but I’m going to bite the bullet and bring up the question that is probably on many, many minds at this juncture: barring a flash of insight from a reader or a well-timed act of celestial intervention, could you get away with retaining the single-space convention in a document already written?

As you may have gathered, I would not advise it, especially in a contest submission. However, it really is up to the individual writer. As much as writers would LIKE for there to be a single standard upon which every single person in the industry agreed, it just doesn’t happen. There are exceptions in what individual agents and editors want; you might strike lucky.

If you DO decide to go the single-space route (picture me rending my garments here), make absolutely certain that your manuscript has NO other problems that might trigger Millicent’s ire. Also, be prepared for an agent to ask to make the change before the manuscript is submitted to editors — and, if asked, do it cheerfully and without explaining at length why you originally embraced the single-space practice.

Not that YOU would do such a thing, of course, but for those who don’t know better: agents and editors tend not to be amused when writers of first books lecture them on how the industry has changed.

And this is definitely an instance where folks outside the industry have been making pronouncements about how the industry should operate for quite a while. Even if you are completely polite in how you express it, chances are that the last writer who made the case to Millicent’s boss was not.

The word Luddite may actually have been uttered.

One more caveat before I sign off: I would caution any aspiring writer against assuming that any single problem, formatting or otherwise, was the ONLY reason a manuscript was getting rejected. Most of the time, it’s quite a few reasons working in tandem — which is why, unfortunately, it’s not all that uncommon for Millicent and her cohorts to come to believe that an obviously improperly-formatted manuscript is unlikely to be well-written. So changing the spaces between sentences alone probably isn’t going to be the magic bullet that results in instant acceptance.

Whatever course you decide to pursue, though, make it YOUR decision — and stick to it. Don’t leap to make every change you hear rumored to be an agent’s pet peeve unless you are relatively certain in your heart of hearts that implementing it will make your manuscript a better book.

Yes, even if the suggestion in question came from yours truly. It’s your manuscript, not mine.

Thanks for the great question, Paula, and everybody, keep up the good work!

Hello, campers –

Well, I am feeling a bit better after my weekend off, due in part to taking a break to go see Seattle Opera’s surprisingly powerful production of AIDA. I may have an odd sense of humor, but few things cheer me up like observing a character bellowing her deepest secrets at the top of her (well-developed) lungs for minutes at a time, only to have her antagonist, who is standing all of three feet away, observe to the audience, “Aha! Her reaction has betrayed her!” as if all the the soprano had done was frown fleetingly.

Why was I surprised by the production, you ask? From an editor’s point of view, the story of Aida is kind of a nightmare — predictable, repetitious, and quite, quite downbeat. The protagonist is almost completely passive (unless you count the aforementioned secret-bellowing); her love interest is quite possibly the least ethically flexible human being ever to have trod the planet, and the moment that the latter changes his mind even a little, Aida’s father pops out from behind a 30-foot statue of Anubis or somebody and tells Dumbo that he’s just betrayed his country.

ANY editor would have told Verdi to have the father use the information to set up the ambush of the Pharaoh’s army FIRST and gloat about it later. That’s just a basic application of the old Show, don’t tellrule.

This production violated this precept even more than most by moving the big trial scene in Act II offstage entirely, so the audience only hears it. Actually, this turned out to be quite a clever way of staging it, since all the audience had to watch throughout was the reaction of Stephanie Blythe, the perfectly marvelous mezzo playing Aida’s rival, Amneris, instead of the usual 50+ supernumeraries wearing King Tut headdresses. In fact, switching the perspective here and in a number of small ways throughout might have made an audience member new to the storyline wonder why the opera was called AIDA, not AMNERIS.

I’m bringing this up not only because I enjoyed the production, of course: this isn’t a bad strategy for perking up a story centered around a passive protagonist.

A I’ve mentioned before, readers tend to lose interest in passive protagonists’ dilemmas rather quickly, and with good reason: characters who sit around and think about their problems, or let events happen all around them without at least trying to change the status quo, become predictable after the third or fourth scene. A character who surprises the reader by taking the occasional risk is inherently suspense-generating — what, the reader wonders, will that feisty protagonist do next?

Now, to be fair, Aida has some pretty great excuses for being passive: she’s Amneris’ slave; she’s in love with Amneris’ fiancé, who also happens to be the commander of the army fighting with her own father’s troops; pretty much everyone she loves has been or is about to be slaughtered, and Amneris is a savvy enough expression-watcher that she’s understood those shouted asides about how deeply Aida and the general are in love. About all she can manage to do is determine the method of her own death — which is, you guessed it, slow and passive.

Hey, it’s an opera: you expected it NOT to be tragic?

Emphasizing Amneris’ perspective was a great choice — not only is she far, far more active in the story than Aida (whose best aria is about not the storyline per se, but how much she misses her homeland), but she experiences genuine moral dilemmas, a broad range of easily shouted-about emotions, AND has both the courage and the resources to act upon her decisions. While Aida stands around and suffers tunefully, Amneris gets to do cool things like have her boyfriend dragged off by guards, offer him his life in exchange for renouncing his love, and curse the priests who bury him alive.

As we editors like to say, she experiences a growth curve throughout the narrative. Since Aida is primarily an observer of her own tragedy, her mindset doesn’t change a whole lot.

Not that I blame her. I wouldn’t like to be walled up in a tomb, either.

Which is not to say that a narrative always benefits by concentrating on the more powerful players — anyone with a decently-stocked fiction collection could point out many novels that prove quite the opposite.

However, concentrating on a character who fights against fate, growing and changing in the process, rather than one who merely suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, usually produces a more sympathetic protagonist. Counter-intuitive, isn’t it, that the pure victim might excite less empathy than her feistier foe?

None of which, I notice, has a great deal to do with the post I am re-running today. Except this: presentation choices do affect the emotional impact of art. Even, as in today’s examples, when those choices are purely cosmetic.

Enjoy!

I was all set to clamber onto my moral high horse again and dispense more of yesterday’s philosophy, honest — but then sharp-eyed long-time reader Janet caught, as is her wont, the missing puzzle piece in my illustrated romp through standard format. So I’m sliding elevated ethical questions onto the back burner for the nonce and diving right back into practicalities.

As Janet so rightly pointed out, I had completely skipped over one of the more common first-page-of-chapter controversies (and yes, in my world, there are indeed many from which to choose), whether to place the title and/or chapter designation at the top of the page, or just above the text.

To place the options before you, should the first page of a chapter look like this:

Or like this?

Now, I had been under the impression that I had waxed long and eloquent about the side I took in this burning debate, and that quite recently, but apparently, my eloquence has been confined to posts more than a year old, exchanges in the comments (which are not, alas, searchable, but still very worth reading), and my own fevered brain.

So let me clear up my position on the matter: the first version is in standard format; the second is not. No way, no how. And why might a professional reader prefer the first?

Chant it with me now: BECAUSE IT LOOKS RIGHT TO THEM.

Yet, if anything, agents and contest judges see more examples of version #2 than #1. Many, many more.

Admittedly, anyone who screens manuscripts is likely to notice that a much higher percentage of them are incorrectly formatted than presented properly, this particular formatting oddity often appears in otherwise perfectly presented manuscripts.

And that fact sets Millicent the agency screener’s little head in a spin. As, I must admit, it does mine and virtually every other professional reader’s. Because at least in my case — and I don’t THINK I’m revealing a trade secret here — I have literally never seen an agent submit a manuscript to a publishing house with format #2. And I have literally never even heard of an agent, editor, or anyone else in the publishing industry’s ASKING for a chapter heading to be moved from the top of the page to just above the text.

Oh, I’ve heard some pretty strange requests from agents and editors in my time, believe me; I’m not easily shocked anymore. But to hear a pro insist upon placing the chapter heading where you have to skip down a third of a page to read it…well, that would have me reaching for my smelling salts. (Do they even make those anymore?)

But clearly, somebody out there is preaching otherwise, because agents, editors, and contest judges are simply inundated with examples of this formatting anomaly. We see bushels of ‘em. Hordes of aspiring writers are apparently absolutely convinced that the sky will fall in if that chapter heading is located anywhere but immediately above the text.

In fact, it’s not all that uncommon for an editor to find that after she has left a couple of subtle hints that the writer should change the formatting…

…the subsequent drafts remain unchanged. The writer will have simply ignored the advice.

(Off the record: editors HATE it when their advice is ignored. So do agents. Contest judges probably wouldn’t be all that fond of it, either, but blind submissions mean that a writer must submit the same chapter two years running to the same contest, have the entry land in the same judge’s pile — in itself rather rare — AND the judge would have to remember having given that feedback.)

This may seem like a rather silly controversy — after all, why should it matter if the white space is above or below the title? — but sheer repetition and writerly tenacity in clinging to version #2 have turned it from a difference of opinion into a vitriol-stained professional reader pet peeve. (See earlier comment about how we tend to react to our advice being ignored; it isn’t pretty.)

Which, unfortunately, tends to mean that in discussions of the issue at conferences degenerate into writing-teacher-says-X, editor-at-Random-House-says-Y: lots of passion demonstrated, but very little rationale beyond each side’s insisting that the other’s way just looks wrong.

However, there is a pretty good reason that moving the chapter heading information to just above the text looks wrong to someone who edits book manuscripts for a living: it’s a formatting tidbit borrowed from short stories, whose first pages look quite different:

There, as you may see for yourself, is a mighty fine reason to list the title just above the text: a heck of a lot of information has to come first. But that would not be proper in a book-length manuscript, would it?

Let’s see what Noël’s editor has to say, viewing his submission as the first page of a book:

Ouch. (That last bit would have been funnier if the entire page were readable, by the way, but my camera batteries were running low.) But as Millicent and that angry mob of pitchfork-wielding ignored editors would be only too happy to tell you, short stories don’t HAVE chapters, so who on earth are they to be telling those of us in the book world how to format our manuscripts?

Stick with version #1.

Which is not to say, of course, that this particular small deviation will automatically and invariably result in instantaneous rejection. Chances are it won’t, even in the latté-stained hands of the most format-sensitive Millicent. (See, she spilled coffee on her hands after she took a sip while it was still too hot — and if you didn’t get that joke, you probably haven’t been reading this blog for very long.) If a submission is beautifully written AND technically correct in every other respect, she might only shake her head over the location of the chapter heading, making a mental note to tell you to change it between when her boss, the agent, signs the writer and when they will be submitting the manuscript to editors at publishing houses.

But if you don’t mind my saying so, that’s a mighty hefty set of ifs.

While I’ve got the camera all warmed up, this would probably be a good time to show another ubiquitous agent and editor pet peeve, the bound manuscript – and this one IS generally an automatic-rejection offense. As with other ploys to make a manuscript appear identical to a published book, binding the loose pages of a manuscript for submission will NOT win you friends in the publishing world.

Why? Not only does this not look right (I spared you the chanting this time), but it seems so wrong that Millicent will be positively flabbergasted to see a submitter to do it.

Seriously, this is one of those things that is so engrained in the professional reader’s mind that it seldom even occurs to authors, agents, or editors to mention it as a no-no at writers’ conferences. Heck, I’m not sure that I’ve mentioned it once within the last six months — and by anyone’s standards, I’m unusually communicative about how manuscripts should be presented.

So pay attention, because you’re not going to hear this very often: by definition, manuscripts should NEVER be bound in any way.

Not staples, not spiral binding, not perfect binding. There’s an exceedingly simple reason for this: binding renders it impossible (or at least a major pain in the fingertips) to pull out a chapter, stuff it in one’s bag, and read it on the subway.

Hey, paper is heavy. Would YOU want to lug home ten manuscripts every night on the off chance you’ll read them?

In practice, I’m sorry to report, a bound manuscript will seldom survive long enough in the screening process for the chapter-separation dilemma to arise, because — and it pains me to be the one to break this to those of you who’ve been submitting bound manuscripts, but if I don’t tell you, who will? — those pretty covers tend never to be opened.

Remember that immense pile of submissions Millicent has to screen before going home for the day — and it’s already 6:30? Well, when she slits open an envelope that reads REQUESTED MATERIALS on the outside, she fully expects to see something like this lurking between the cover letter and the SASE tucked underneath:

But in the case of the bound manuscript, she instead sees something like this:

Kind of hard to miss the difference, isn’t it? And unfortunately, nine times out of ten, the next sound a bystander would hear would be all of that nice, expensive binding grating against the inside of the SASE.

Honestly, it’s not that she is too lazy to flip open the cover; she just doesn’t see why she should. Her logic may not be fair or open-minded, but it’s a fairly common argument throughout the industry: if this submitter does not know this very basic rule of manuscripts, how likely is she to know the rules of standard format?

And if she does not know either, how likely is she to be producing polished prose?

Yes, this logic often does not hold water when it comes down to an individual case. But from her perspective, that matters less than we writers would like — because, as unpleasant as it is for aspiring writers to realize, her agency is going to see enough technically perfect submissions this week to afford to be able to leap to unwarranted conclusions about this one.

Don’t waste your money on binding.

Now that I have depressed you all into a stupor, let me add a final note about learning to conform to these seemingly arbitrary preconditions for getting your book read: any game has rules.

If you saw a batter smack a baseball, then dash for third base instead of first on his way around the diamond, would you expect his home run to count? Would an archer who hit the bulls-eye in her neighbor’s target instead of her own win the grand prize? If you refused to pay the rent on Park Place because you didn’t like the color on the board, would you win the Monopoly game?

I can go on like this for days, you know.

My point is, submitting art to the marketplace has rules, too, and while your fourth-grade P.E. teacher probably did not impart them to you (as, if I ran the universe, s/he would have), you’re still going to be a whole lot better at playing the game if you embrace those rules, rather than fight them.

You’ll also, in the long run, enjoy playing the game more.

And remember, you’re playing this game by choice: you could, after all, make your own rules and publish your book yourself. Weigh the possibilities, and keep up the good work!

Good evening, campers –

In light of recent events, I’m taking a break from my ongoing series on what standard format for book manuscripts looks like — don’t worry; it will return next week, along with some tips on writing and formatting a query letter — and taking the weekend off. (I know: practically unheard-of here at Author! Author!) In order to give you some fresh material for weekend pondering, I threw myself on the mercy of FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! blog), blogger, and novelist Janiece Hopper. She very kindly agreed to help us out. Thank you, Janiece!

For those of you who missed my wholesale gloating when Janiece’s first novel, Cracked Bat, came out — I love announcing my readers’ triumphs! — here’s a brief synopsis:

Linnea Perrault is the editor of The Edge, a successful community newspaper. Happily married to Dan, Spinning Wheel Bay’s premier coffee roaster and owner of The Mill, she is the mother of an adorable four-year-old daughter who insists upon lugging a fifteen-pound garden dwarf everywhere they go.When Linnea’s wealthy father returns to their hometown to make amends for abandoning her to a cruel stepfather twenty-eight years earlier, she painfully resurrects his old place in her heart. He buys the local baseball team. Before long, fairy tales, Islamic mystics, and a host of cross-cultural avatars come into play as the team is propelled to the top of the league. After a foul pass and an accident at the stadium, Linnea finds herself locked in the stone tower of pain as she realizes how much the man she married is like the father she never knew. Doctors can’t diagnose her debilitating condition, but kind, magical strangers give her a chance to save her soul. Cracked Bat is dedicated to the approximately five million people who have experienced the mystifying and frustrating ailments of myofascial pain syndrome, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue.

As you may see, it’s not a novel that is particularly easy to assign to a book category — which is one of the many reasons that I’m particularly thrilled that Janiece has given in to my blandishment to share her self-publishing experiences with us. I know that many of you write between genres and thus must have given dead-of-night thought to a question haunting many fiction writers these days: what would happen if I published it myself?

It’s a great question — and here is an author who can answer it from direct personal experience. Take it away, Janiece!

Hello everyone! I am absolutely delighted to be Anne’s guest blogger. So thank you, Anne. Today, I am going to share why I created Ten Pentacles to publish my novel, Cracked Bat. Self-publishing works for me because it reflects my relationship with writing and my purpose for doing the work.

We’ve all heard agents at conferences say that good writing will always find a home. This storyline serves. It keeps aspiring authors going to conferences and certainly helps keep the United States Postal Service in business. (Just think how much you’ve spent on stamps for query letters and how much you’ve paid in return postage for bulky, boxed manuscripts.) Unfortunately, the idea that good writing will always find a publisher to finance and promote it is simply not true.

In reality, the current publishing paradigm requires authors to tweak and twist their “good” writing until an agent can see (in a split-second, mind you) exactly how it fits into a publisher’s pre-established list and how it appeals to a pre-determined market.

I’m not critiquing, but after two years of intense writing, repetitive stress injury, and a divorce, I wasn’t willing to force Cracked Bat to be anything other that what it became. Whether or not a New York agent could “fall in love” with Linnea Perrault on the first page so that she could bulldoze a bleary-eyed, overworked editor into buying it with her enthusiasm became completely irrelevant.

Cracked Bat is good, true, beautiful, quirky…and exactly what I hoped it would be. But it is different. I call it Intuit-Lit.

Intuit-Lit illuminates limiting socially-constructed and neurologically-wired thought, behavorial, and physiological patterns so that characters can recast and overcome obstacles on their life paths. By sharing the characters’ experiences, I hope my find themselves further along on their own life journeys and are more conscious of and more comfortable with their own intuitive abilities. Please see my blog for more about how the blank stare of agents actually guided me to this rewarding work.

Cracked Bat faces what is painful truth for many Gen X women and transforms what must die into new life. The painful truth in the publishing industry today is, fiction that doesn’t “fit in” with what’s out there either dies in a drawer or needs a dynamic new structure to support it.

In Cracked Bat, Linnea Perrault learns to speak her truth in an unreceptive environment. As she embraces her authenticity, she takes responsibility for the outcome of her choices and her actions. In developing her character, I strengthened that part of myself. I didn’t want Cracked Bat to stagnate on a flash drive in my safety deposit box, so I took on the responsibility of creating something new, Ten Pentacles, to bring the book into being.

Authors pitching a book often find themselves in an unreceptive environment and spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to make their creative “babies” conform to a distant other’s vision. It is very dysfunctional to parent the children we birth this way and it’s a disservice to our muse to force the art our “selves” create into a marketer’s take on reality.

Just as writing Cracked Bat led me to choose a more authentic life, I want this novel to live a book’s life that is consistent with its unique energy. I’m still figuring out exactly what that means, but I love being on this path. I love that it was my choice to print on recycled paper and not to ship it out in reams of bubble-wrap. I don’t care that my cover isn’t compatible with what’s on the shelves of the local bookstore today. The fact that my cover is deeply integrated with the story is more important to me than competing with someone else’s image.

Writers with traditional publishers almost never have any say over their book covers at all. I think this is almost abusive. We ought to get to dress our “baby,” the way we want to. I always wanted my cover to have a sleeping beauty on a massage table in the middle of a baseball diamond and I loved brainstorming all the symbolic images that could be embedded in that picture. I knew I wanted the cover to look like a cracked wooden bat and to have lots of red and white on it, like a baseball. I also wanted red, white, and black because I associate these colors with the Triple Goddess. Imagine explaining the need to honor that to someone at a traditional publishing house!

Well, the Universe stepped in to help me get just the look I wanted. Just as I began to consider forming Ten Pentacles, an educational assistant was assigned to my English as a Second Language classroom. She didn’t stay long before being moved to a higher needs assignment, but she was with me long enough to mention that she was a watercolor artist. I asked to see her work and loved it. The rest is history:

Now, at first glance, some people think Cracked Bat is a children’s book. As a former school librarian I can understand the misperception. Was that horrible packaging on my part?

No, I don’t think so. Not for this novel because this book is for people who are willing to take time to look beyond the surface, who go deep, and who can remember the thrill of settling down to let the magic of a fairy tale seep into their psyche.

Of course, I want to sell a million copies of my book, but only so that I could have more time to creative what I want to create. Choosing to self-publish, self-promote, and self-distribute while single-parenting teenagers and teaching full-time does seem to diminish my chances of hitting the bestseller mark.

Yet truly “owning” my story, both literally and figuratively, is far more satisfying than I ever imagined. I love my book so much that I’m actually I’m happy to have boxes full of yet-to-be sold, sealed with joy, and delivered (yes, via USPS) copies stacked all around my writing space. I love its physical manifestation so much that I’m grateful to the bank and glad to write the checks toward paying off the hefty loan I had to take out to get it printed. I can image my dad snickering at my business sense. Go ahead. I can laugh at it, too. I’m lucky enough to have a day job that I love as much as writing.

People always ask me if this was expensive. They ask how I started a company, designed a website, edited, proofed, published, and marketed while going through a major life transition. I know Anne’s readers expect honesty, so here it goes. Financially speaking, I have excellent credit…and I have become quite talented at justifying expenses that help me grow. For about the price of flying to and participating in Maui’s Writer’s Retreat and Conference (which I’ve always wanted to do) and hanging out on the beach for a few extra days (which any new divorcee seems entitled to), I created a company and produced my books. I missed out on the leis, the sand, and the great company, but I’ve got a very significant book in print.

Energetically, I have no idea how I did everything I did to make it happen. At one point, I realized I would never feel fulfilled, no matter how many beautiful seashores I visited or how many more writing classes I took until Cracked Bat was available for people who might want or actually need to read it. All I can say is that I was propelled by the story itself to get it out there. (I also have empathetic, creative sons who cheerfully make their own dinner several nights a week and do their own laundry.)

I truly wish all of Anne’s readers the best of luck in pursuing publication and hope you sell tons of books. But, above all, I urge you to honor your good writing in your heart and then, it will always have the home it really wants.

Janiece Hopper lives in Snohomish, Washington. She met her first garden dwarf on an island in the Pacific Northwest when she was four years old. Thirty years later she met a witch in the same place. As an elementary school teacher, librarian, and book reviewer with an M.Ed. from the University of Washington and a B.A. from California State University, she always struggled with calling fairy tales fiction. Intuit-Lit has resolved her conflict nicely. If Janiece ever goes to another baseball game, she’ll be the woman in the stands, trying to drink a mocha while wearing full catcher’s gear.

Hello, campers –

Okay, I am officially annoyed: someone has had the temerity to write a bad Amazon review of my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK. Which would be a little less odd if the book had ever been released, but as far as I know, not even review copies were ever available.

And I certainly never sent this person a copy of any draft of my manuscript. So what can she possibly be reviewing? The blurb on the Amazon page — which, like pretty much every marketing blurb, was written not by the book’s author, but by the publisher’s marketing department?

Yes, yes, I know: Amazon lists my book as being out of print — limited ability, not as still to be released, which implies that there are a few copies running around out there. Their assertion is technically true, because it was never IN print, but factually inaccurate.

So how did it end up with a listing on Amazon at all? Well, as long-time readers of this blog already know, Carroll & Graf was supposed to publish it in February, 2006 — then May, 2006, then September, 2006 — before the project was permanently put on ice, due to a series of nebulous threats from the Dick estate. Although to the best of my knowledge, they never asked my publisher to make any changes in the book whatsoever, the figure two million dollars was bandied about menacingly.

A right about the same time as the A MILLION LITTLE PIECES scandal broke. That the publisher would balk was inevitable.

I’ve come to peace with all that, mostly: I have faith that the book will eventually come out, even if I have to outlive the naysayers to do it; it’s not as though the audience for it is going to disappear. I know that my memoir is honest; someday, a larger audience will see the story.

In the meantime, I have a life to live and books to write.

Still, it rankles me that someone who apparently hasn’t read the book should review it — and that the review should have come (evidently) from one of Philip’s ex-wives — to be precise, the one three wives after my mother. I don’t even understand why Amazon would ALLOW her to review it, when for over two years now, it apparently hasn’t permitted others who HAVE read drafts of the book to post reviews.

You HAVE already lined up fellow writers to tap out Amazon reviews for you when your first book comes out, right?

What makes me think that this review didn’t filch a stray draft copy to pass judgment upon, you ask? Because her sole stated objection to the book is that I couldn’t possibly have spoken with Philip on the telephone, because, she claims — brace yourselves, because I think this is going to come as a shocker to those hoping to make a career writing science fiction — she and Philip were too poor to afford a phone during their very brief marriage.

Interesting claim. She is presumably referring to the early 70s, when Philip had been publishing his writing successfully for over 15 years, including a little number called THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. It won a Hugo Award in 1963, not an achievement typically associated with a writer’s book sales declining to the point of penury, especially one as prolific as Philip was throughout the 1960s.

But even he had been reduced to living in a treehouse in a public park, my memoir isn’t ABOUT the early 70s, as those happy few who have read the manuscript could tell you. It takes place mostly in the late 70s and early 80s, when Philip and I were indeed talking on the phone a great deal (as were others, some of whom seem to recall having picked up the phone a few years earlier and calling…well, never mind), and the 1950s, when Philip and my mother were married. (The same period when, not entirely coincidentally, he was working with my father, my science fiction-writer uncle was giving him marketing advice, and my godfather was dropping by to play chess…well, you get the picture.)

In other words, I’ve been writing what I know.

In fact, for this critique to be remotely apt, my entire memoir would have to have been devoted to ages 5 to 8 — years which, if memory serves, take up only a small handful of pages in the manuscript at all. Why? Well, I was a precocious child, certainly, but if I was libeling anyone during mid-elementary school, it’s news to me.

Even if there were an honest difference of recollection here (which I don’t think is the case), why this review should wait to bring this up until more than two years after the book in question was supposed to be released mystifies me. Unless she’s planning to write a book of her own?

And don’t even get me started on the irony of someone who has ever been married to an SF/fantasy writer using the term fantasy as an insult about a piece of writing.

Okay — deep breath. I don’t need to get upset over this. But I have to tell you, it did give me a turn to be accused of libel on an Amazon discussion board. (In an apparent effort to leave no stone unturned in discrediting me, the reviewer evidently started a discussion thread. Thorough of her, no?)

Now, to set all of you memoirists’ minds at ease, this is a pretty empty accusation — legally, the dead have no reputations, my lawyer tells me, and thus cannot be libeled. Also, truth is an absolute defense against both libel and slander, and so far, no one who has objected to the book’s publication has shown me — or, to the best of my knowledge, my publisher — any evidence whatseverthat my memories are not grounded in fact. It’s all just been assertions of different points of view.

Which, strange to say, has been hard to get the relevant parties to understand. Contrary to criticisms leveled at some popular memoirists lately, few people’s lives are documented down to the last second. How would you, for instance, prove that everything that happened on your first date actually occurred, in the absence of the other party?

You couldn’t, of course. Welcome to the dilemma of the present-day memoirist.

I can’t even begin to tell you how tired I am of all this — I’ve been defending this book for over three years now, without anyone ever having produced a single tangible reason it shouldn’t be published. Yet until today, as far as I knew, no one had ever even implied that anything about my memoir had broken the law.

Prior to this review, the issues of alternate points of view and who owns personal memories, if not the person herself — both subjects upon which Philip Dick wrote frequently, as it happens — dominated the discussion of my memoir. Now, it seems as though my very memories are being called libelous.

I can’t explain it.

In fact, I wouldn’t be bringing it up at all, except the only reason I found out about this puzzling review at all was that I was double-checking a link in the post below, a little gem on standard format from last December. To be precise, I originally posted it on Philip’s birthday.

Don’t ever say I didn’t do anything for you people; I may never double-check a link again. Enjoy the post.

Many thanks to all of you sweet souls who forwarded me links to the many literary and SF sites out there that commemorated what would have been my good old friend Philip K. Dick’s 79th birthday. This was the first year that I received a whole boatload of these messages, so it was great fun — rather like receiving a flotilla of birthday cards in the mail.

I needed the cheering up, I’m afraid, as usually, I throw a little dinner party on this particular day. Not only out of respect for my first serious writing teacher, but also as a birthday shindig for some of the other great artists born today: Beethoven, Sir Noël Coward, Sir Arthur C. Clarke (of 2001 and CHILDHOOD’S END fame), and of course, Author! Author!’s own beloved, wise auntie, Jane Austen.

You could do worse than to raise a glass to that crowd. But this year, I’ve just been too wiped out to allow anyone but the postman to drop by — and some days, I’m not even up to seeing him.

Thus, no dinner party this year, more’s the pity. I did a little too much last week, so this weekend, all I did was sleep and make groggy suggestions about how to maneuver the Christmas tree in order to make it stand up straight. (Which actually is necessary in our household: due to a truly spectacular bracken-and-cat interaction a few years back, we now tie the top of the tree to a ring firmly attached to the ceiling, so the tree does not need to be completely vertical in order to keep from toppling over.)

But enough about me; let’s talk about you.

While I was incapacitated, a group of my wonderful readers was holding down the fort here, trading tips on how to deal with that pesky problem, how to add a second space between sentences if a writer had mistakenly typed the whole thing thinking there should only be one. If you have even a passing interest in this topic, I implore you, check out the comments on the last two days’ posts; it’s well worth it. (Here’s a link to the first and here’s one tothe second.)

We have only few rules of standard format left to cover in this series, so my first instinct was to use the text of one of Philip’s short stories for the examples. (Seemed appropriate, given that he used to mark deviations from standard format on stories I wrote for school and send them back to me for correction. What 11-year-old girl wouldn’t have loved THAT?) But since fair use permits only 50 consecutive words in a quote without explicit permission from the copyright holder, and the copyright holders in his case have a nasty habit of waving $2 million lawsuits in my general direction (and my quondam publisher’s) every time I so much as breathe his name, that didn’t seem entirely wise.

So I thought, in honor of the day, I would use a little something that I am undoubtedly entitled to reproduce here. Here is the first page of Chapter Six of my memoir:

Every chapter should begin like this: on a fresh page, 12 single lines (or 6 double-spaced) from the top.

As with the first page of text, the only reference to the author’s name or the title should appear in the slug line, located in the upper left-hand margin. (And in answer to reader Janet’s intelligent question: the slug line should appear .5 inches from the top of the paper, floating within the 1-inch-deep top margin. I can’t believe I never mentioned that before.) The page number belongs within it, rather than anywhere else on the page.

The slug line confuses a lot of aspiring writers; until you have seen piles and piles of professional manuscripts, it looks kind of funny, doesn’t it? And when you’ve been told over and over again that a manuscript should have a 1-inch margin on all sides, it can seem counterintuitive to add a line of text, even such a short one, IN that margin.

But I assure you, it’s always been done that way. And why? Followers of this series, chant it with me now: BECAUSE IT LOOKS RIGHT.

Yes, that logic IS tautological, now that you mention it. If you have a problem with that, I would suggest taking it up with the powers that rule the universe. I, as I believe the reference above to my memoir’s troubled path makes abundantly clear, apparently do not rule the universe.

If I did, today would be a holiday for every writer on the planet. Especially the ones who are having trouble getting their work published, like, oh, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, and Jane Austen all did at the beginning of their fiction careers.

I just mention.

Back to business. Placing the slug line in the header (located in Word under the VIEW menu) also enables the writer to take advantage of one of the true boons of the advent of word processing, pages that number themselves. Every so often, I will receive a manuscript where the author has, with obviously monumental effort, typed a slug line onto the first line of TEXT of each page, so it looks like this:

See how pulling the slug line down into the text messes with the spacing of the page? An entire line of text is sacrificed to it — and let me tell you, that line is not going to go quietly.

Why not? Well, what’s going to happen if new writing is inserted on a page formatted this way? That’s right: the author is going to have to go back and move each and every one of those slug lines to match the NEW pagination.

I’d show you a picture of this, but it’s just too ugly to contemplate. Trust me, it would be a heck of a lot of work.

See any other problems with this page? How about the fact that the slug line includes the word PAGE? Shouldn’t be there; just the numbers will suffice.

Did I just hear some huffs of indignation out there? “But Anne,” I hear the formatting-ambitious cry, “it’s kind of stylish to include PAGE before the page number, isn’t it? It’s just a matter of personal style — who could be hurt by including it, if I like the way it looks?”

Well, you, for starters. And why? (Chanters, ready your lungs.) BECAUSE IT JUST WOULD NOT LOOK RIGHT TO A PROFESSIONAL READER.

I’m quite serious about this; I’ve seen screeners get quite huffy about this one. “Does this writer think I’m STUPID?” Millicent is prone to huff. (Don’t answer that question; it’s rhetorical.) “Does she think I DON’T know that the numeral that appears on every page refers to the number of pages? Does she think I’m going to go nuts and suddenly decide that it is a statistic, or part of the title?”

Don’t bait her. Do it the standard way.

Okay, did you spot any other problems? What about the fact that the first paragraph of the chapter is not indented, and the first character is in a different typeface?

The odd typeface for the first letter, in imitation of the illuminated texts hand-written by monks in the Middle Ages, doesn’t turn up all that often in manuscripts other than fantasy and YA, for one simple reason: books in that category are more likely to feature this it’s-a-new-chapter signal than others. But once again, what an editor may decide, rightly or wrongly, is appropriate for a published book has no bearing upon what Millicent expects to see in a manuscript.

Save the bells and whistles for someone who will appreciate them. Hop in your time machine and track down a medieval monk to admire your handiwork, if you like, but in this timeframe, keep the entire manuscript in the same typeface and size.

The non-indented first paragraph of a chapter is fairly common in mystery submissions, I have noticed. I’ve been told by many mystery writers that this is an homage to the great early writers in the genre, an echo of their style.

But you know what? Almost without exception, in Edgar Allan Poe’s time all the way down to our own, the EDITOR has determined the formatting that appeared on any given printed page, not the author. To professional eyes, especially peevish ones like Millicent’s, a manuscript that implicitly appropriates this sort of decision as authorial might as well be the first step to the writer’s marching into Random House, yanking off a well-worn riding glove, and striking the editor-in-chief with it.

Yes, you read that correctly: it’s sometimes seen as a challenge to editorial authority. And while we could speculate for the next week about the level of insecurity that would prompt regarding a minor formatting choice as a harbinger of incipient insurrection, is the manuscript of your first book REALLY the right place to engender that discussion?

Exactly.

If you want to make Millicent and her bosses happy — or, at any rate, to keep them reading calmly — indent every paragraph of the text should the expected five spaces. It just looks right that way.

While we’re at it, how about the bolded chapter number and title? Nothing in a manuscript should be in boldface. Nothing, I tell you. Uh-uh. Not ever.

Well, you could get away with the title itself on the tile page, but frankly, I wouldn’t chance it.

Nor should anything be underlined — not even names of books or song titles. Instead, they should be italicized, as should words in foreign tongues that are not proper nouns.

I heard that gigantic intake of breath out there from those of you who remember constructing manuscripts on typewriters: yes, Virginia, back in the day, underlining WAS the norm, for the simple reason that most typewriters did not have italic keys.

If you consult an older list of formatting restrictions, you might conceivably be told that publications, song titles, and/or foreign words (sacre bleu!) should be underlined. But trust me on this one: any agent would tell you to get rid of the underlining, pronto.

And why? All together now: because IT JUST DOESN’T LOOK RIGHT THAT WAY.

All right, campers, do you feel ready to fly solo? Here are two pages of text, studded with standard format violations for your ferreting-out pleasure. (I wrote these pages, too, in case anyone is worried about copyright violation or is thinking about suing me over it. Hey, stranger things have happened.)

How did you do? Are those problems just leaping off the page at you now? To reward you for so much hard work, here are a couple of correctly-formatted pages, to soothe your tired eyes:

Whenever you start finding yourself chafing at the rules of standard format, come back and take a side-by-side gander at these last sets of examples — because, I assure you, after a professional reader like Millicent has been at it even a fairly short time, every time she sees the bad example, mentally, she’s picturing the good example right next to it.

And you know what? Manuscripts that look right get taken more seriously than those that don’t. And regardless of how you may feel about Millicent’s literary tastes, isn’t a serious read from her what you want for your book?

Keep up the good work!

Hello, campers –

Well, I’m feeling a little better today, you’ll be happy to hear (or at least I hope you will be), enough so to spend half an hour reading my local newspaper. And what should I see but that Arleen Williams, memoirist and long-time reader of this blog, is going to be reading at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, WA tonight at 7 pm!

What a treat. I think I’m going to try to make this my first evening out in weeks. I know that it’s short notice, but if you happen to be in the area, why not join me there?

For those of you who missed my gushing about The Thirty-Ninth Vicitim when it came out last spring, I can do no better than to quote my Amazon review (not a place I post reviews very often):

Oh, my, what a disturbing memoir this is. Not solely because of the murder of the author’s sister by the infamous Green River Killer — which would be plenty creepy enough for any true crime book, or even murder mystery — but because Arleen Williams presents us with an achingly honest look at absence, longing, and denial within a family waiting years for what the media dismissively calls closure.

What struck me most about this story is that, unlike so many books about particularly horrific crimes, the victim here comes alive on the page. Not as yet another in an almost unimaginably long list of murdered women (so long, in fact, that it sparked the nationwide Take Back the Night rallies) or as merely an object to be acted upon with violence, but as a vibrant light abruptly, inconceivably snuffed. And as part of a family so deeply attached to its own self-image as normal that not even a daughter’s disappearance is allowed to disrupt it.

Powerful stuff. Chilling. (And yes, for you fans of close-up crime recreations, there was one scene that I’m quite positive is going to give me nightmares for years to come.)

In light of my upcoming unwonted (lately, at least) energy expenditure, I’m going to conserve my resources and post today’s re-run as much as is as I can. Enjoy!

No, the statue is not a Christmas angel, but rather Nike, the winged goddess of victory, bringing a laurel wreath for reader ACD, who will be famed in song and story forevermore for the comment she posted on yesterday’s blog. Why? Because she, clever soul, wrote in with a method for using Word’s Find and Replace feature to change single spaces between sentences into double spaces within sentences. And if that’s not an achievement worthy of a laurel leaf or two, I should like to know what is.

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the artist’s original intent with this particular statue (which comes to us courtesy of FreeFoto.com), but some celebration seemed appropriate, no?

And if THAT isn’t enough to meet whatever standard you may be cherishing for what constitutes a reason to initiate dancing in the streets, long-time reader, prolific commenter, and computer whiz Chris has once again gone far above and beyond the call of duty and written an entire blog post on the subject.

Thanks, Chris and ACD. Laurel leaves all around!

All week, I have been running through the strictures of standard manuscript format and some common deviations from it, to demonstrate just how clearly our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, discerns the differences. And let me tell you, at the end of a long day’s reading, they definitely jump out at her, and with good reason: once a professional reader gets used to seeing the similarities that pretty much all professional manuscripts share, submissions formatted in other ways might as well have UNPROFESSIONAL stamped on them in bright red ink.

And while Millicent may strive valiantly NOT to allow that impression to color her reading of the submission itself, it’s just not a good idea to assume that it won’t. She’s only human, after all.

It’s an even worse idea to assume a charitable reading for a contest entry, by the way. If anything, contest judges tend to be even more sensitive to the beauty of standard format than Millicent, for the simple reason that they’ve usually been reading a whole lot longer. The agency gig may well be Millie’s first job out of college, but the judge handed your entry may well have just retired from a long and fruitful career teaching English composition. Her fingers ache for the red pen of correction.

Then, too, most well-respected contests require some professional credentials from their judges, either as writers, editors, or teachers. Which means, in practice, that judges have often been writing in standard format themselves for years or bludgeoning other writers into compliance with its requirements.

To put it another way, other kinds of formatting won’t look right to them, either. By now, you’re probably having a similar reaction, aren’t you?

Don’t think so? Or don’t want to believe you could conceivably share any traits with Millicent? Let’s test the proposition by trying a little Aphra Behn on for size.

If you don’t know her work, you should, at least historically: as far as we know, she was the first woman paid for writing in English. (She’s also hilarious.) Here is a page from THE FAIR JILT (1688):

You could tell instantly that there was something wrong here, couldn’t you, and not just because Miranda’s trying to seduce her priest? (For convent, read monastery.) Set aside her practically Dickensian affection for semicolons for the moment — which would tend to turn off a modern Millicent pretty quickly — and try to tote up in your mind all of the deviations from standard format.

To refresh your memory and gladden your now-sharpened eyes, here’s what it should have looked like:

Got your list of problems in hand? Let’s take the problems on the first version from the top of the page: the incorrect version does not have a proper slug line. (For those of you joining us late, a slug line is AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/PAGE #, repeated on every page of the text.)

Seeing this lone page out of context, it’s quite obvious why a slug line is a dandy idea, isn’t it? Without a slug line, it would be virtually impossible to return this wandering page back into the manuscript from whence it came. “Who wrote this?” Millicent cries in ire, glaring around her cubicle at the 47 manuscripts lying there. “It could be from any of these!”

At least Ms. Behn thought to number the pages of Example #1 — but did you catch the problem with how she did it? The page number is in the bottom right-hand margin, not in the slug line, where it belongs.

Did you catch any other difficulties? What about the 10-point type, which will strain Millicent’s already overworked eyes? Or the Ariel typeface? There is nothing inherently wrong with either, but when she’s used to see practically every manuscript that heads out of the agency to publishing houses in 12-point Times New Roman, it (chant it with me here) just doesn’t look right.

Anything else? What about that right margins? Mighty straight, isn’t it? That look proper to you?

It’s called block-justification, and it’s another problem that can be laid squarely at the feet of those who insist that a manuscript and a published book should be identical. The text in many published books, and certainly in many magazines and newspapers, is spaced so that each line begins at exactly the same distance from the left-hand edge of the page and ends (unless it’s the last line of a paragraph) at exactly the same distance from the right-hand edge of the page.

Which, to let you in on why this type of neatness bugs professional readers, renders skimming quite a bit more difficult. Fewer landmarks, as it were; to the glancing eye, practically every line of narrative text resembles every other. To those of us used to the ragged right margins and even letter spacing of standard format, it’s actually kind of hard to read.

So there’s quite a bit in Example #1 that’s distracting, isn’t there? Doesn’t help sell the text, does it?

Okay, all of these rhetorical questions are beginning to make me dizzy, so I’m going to wind down for the day. But before I do, let’s take one more look at Example #2, the one Millicent and a contest judge would like:

Now, let’s take a gander at the same page in — ugh — business format:

Startlingly different, isn’t it, considering that I made only two formatting changes? (In case you missed one or the other, all I did was I eliminate the indentations at the beginning of each paragraph and skipped a line between paragraphs.) This, of course, is the norm for business correspondence, as well as for most of the text currently posted on the Internet.

Including this blog. As a professional writer and reader of manuscripts, it drives me NUTS that my blogging program won’t allow me to indent paragraphs.

Why? Because it just doesn’t look right. So much so that in a contest entry, business formatting is often grounds all by itself for knocking a manuscript out of finalist consideration.

Finding yourself asking why again? Well, to a professional reader, the differences between the last two examples would be more than visually jarring — they’d be downright confusing. In standard format, the only reason for a skipped line between paragraphs would be a section break, so Millicent would be expecting the second paragraph to be about something new.

Okay, so a misconception like that might distract her attention for only few consecutive seconds, but let’s not kid ourselves: Millicent is spending less than a minute on most of the submissions she rejects — it’s actually not all that uncommon for her not to make into the second or third paragraph before reaching for the SASE and a copy of that annoying form rejection letter.

Take a moment for the implications of that to sink in fully. Don’t worry; I’ll wait.

Time loss is not the only reason she might take umbrage at momentary confusion. Let me let you in on a little secret: professional readers, especially those who inhabit agencies and publishing houses, are not overly fond of having their mental image of the story they are reading at the moment jarred.

How do I know this? Well, for one thing, they commonly refer to it as being tricked. As in, “I hate being tricked by a first paragraph that is about someone other than the protagonist.”

There’s a practical basis to this dislike, of course, but it’s kind of complicated. I wrote a couple of fairly extensive posts on the subject last year (here’s a link to the first, and here’s a link to the second, in case you’re interested), but I’ll run over the thumbnail version now.

Comfortably seated?

To get through all of those manuscripts she’s assigned to screen each week, Millicent has to read quite quickly. If she decides to pass a manuscript on to the next level, she is going to need to be able to tell her boss what the book is about: who the protagonist is, what the conflict is, and why that conflict is important enough to the protagonist for the reader to be drawn into it.

Basically, she’s going to need to be able to pitch it to the higher-ups at the agency, just as the agent is going to have to do in order to sell the book to an editor, and an editor is going to have to do in order to convince HIS higher-ups that the publishing house should acquire the book. And, often, as first-round contest judges will need to do on an evaluation form in order to pass an entry onto the next round.

Okay, brace yourself, because explaining what comes next involves delving into one of the great cosmic mysteries. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Remember earlier in the week, when I mentioned that agents and editors don’t read like other people? Well, one of the primary differences is that from line one of page one, they’re already imagining how they’re going to pitch this book.

So if paragraph 2 or 3 (or page 2 or 3) suddenly informs them that their mental patter has been about the wrong character, they feel as if they’ve been backing the wrong horse.

And while there may have been any number of perfectly reasonable narrative reasons for the text to concentrate upon an alternate character for the opening, unless the writing AND the story have already really wowed Millicent, her resentment about being trickedwrong about the identity of the protagonist is often sufficient to make her reach for that SASE and form letter.

Feel free to go scream into a pillow over that last piece of logic; you don’t want to keep that kind of existential cri de coeur pent up inside. I’ll wait until it’s out of your system.

Feel better? Good.

Before you go rushing off to see if your opening paragraphs might possibly be open to an interpretation of trickery — because, for instance, you might have taken the bold authorial step of noticing that there is more than one human being in the world, and reported a piece of action accordingly — let’s return to the formatting issue that prompted my little segue into the psychology of resentment. Can we extrapolate any practical lesson about business format from it?

You bet your boots we can: it’s not a good idea to give the impression of a section break where there isn’t one.

There’s a lot more psychodrama than one might think involved with these formatting choices, isn’t there? I’ll wrap up this series next time, to spare us further emotional toll. Keep up the good work!

Hello, campers –

I’m still under the weather (which, in a Seattle summer, could mean being oppressed by either sunny heat or chilly grayness, sometimes within the same day), but since my sniffles have been providing me with a dandy excuse to re-run some extremely practical posts on how to format a manuscript professionally. Even if you are a long-time Author! Author! reader, and thus have seen me run over these points before or do not anticipate being ready to submit anytime this year, PLEASE do not just skip these posts — everyone could use a refresher from time to time.

Trust me, your future agent will be really, really glad that you did, because literally every page s/he will be submitting to the editor of your dreams — be it manuscript, book proposal, or synopsis — will need to be in standard format.

Or, to put it another way: of the pieces of paper you might be conceivably be sending an agent or editor, only query letters and e-mails AREN’T expected to be in standard format. (Don’t worry; I’ll be showing you how to format a query letter next week.) So it really will save you time in the long run if you just write everything from first draft to final revision in standard format.

As you may gather from the Yuletide references throughout, I originally wrote this as Christmastime, but actually, the Cratchit family analogy works surprisingly well for this time of year, too: since most of the NYC-based publishing industry goes on vacation about this time of year (basically, from now through Labor Day), the Millicent who gets left behind to mind the store in muggy midtown might well feel Scrooge-oppressed just now.

Think she’s grumpy to be left alone with all of those piles of paper? Or, if she’s one of the lucky most scurrying out of the office right about now, imagine her state of mind upon returning September 2 to find her desk buried in enough submissions to wallpaper her entire floor — and enough piled-up query letters to build a cabin larger than her Brooklyn apartment.

Not a pretty picture, is it?

Even if you aren’t in the habit of empathizing with people who reject writers for a living, there’s a good self-interested reason you should care about her state of mind right about now: even with the best will in the world, grumpy and/or rushed readers tend to be harder to please than cheerful, well-rested ones.

Not a bad excuse to hold off on sending her anything, be it query letter or requested materials, until after Labor Day, is it?

For the last couple of days, I’ve been pursuing the dual goals of trying to show you just how obvious it is to a professional reader when a submission ISN’T in standard manuscript format (as opposed to being set up to ape the format of published books) and to drum up a little holiday sympathy for Millicent, everybody’s favorite agency screener.

She’s the Tiny Tim of the literary world, you know; at least the Bob Cratchits a little higher up on the office totem pole get paid, but our Millie often doesn’t. Even if she’s not an intern, she’s still unlikely to be paid very much. Her hours are typically long, and quite a lot of what she reads in the course of her day is, let’s face it, God-awful.

Yes, that thought that suddenly sprang into your mind is precisely right: rejecting queries and manuscripts by the score IS considered on-the-job training for a fledgling agent, in much the same way as an editorial assistant’s screening manuscripts at a publishing houses is the stepping-stone to becoming an editor.

You didn’t think determining a manuscript’s literary merits after just a few lines of text was a skill that came naturally, did you?

The aspiring writer’s learning curve is often not dissimilar to Millicent’s, actually: no one is born knowing the rules of manuscript formatting. (Okay, so I practically was, growing up around so many writers, but I’ma rare exception.) Like Millicent, most of us learn the ropes only through reading a great deal.

She has the advantage over us, though: she gets to read books in manuscript form, and most aspiring writers, especially at the beginning of their journeys to publication, read mostly books. The format is, as I believe that I have pointed out, oh, several hundred times before in this very forum, quite different.

So what writers tend to produce in their early submissions are essentially imitations of books. The problem is, there are many reasons that a manuscript in book format would be hard for an agent or editor to handle — and not merely because the individual pages would appear unprofessional to Millicent.

For starters, published books are printed on both sides of the page, manuscripts on one. Why the difference, in these days of declining tree populations and editors huffily informing writers at conferences that paper is expensive?

Simple: it’s easier to edit that way.

Believe it or not, even in these days of widely available word processors, most professional editing is still done by hand. Why? Well, it’s hard to give trenchant feedback while traveling in a crowded subway car if you have to maneuver a laptop, and many agencies remain far too virus-fearful to allow their employees solicit attachments from writers who aren’t already clients. (Those who do generally have a policy that forbids the opening of unsolicited attachments.) Even in agencies that have caved in to new technology sufficiently to send their member agents on long airplane flights to writers’ conferences armed with a Kindle with 17 manuscripts on it, hand-commenting is still the norm, even if it means scanning hand-proofed pages and e-mailing them back to the author.

Ultimately, most editors edit in hard copy because they prefer it. The human eye is, of course, to blame for this: reading comprehension drops by about 70% when the material is presented on a computer screen; the eye tends to skim.

Which is why — you can hear this coming, can’t you? — a wise writer always reads her ENTIRE manuscript IN HARD COPY before submitting it to anyone even vaguely affiliated with the publishing industry. It’s much, much easier to catch typos and logic problems that way.

In case anyone has missed the last two weeks’ worth of posts,manuscripts should also be typed (don’t laugh; it’s not unheard-of for diagrams to be hand-drawn in submissions, or for late-caught typos to be corrected in pen), double-spaced, and have 1-inch margins all the way around.

Time to see why, from an editing point of view. To call upon our old friend Dickens again, a page of a manuscript should look like this:

To give you some idea of just how difficult — or even impossible — it would be to hand-edit a manuscript that was NOT double-spaced or had smaller margins, take a gander at this little monstrosity:

Reader-hostile, isn’t it? Millicent would reject a submission like this immediately, without reading so much as a word.

Why? Well, even with nice, empty page backs upon which to scrawl copy edits, trying to cram spelling or grammatical changes between those lines would be well-nigh impossible. Knowing that, Millicent would never dream of passing such a manuscript along to the agent who employs her; to do so would be to invite a stern and probably lengthy lecture on the vicissitudes of the editorial life.

Don’t tempt her just to reject it unread — and don’t, I beg you, provide the same temptation to a contest judge. Given the sheer volume of submissions they read, they’re not all that likely to resist.

Even if the sum total of the provocation consists of a manuscript that’s shrunk to, say, 95% of the usual size.

You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, past contest entrants and submitters who wanted to squeeze in a particularly exciting scene before the end of those requested 50 pages? Faced with a hard-and-fast page limit for submission, some wily writers will shrink the font or the margins, to shoehorn a few more words onto each page. After all, who is going to notice a tenth of an inch sliced off a left or right margin, or notice that the typeface is a trifle smaller than usual?

Millicent will notice, that’s who, and practically instantly. As will any reasonably experienced contest judge; after hours on end of reading 12-point type within 1-inch margins, a reader develops a visceral sense of when something is off.

Don’t believe me? Go back and study today’s first example, the correctly formatted average page. Then take a look at this:

I shaved only one-tenth of an inch off each margin and shrunk the text by 5% — far less than most fudgers attempt. Yet admit it — you can tell it’s different, can’t you, even without whipping out a ruler?

So could a professional reader. And let me tell you, neither the Millicents of this world nor the contest judges tend to appreciate attempts to trick them into extraneous reading. Next!

The same principle applies, incidentally, to query letters: often, aspiring writers, despairing of fitting a coherent summary of their books within the standard single page, will shrink the margins or typeface.

Trust me, someone who reads queries all day, every day, will be able to tell.

The other commonly-fudged spacing technique involves skipping only one space after periods and colons, rather than the grammatically-requisite two spaces. Frequently, writers won’t even realize that this IS fudging: ever since published books began omitting these spaces in order to save paper, I’ve seen a theory propounded all over the Internet (and sometimes even in writing classes, where the teachers should know better) claiming that skipping the extra space is obsolete. Frequently, the proponents will insist that manuscripts that include the space look old-fashioned to agents and editors.

Well, guess what: standard manuscript format IS old-fashioned, by definition; that fact doesn’t seem to stop anyone in the industry for using it. In fact, in all of my years writing and editing, I have never — not once — seen a manuscript rejected or even criticized for including the two spaces that English prose requires after a period or colon.

I have, however, heard endless complaint from professional readers — myself included — about those second spaces being omitted. Care to guess why?

Reward yourself with a virtual candy cane if you said that cutting those spaces throws off word count estimation; the industry estimates assume those doubled spaces. And give yourself twelve reindeer if you also suggested that omitting them renders a manuscript harder to hand-edit.

We all know the lecture Millicent is likely to get if she forgets about that, right?

Again, a pro isn’t going to have to look very hard at a space-deprived page to catch on that there’s something fishy going on. Since Dickens was so fond of half-page sentences, the examples I’ve been using above won’t illustrate this point very well, so (reaching blindly into the depths of the bookshelf next to my computer), let’s take a random page out of Elizabeth Von Arnim’s VERA:

There are 310 words on this page; I wasn’t kidding the other day about how far off the standard word count estimations were, obviously. Now cast your eye over the same text improperly formatted:

Doesn’t look much different to the naked eye, does it? The word count is only slightly lower on this version of this page — 295 words — but enough to make quite a difference over the course of an entire manuscript.

So I see some hands shooting up out there? “But Anne,” I hear some sharp-eyed readers cry, “wasn’t the word count lower because there was an entire line missing from the second version?”

Well spotted, criers-out: the natural tendency of omitting the second spaces would be to include MORE words per page, not less. But not spacing properly between sentences was not the only deviation from standard format here; Millicent, I assure you, would have caught two others.

I tossed a curve ball in here, to make sure you were reading as closely as she was. Wild guesses? Anyone? Anyone?

The error that chopped the word count was a pretty innocent one, almost always done unconsciously: the writer did not turn off the widow/orphan control, found in Word under FORMAT/PARAGRAPH/LINE AND PAGE BREAKS. This insidious little function, the default unless one changes it, prevents single lines of multi-line paragraphs from getting stranded on either the bottom of one page of the top of the next.

As you may see, keeping this function operational results in an uneven number of lines per page. Which, over the course of an entire manuscript, is going to do some serious damage to the word count.

The other problem — and frankly, the one that would have irritated a contest judge far more, but probably Millicent slightly less — was on the last line of the page: using an emdash (“But—“) instead of a doubled dash. Here again, we see that the standards that apply to printed books are not proper for manuscripts.

Which brings me back to today’s moral: just because a particular piece of formatting looks right to those of us who have been reading books since we were three doesn’t mean that it is correct in a MANUSCRIPT.

Millicent reads manuscripts all day; contest judges read entries for hours at a time. After a while, a formatting issue that might well not even catch a lay reader’s attention can begin to seem gargantuan.

As I pointed out yesterday, if the writing is good, it deserves to be free of distracting formatting choices. You want agents, editors, and contest judges to be muttering, “Wow, this is good,” over your manuscript, not “Oh, God, he doesn’t know the rules about dashes,” don’t you?

Spare Millicent the chagrin, please; both you and she will be the happier for it. Keep up the good work!