I stop by the site, Book Life Now, about once a week because they always have great posts about writing. Posts here are published on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and usually keep to a weekly theme. This week's theme is Westerns. If you're interested in writing Westerns the first post is here http://booklifenow.com/2010/07/more-than-just-gunfights-writing-the-west-1/ Then drop on by during the week for advice from other Western writers like James Reasoner, Johnny Boggs, Max McCoy and many more.
One of the things you have to know as a writer is how to format your story for submission. And yes, the formats vary from publication to publication especially for online zines. Most writers are directed to William Shunn's excellent site for a detailed example. Today, I discovered that Mr. Shunn has a blog, or a flog as he calls it, where he answers questions from writers about formatting. http://www.shunn.net/format There's lots of excellent information on the site for both beginners and more experienced writers.
5 comments:
I hate that formatting stuff. I never understand what they mean by a hard return for one thing. I am quite sure I never give them what they want.
I know what you mean, Patti, though I do know what a hard return is! That's when you push the return yourself instead of letting the computer go to the next line. For some reason it screws up the formatting.
I think the worse formatting request I ever saw was when one zine editor wanted the writers to format the story to fit his Kindle! Sometimes I feel like I'm required to be editor and typesetter so all the publisher has to do is print.
You get a hard return (also called a paragraph return) when you press the return key.
If you put one at the end of every line (like you would if you used a typewriter), your computer and any computer that receives your file will treat every line as a separate paragraph.
That's bad.
If you use Word (and some other programs) there's also a "soft return" or a "manual line break" that occurs when you hold down the shift key and press the return key.
You also don't want to do that (except under very specific and probably unusual circumstances).
I strongly urge writers to master their word processing programs--especially now that so many publications desire electronic files (either as part of the submission process or upon acceptance).
As a freelance editor I spend almost as much time removing the bizarre codes writers put in their files as I do dealing with spelling and grammar.
Unneeded/unwanted coding should be removed before files are submitted to typesetting/desktop publishing/page layout.
If the author doesn't submit a clean ms, the editor has to clean it up. If the editor doesn't clean it up, then the typesetting/DTP person has to do it. And neither of them use polite words to describe the writers who submit ms. filled with bizarre, unnecessary, or inconsistent coding.
Many thanks for these. I'm especially looking forward to the author interviews.
Thanks for the explanation, Michael. While computers have made writing and editing easier, the formatting has become more complicated, at least for me. I miss those lovely little knobs and tab buttons on my typewriter.
Those interviews should be very interesting, Ron. I stopped by Richard Wheeler's blog yesterday and was scrolling back through his posts and he has some very interesting insights into writing Westerns there also.
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