4 Basic (Novel/Short Story Writing) Formatting Tips

     I don't have a lot of time to just sit down and read anymore--it's one of the things I really really miss about being a kid.  I devoured It in maybe a week as a ten-year-old, and when I was twelve I once read eight 200 page books within twenty-four hours.  Watching that huge stack of library books lower book by book was so satisfying, and the books themselves were wonderful.

     My point there kids is, read while you're young.  Do as much as you can, because the older you get the tougher it's going to be to find that time and cultivate those skills.

     Anyway, now that I'm an Adult™ I have trouble finding time to read--so most of my reading on a day-to-day basis consists of plays I have to read for class or, most voluminous, fanfiction.  Some fanfiction is really really good.  Other fanfictions are really, really bad.  

     The vast majority are okay.  But there are a lot of good fanfictions that get a total pass from me just because of the formatting--the ideas are solid, the writing is fine, maybe it's not the best work in the world but I'd read a couple thousand words if the formatting just weren't so nonstandardized.

     And I get it--schools don't teach you things like this anymore.  No teacher ever told me to do any of these things--with the exception of indentations when starting new paragraphs, I had to teach myself how to write and format by extensive reading on my own.

         So in the interest of helping writers, new and old, fanfiction or original content, here are some of my formatting pet peeves.


1.  One Paragraph, Many Speakers

     Make sure that when a new character starts speaking, you switch paragraphs.  Even if this means having several one-sentence paragraphs, do it.  It'll make the work more streamlined and less cluttered, it increases the white-space-to-text ratio, and it very clearly indicates that someone new is speaking, meaning you can use fewer dialogue tags, and your audience doesn't have to put in too much brainpower.

     Your audience sometimes needs to be able to work things out on their own, it's in the contract, but when it comes to formatting, don't make them work any harder than they absolutely have to.

2.  "  " or '  ' Used For Thoughts

     This gets me.  This gets me really hard.  I'm sitting there, reading a fic or short story online, doo doo da loo, la la la, and I see the character starts speaking, and I get into character speech mode.  "Dorothy Anne should be shot," she thought.

     And I always have to double-take--thought?  Thought?  What?  Quotation marks indicate speech, not thought, that's why they're quotation marks, because we're using them to quote a person's speech.

     Almost as bad are the using of 'apostrophes' to indicate thought, which just irks me on a level I don't completely understand.  It's a thing, okay, we've all got them, and this thing is that these tactics confuse the reader--even if it's just momentary, that's still a moment that the reader is taken out of the story, that they have to double-back and approach from a different angle, and the goal of a writer is to minimalize those moments as close to completely as possible.

     To avoid this confusion, there are two ways to indicate thought that aren't intrusive--you can just state it;         She thought this was a really bad idea; he thought about the cat on the roof, and wondered how it got there.

     That method is quick and simple, though it creates a little more distance, and summarizes more than it shows exactly what a character is thinking.  If you're looking to quote the exact thought, I recommend the second method; italics:       Thus is ludicrous, she thought, climbing into her car.  "Hand me a Kleenex."  There's no way Jonathan could have done any of this.

     This way the thought is clearly separated from typical narration, and when the character does speak aloud, the audience can tell what's being said aloud and what's being privately pondered upon.

3.  '  ' For Speech Spoken Aloud

     Again, quotation mark drama will be the death of me.  Here's a quick rundown of what kind of quotation signifier to use in different situations:

Speech:  Quotation marks.  Always quotation marks.
     Ex,  "Hey Mom," Jenny called, "Can you help me with this?"
Exceptions:  I really need to punch someone in the face, Jenny thought, and didn't realize she'd spoken aloud until every eye in the room was on her./He asked his mother for a tissue and she told him to go fuck himself.

Quotations outside of speech:  Quotation marks.
     Ex.  He took the "pencil box" and buried it deep beneath the ground.

Quotations within speech:  Double apostrophe
     Ex.  "Your 'pencil box' is really starting to unnerve me," she said, backing away slowly.

4.  Massive Blocks Of Text

     A paragraph that goes on for an entire page isn't one most people are likely to sit through--not unless you are really, superbly, extremely  skilled, but if that's the case you're unlikely to do this.  Big paragraphs in and of themselves are fine in moderation, and sometimes necessary.  But many many big paragraphs can, and should, be broken up into smaller bite-sized chunks.

     Sometimes, especially online, an author breaks up their paragraphs into perfectly manageable bits, but due to the lack of a double-space option, the paragraphs clump together to form a massive text wall nonetheless, which drives off prospective readers.  In this situation, make sure you press "enter" twice between paragraphs; this will serve in the place of the double-space option and help your readers break the text up.  Plus, it helps them avoid losing their place.

     ... I should probably stop forgetting to do this on my own blog.  Whoops.  Well, I never said I was perfect, did I?

     If you have any formatting or fanfiction pet peeves you'd like to share, feel free to drop them in the comments section below!

Vulnerability in Art

     Art demands every piece of us.
     Art, and the making of it, commands respect, and insists on nothing less than everything we are; it's why we, as artists, choose to work dead-end jobs while we bang out that novel; it's why we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a school everyone told us wasn't worth it; its why we eschew safety and isolate ourselves from the outside world.
     Art demands nothing less than one hundred percent.
     This doesn't mean that being an artist means having to give up friends and family, or needing to work a dead-end job or study art in school or live a difficult life, but it's because art demands so much of us that many of us choose to do these things.  It doesn't mean we can't live, though we often have to live harder, faster, more fully, while making time to create and support ourselves at the time.
     What it does mean is that in order to create art, we must be vulnerable.
     Art is cutting yourself open and bleeding on the page, on canvas, on stage, on screen--art is destroying yourself and giving away pieces of your soul.  If you can't be vulnerable in your work, you won't produce art--stories, sure, pictures, plays, but not something novel, fresh, stimulating--that's what art is.  Art makes you think, makes you feel.  Art is a piece of yourself, carved out of your heart and plastered up for all to see.
     In order to create art, you have to be willing to go there, to accept whatever story wanders into your heart without censorship or fear, because to an artist, nothing is taboo--nothing can be taboo, because even if you're promoting the tabooness of something, you have to be able to recreate it, to explain it, to get into the heads of those who partake in the deeds.
     One of the things I'm learning in my acting classes is how to be vulnerable--I'm not a vulnerable person in nature, I was always taught to be strong and keep others out of my head, but when you're acting on the camera you can't do that; you have to look another person straight in the eyes, and you have to maintain that eye contact except at very specific moments, no matter how hard it gets.
     To be an actor you have to be vulnerable all the time--there are times you'll have to strip naked, times you'll have to bleed out, times you'll have to bumble around and look like an idiot, and as a writer it's the same deal; you have to write characters that are totally unlike you, characters you hate that you have to make three dimensional, likable even, and characters you love that are flawed out the ass.
     You'll have to write about things that make your skin crawl, you'll have to revisit traumatizing moments in your life to access the raw emotion that makes your characters feel real, you might even have to seek out new traumas in order to understand what your characters are going through.  You have to be willing to cut yourself open, and then cut again, and keep cutting and cutting until there is nothing left of you to give.
     But the beautiful--and terrifying--thing about art is that there will always be more of you to give. Creativity isn't a limited resource; the more of it you give, the more you get back, and every time you consume the art of others it changes and recharges you.  Every experience you have, good or ill, gives you something new to write about, draw, paint, new fodder for your acting, for whatever it is that you create.
      Art is not easy; it can very, very difficult, in fact.  But it's what we do, because we love it, and because we need it.  I've never met another artist that didn't have things burning underneath their skin that didn't have a fierce and driving need to get it out, out, out, before the wind caught it up and it consumed them.
     There are a lot of reasons we produce art--to be seen, heard, validated, to make change, to make waves, to keep things the same, to express oneself, to deal with what one has been through in their own life, to help others--and art is never twice the same.  Your entire life can't be creation, because if you never lived or experienced or consumed you'd never have anything to write about!
     But you have to be willing to let yourself give the page everything you are.  A lot of it may never see the light of day--we edit and have editors for a reason--but if you never bleed there will be nothing worth editing away.
     Art demands commitment, it demands sacrifice, it demands love and hate and raw primordial emotion the depths of which are murky and barely understood by the person feeling them--but most of all, it demands you.  Because you are the only you, and trying to be anyone or anything else is inauthentic, false, a lie--art is about truth.  If nothing else, it's about the truth of you.
     So you do you.  Bleed on the page.
     (You know you want to.)