Submission Accomplished

  

About two weeks ago, a good friend who's also an editor contacted me and said he needed a story for a crime anthology he was editing and needed it really fast, because one of the contributors had backed out of the lineup and he had to send everything to the publisher in just a few days. (Red alert red alert!) The theme of the anthology was specific but interesting, and after some arm-twisting I agreed to come up with a story. I did it in my usual way, beginning with a plot (a crime) and then putting in the characters and settings that were necessary to tell the tale, and--bottom line--I finished the story, sent it to him, and got a thumbs-up, so all is well in the world.

But that's not why I'm posting this column. I'm posting it because it occurred to me, as I sat down to begin typing that new story, that every single story I've written in the past several years has started by my doing the same thing. I pull up a previous story manuscript, change the title, delete everything below my byline, and start typing the new manuscript--which is then "saved as" a new file bearing the title of the new story. What I'm saying here is that all my stories use the same template.

What does that template look like? It's almost identical to the example shown at the Shunn's Modern Manuscript Format site. I said "almost the same" because there are a few things I choose to do differently. 

In case you're interested (and if you're an established writer I'm sure you already have your own version of all this), here are some observations about the way I format a short-stort manuscript for submission:

- I like Shunn's advice on placing the name/address/contact information at the top left of the first page and and the approximate word count, rounded off to the nearest hundred, at the top right. I don't usually include my membership in professional writing organizations in all this, as he suggests, but you can do that if you want.

- I type my story title and byline in proper case between a third of the way and halfway down the page. I sometimes change this after I finish the story, depending on where my story ends on the final page. (More about that later.)

- I always indent the first line of the story and the first line of every new scene, just as I indent the first lines of all the other paragraphs, as Shunn suggests. Some authors don't indent those first lines of scenes in order to make it look more like a printed version, but I do.

- I double-space everything in the text of the story with nothing extra between paragraphs. When I taught writing classes, some students turned in their stories with a slightly bigger vertical space between paragraphs. Editors I've talked with don't like that, and neither would I.

- I center a pound-sign (#) between scenes. Some writers and editors prefer using other separators (three asterisks, etc.) and some prefer to use nothing except one extra vertical space to separate scenes. I do whatever the guidelines tell me to, but I like putting at least something there, because when I used only spacing between scenes, I once had an editor butt two scenes together in the printed version of one of my stories. Scene breaks are there for a reason, and inserting a separator of some kind lessens the possibility of that happening. 

- I make sure Widow/Orphan Suppression is turned OFF before starting. In other words, widows and orphans are fine with me (even in real life) and if you suppress them, it can cause way too much open space left at the bottom of some pages. If all this sounds ridiculous to you, Google widow/orphan control.

- I also make sure Grammar Check is turned off. That program is maddening to me. When writing fiction, I happily splice commas, split infinitives, fragment sentences, etc., when needed, and I don't want the computer telling me I can't. (This is one of those times when it's good to be da king.)

- I use the Tab key to indent the first lines of all paragraphs unless the submission guidelines tell me to do otherwise. I know some editors prefer an automatic half-inch setting, etc., to indent paragraphs.

- I space only once after a period. I'm old and it was hard to make myself change, on this, but I did. It's my theory that the two-spaces-after-a-period rule was there to go along with the each-letter-takes-up-the-same-amount-of-space Courier font. The two spaces made everything look better, back then.

- I italicize. I don't underline. Underlining to emphasize text goes back to the days of typewriters, when italics weren't a possibility. I have, however, submitted stories to publications whose guidelines said to underline and not italicize, and I followed their rules. Just saying.

- I center the word END three double-spaces (sometimes two) below the final line of my story. Shunn prefers THE END, and that's fine too. I think it's good to put something there, because if my text happens to go all the way to the bottom of the final page, I don't want an editor to wonder if another page should be coming. Maybe, as with scene separators, that's just me and my paranoia.

- I don't use anything except black TNR 12-point format throughout. No colors, no boldface type. If I need to include something like a newspaper article excerpt, etc., I sometimes indent the whole thing to set it off from the rest of the text but I leave the font size the same.

When I'm done typing the story, I go back and check several things:

- I make sure all curly apostrophes and quotation marks are "aimed" the right way. Example: to properly type 'em (instead of them), I type a character just before em, hit the apostrophe key after that character, and delete the character I inserted. I realize that's a bassackwards way of getting there, but it works. I do the same kind of thing with single quotation marks in funny places. There are of course other ways to do this, but I like that one.

- I do a spell-check of the whole finished manuscript to catch misspellings, duplicated words, etc. It also flags certain odd words that I want to leave as is. (I like made-up words, and my characters sometimes THUNK their heads on the sidewalk or WHACK their palms on desktops, so when those get flagged I just override the program and allow them.

- I check to make sure my headers look right. Since I use previous stories as templates, it's all too easy to accidentally leave the title to the previous story in my header.

- If my story ends too close to the bottom of the page for me to write END two or three double-spaces after the final line, I don't want to put END by itself at the top of the next page. Instead, I go back to the first page and adjust that one-third-to-halfway-down title and byline such that END can now fit at the bottom of the last page or such that I can put the final couple of lines of text at the top of the next page and type END below that. This adjustment isn't usually required, but it sometimes is.

NOTE: Some editors prefer different fonts, different separators between scenes, and other unusual things. Whatever they want, I do it. (One editor, I recall, wanted everything to be in Verdana font.) If I don't like it, I do it anyway, and then change it back later, when I submit the story someplace else as a reprint. 

Again, these are just things I do in preparing my own stories. I'm NOT saying you should do it that way. I would like to hear, though, about your preferences on this submission/style/formatting issue. Are you a Shunn follower or a Shunn shunner? What's the strangest requirement that you've seen in submission guidelines? Do you have some formatting tips that I or others might consider, to make manuscripts look or read better? In my view, all of us are still learning, on this and on everything.

Meanwhile, I wish you joy in your writing and luck with your submissions!

Back in two weeks.