Novel Formatting in MS Word

A poorly formatted document is the first thing that signals an Editor to recycle your novel. Imagine an editor's job for a minute: he's reading one submission, trying to move at his own pace as the slush pile gets bigger by the minute, novels rolling in from E-mail, postal service, and fax. (This actually happened to an editor pal of mine; 180 pages rolled off the fax machine while he was out of the office. Hint: faxing your novel is rude, and probably puts your name on a blacklist somewhere.) Editors spend hours and hours every day looking at documents they've requested from professionals and colleagues, gazing their eyes over crisp typeface and well formatted paragraphs. Then they turn to the ever growing slush pile - the unsolicited documents - and see a size seven wing-ding font bleeding off into the margins that they know they mentioned in the writer's guidelines. The best first sentence on earth won't save this document from the recycling bin.

MS Word is the most common word processor out there, so we're going to talk about how to use it to format your novel. The first thing you need to do is look at your target publisher's guidelines. If they provide detailed instructions on how to format your novel: obey. One well known short story publisher insists that submissions come electronically, in ASCII format. Usually, however, the guidelines are loose, telling you only a few simple things, such as "double space it" and "please use a size twelve font." Little do they realize that these loose guidelines leave room for all sorts of formatting horrors.

In MS Word, go to FILE | PAGE SETUP. Click on the PAPER tab. Make sure that you're using the "letter" formatting option, or that your margins are 8.5" by 11". This is the default setting - but we're talking about a Microsoft product, so it's bound to go wonky at least once while you're using it. Plus, children like to find and play with these settings, so it's always good to double check. Go back to the margins tab; I'm going to tell you how to use MS word to format your novel with an exact double spaced, picture perfect 25 lines per page. We'll talk about *why* in a minute.