August 24, 2023 Carol Brennan King

Well, Readers, thanks for hanging in there. As a writer, you understand that sometimes, you have to keep your nose to the grindstone…or the most demanding of your projects.

For me, that means finishing and pitching the book I have been working on for more than three years: Leaving Ireland. It all started back in Ireland in the 1840’s, or technically twenty years earlier when John Brennan and his wife Johannah married and started their family. But more about that later.

The Potato Famine of the 1840s ultimately halved the population of Ireland, killing a million or more, and driving another million away. But enough about all that.

To the meat of this blog: there is more than the story you must write, whatever that story is – a fantasy or other-worldly creation or the real thing with people and places that have touched your life. Either way, you must know your characters, who they were before the first page, who they are now, what they did, where they lived, and how did the events of this story change them. And you must know all of that before the story takes place. Remember our discussion many months ago about story arc? If your story has no arc or changes in the characters from the opening to the ending of your story, it will be summed up easily: boring.

So there’s that.

On another note, did you know that agents and publishers expect your manuscript to meet their criteria? You can’t just use whatever size and type of font that rings your bell. You can’t use color to help you make your point. BECAUSE before you send that baby in, it has to meet the publisher or agent’s standards. So check them out and use those standards to write your story.

You may save yourself a lot of time at the other end of the writing – if you spend the time getting it right up front. Just check out https://www.scribophile.com/academy/how-to-format-a-novel-manuscript

Maybe some of you remember those days in high school where a friend of yours used 14pt type for his research paper because he could get to 10 pages quicker. Or maybe it was the font. Some fonts are bigger naturally than others. But the people that count want your work in 12 point font…and generally Times New Roman or TNR.

About that taking up space thing: your manuscript needs to be aligned to the left with the right side ragged or not justified. I can hear it now, “But if I justify both edges, it looks better,” or “I get more pages faster. ” The problem is the guys who will buy your work won’t, if you cannot follow basic expectations.

Then there’s that hit the tab key for new paragraphs. The people that count want you to indent each paragraph by half an inch (1.25cm.) Don’t do this by hitting the tab key; instead, set indentation in Word using the Format → Paragraph → Section menu, or see this tutorial.

Oh, there’s more. You get 15 tips at https://www.scribophile.com/academy/how-to-format-a-novel-manuscript

I encourage you to do it right the first time as you are writing. Don’t be like me who slaved over a 290-word manuscript writing it the way I wanted to, and now it feels like it is taking forever just to correct my layout errors.

However, if you are writing poetry. Forget everything I just said. I went to a poetry class a couple of weeks ago and learned that you can arrange your words in all kinds of strange ways for poetry. You just have to construct it in such a way that your reader gets the message you wanted to send. Like this thing I wrote a week ago when it happened.

He sat there

in front of the stone wall

on the ground

his legs folded up

eyes lazy

like I was not worth the time

to look at.

I put the window down

He never moved

just his eyelashes

so I would know he was alive

or was he saying

I wasn’t,

I was the one

not alive

I was the one still wanting

By the way: You can see him at the top of this post.

CBK