McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Formating question

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pathele:
When you are writing your rough draft, do you use something like MS Word? and if so, do you have a favorite way of formatting the draft? (single space vs double space, 12pt vs 10pt vs 14pt, etc)

I generally use 12pt font, with double space between paragraphs, but single space otherwise. I know that eventually I will need to go back an format for submission, but right now, it's what's comfortable for me.

What do you guys do?

-paul

Josh:
First draft. MS Word. 12 pt. Times New Roman. Single spaced. 1" margins all around.

When I'm done with a chapter or scene, I double-space it. This gives the illusion of doubling my productivity and gives me warm fuzzy feelings to see the page count go up. Aside from that, I base my formatting on where I'm submitting the work to after it's ready.

www.jrvogt.com

Dom:
I use a MS Word I've tweaked to turn off autocorrect, grammer check, automatic tabbing at the start of a paragraph, and tweaked to put some extra buttons on the top bar such as "word count" and "thesaurus".  I've also changed the normal.dot template so it defaults to 12 pt Arial font (although sometimes I mistakenly hit some weird key combo and it goes back to Times New Roman), and I type single spaced. I also do a centered * * * * betwen scenes rather then a centered # - this dates from the days when I wrote longhand in a notebook, I used to put four stars between scenes.

Really, the only thought I give to the final formatting is making sure my italics are underlined, just because I'm not aware of a way in Word to make italic words underlined all in one go, and it would suck to eyeball it line by line when formatting it, trying to spot all the italics and make them underlined.

Edit: Regarding habits, just in case some folks don't know yet...I use these shortcuts while typing:

shift + arrow keys => highlight a word so I can type over it, or underline it, or manipulate it
ctrl + I => italics
ctrl + B => bold
ctrl + U => underline
ctrl + home key => move cursor to the very start of the document
ctrl + end key => move cursor to the very end of the document
home key => move cursor to the start of the line
end key => move cursor to the end of the line
ctrl + c => copy highlighted text
ctrl + x => cut highlighted text
ctrl + v => paste text where the cursor currently is.
ctrl + s => save document

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
There are only a few non-governmental organisations in the world with budgets of a size to pay me enough to use MS Word for writing fiction, and let's face it, they're not going to.

I'm currently using emacs, which suffices, but I hold to the belief that the One True Word-Processor where fiction is concerned was Protext for DOS.

pathele:

--- Quote from: Dom on March 02, 2007, 07:50:35 PM ---I also do a centered * * * * between scenes rather then a centered # -

--- End quote ---

Does everyone use a seperator (**** or ####) between scenes?
I usually just skip an extra line and go to the next scene.

-paul

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