So where a character should, say, make certain word choices, it doesn't always happen. While I find I can (or think I can) adopt the attitude of a character, I find it far more difficult to constrain and adapt my vocabulary to a character. ** - I use this as a crutch to help with the characters' voices, whether in dialogue or in narrative. Of course, some of you were already doing all this already, weren't you?Ĭlick to expand.I haven't gone that far - well, not in that direction - mainly because: 1) my biggest use of italics is in recording PoV characters' thoughts and each PoV character has their own "thoughts" style** as each PoV character has their own PoV narrative style (and as each PoV character and each other major character has their own "dialogue" style**), the number of "emphasis" styles would balloon.Īnd it isn't as if our manuscripts should be bulging with italics (or whatever****) used for emphasis, is it? (In the same way as we should be sparing in our use of exclamation marks.) *Is now worried that this is exactly what his manuscripts are bulging with/full of.! * Now I'm restarting each document I work on using style sheets. I mention this because I tried to reformat an old file, and everything ended up working backwards and it was not fun. That will strip the hidden formatting commands out, and let you do a fresh start with formatting. IF you want to apply stylesheets to an old document, it's best just to copy/paste the whole thing into a plain text editor, such as Notepad - then highlight and copy the text from the plain text editor back into Word. The chances are there will be loads of extra formatting code hidden in it, which will cause style sheets to malfunction. Using stylesheets is the most efficient way to do it.Ĭaveat: If you have a Word document you have long been working on, don't try to suddenly style sheet it all. It gets even better - there are all sorts of times where you might want to tweak your heading settings or normal text settings, etc. With two clicks you have now reformatted all your text and not changed your headings at all. Now, all you have to do is right click the style for "Normal" and then change the alignment setting from Left to Justified. Normally that would mean highlighting all of your manuscript, changing the alignment from Left to Justify, and then have to go through all your Chapter headings and Titles and other things to re-align them to centre or what-not. But if you decide to self-publish, you will need to make all your text Justified. If you're formatting for agents, you'll left align your Normal text. Then press return for a new line, select the style "Normal" and type another paragraph of text and continue on to the end of the chapter. Press return for a new line, select the style "No Space" and type your first paragraph (or some random text to test it". Then return for a new line, select the style "Heading" for your Chapter heading, and type it. Select the style "Title" (that you just defined) and then type your book title. Your Word document is blank, so let's start using it. Ensure no indent.Īnd that's basically it - you have now supercharged your Word document using stylesheets. You may want to select "centre" for alignment. Increase the font-size accordingly to what you think a title or heading should have. Again, this means if you change the font, it'll apply universally - if you want to use the same font. I keep one "Title" and use two "Heading" styles.īasically, go through the same routine as mentioned by right-clicking and selecting "modify" each, ensure they are based on "Normal" (as above). These are pretty much as they say they are. Why did we do that? Because when formatting a manuscript for agents, editors, or for publishing, you will want the first paragraph to not have an indent.
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