Flashing Swords

Manuscript Formatting

Courtesy of Joseph Benedetto

Manuscripts must be typed on plain white paper, one side only, and double-spaced, with your name and address in the top left-hand corner of the first page. A telephone number and e-mail address must be included as well, in case we need to get in touch with you prior to the meeting.

Use COURIER for the entire work: text of the story, headers, title, byline, everything. You should have only Courier and no other font anywhere in your manuscript.

Use a 1-inch margin around the text, for the top, bottom, left and right margins. Do NOT make the margin larger or smaller. Conformity makes the manuscript transparent, so that good writing stands out. There is no separate title page.

Word Count:

[Version A] count the number of lines in your story (including the "blank" lines that indicate scene breaks); multiply that number by 10. This is your rough word count. Round it up/down to the nearest hundred–for example: 2340 becomes 2300. Put this number in the upper right-hand corner of page 1.

[Version B] highlight the text ONLY and then click on the WORD COUNT button. This is your exact word count. Round it up/down to the nearest hundred, so that, for example, 2347 becomes 2300. Put this number in the upper right-hand corner of page 1.

Directly below the word count, write "Science Fiction", "Fantasy", "Horror" or whatever genre your story is. This is a courtesy to the group, as well as to a magazine that publishes more than one genre within its covers. If your manuscript is disposable (and these days it probably will be) put the words "Disposable Manuscript" below the word count/genre listing. You can place this phrase in Boldface to make it stand out clearer. Do not justify the right-hand margin.

There is no Header on page 1. Center the title halfway down the first page and type it in ALL CAPS, then drop one double-space below that for your byline, and two double spaces below that you can start your story.

Scene breaks

A scene break is that blank line in a story where one part ends, and then we change place or time and start up the story anew. You indicate a scene break to the editor by putting a blank double-spaced line between your paragraphs, and mark the blank line as such by inserting a centered octothorpe (#) in the middle of it. To wit~

Pagination

Every page after page one must be numbered in the upper right-hand corner as a part of the Header. Page One does NOT get numbered, as it is obviously the first page. Indent each paragraph five spaces. Do not leave 1-line spaces between paragraphs!

Widows & Orphans

The number of lines per page should be uniform. A common mistake we see is leaving "Widows & Orphans" feature in your word processor ON. It tries to keep short paragraphs from breaking across the bottom and top of consecutive pages by shoving the entire paragraph down onto the next page–leaving an ugly extra blank space of one, two or more "missing" lines at the bottom of the effected page. This throws off the editor's estimate of how long your story really is. Make sure that W&O is OFF so that the number of lines per page is the same on all pages.

Smart Quotes/Curly Quotes

Standard Manuscript Format requires that quotation marks and apostrophes NOT be "smart" or "curly". Smart Quotes are curved in shape and have different opening and closing versions for the beginning and end of quoted material. You want to use Straight Quotes, which simply go straight up and down. The same is true of the apostrophe mark–you want a straight one, not one that is angled. The easiest way to handle this is to go to the Preferences Menu of your word processing program and turn OFF the "smart quotes" feature.

While you are there, also turn OFF the function that replaces…

• Ordinals (1st) with Superscripts (1^st)
• Fractions (1/2) with fraction characters (½)
• Hypens (--) with dashes (–)
• Typed Italics replaced by Actual formatted Italics.

You ALWAYS want to use actual Ordinals (1st), Fractions (1/2), Hyphens (–) and Underline for Italics in standard manuscript formatting.

Typos

Run through your work and spell-check it on the computer… and then do a visual run-through yourself, without relying on the spell checker. Every typo helps you get rejected, so don't trust the machine to find the errors; hunt them down yourself.

I STRONGLY suggest that you take a look at William Shunn's *excellent* website

http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html

for a practical example of standard manuscript format. If you follow it you won't go wrong.

AND at the end of your story, always type END so that we know that the story has ended. YOU might think it is obvious that the story has ended, but trust us, WE often don't, especially if it happens at the bottom of a page – more than once, WorD members have waved the last page at the writer and asked "was there more? It felt like there should be, and I thought that maybe I lost the last page…" You don't want us to think you accidentally left off the last page, do you?

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Sheesh! Is all this format stuff really that important?

Yes.

To begin with, it proves that you can read–and follow–submission guidelines. Surprisingly few people can, and their ignorance (or arrogance) regarding the need to follow the rules is one thing that tells an editors that this person's work is likely not good enough to publish.

The famous literary agent Scott Meredith called the manuscript "Your attractive merchandise," the item that lets the editor know, before he's even read it, if he is dealing with an amateur (whose work will almost always be awful and unpublishable) or with a professional writer (whose work may well be enjoyable and publishable). If your manuscript looks crappy, or sloppy, or amateurish, the editor is going to look at it with a cursory your-fate-is-already-decided mindset.

Call it a psychological advantage if you want, but a professional-looking manuscript can mean the difference between a prejudiced and an unprejudiced reading of your work… and nothing that gives you that kind of advantage over other writers can be regarded as minor or unimportant.

So… does a professional-looking manuscript automatically get you published? No!

Okay… so does a sloppy manuscript automatically get you rejected? It can. And even if it does not rate an automatic rejection, it influences the editor against wanting to accept your work, because of the effort he'll have to put into correcting the work for you.

Be aware that editors get far more manuscripts than they can use. The average editor rejects 95 or more out of every 100 manuscripts he sees. Thus, editors spend FAR more time rejecting manuscripts than they do accepting them! So when they are reading your story, they are not so much looking to see if it is publishable, but rather are looking for any reason to reject it now, and let them get onto the next story in the slushpile. Anything that makes the job of rejecting a manuscript easier means one less manuscript the editor has to read all the way through to the end just to find out it was, as he suspected all along, not good enough to be publishable.

Is this unfair? Hardly. The editor has learned from bitter experience that a writer who has not bothered to learn something as easy as properly formatting a manuscript also hasn't learned how to do all those other neat things like tell a good story, create fleshed-out characters, and build tension and suspense. No one knows for certain how many good stories are passed over because the manuscripts containing them are formatted poorly, but it is a dead certainty that a properly formatted manuscript will be more eagerly read by an editor than a poorly formatted one.

Proper manuscript format is easy to learn, and once learned, never forgotten. It never hurts your work, and certainly can help it.

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Website © 2008 Flashing Swords. A Daverana Enterprises publication.