Who's Got Style?

We all have style; fashion style, decorating style, writing style. In this lesson, you will learn the steps to creating your own personal manuscript style for your fiction writing.

Why Use Styles?

Consistency, readability, and ease of use.

Consistent text attributes allow a reader (contest judge, agent, editor) to focus on your story rather than some odd-looking and insignificant formats.

Consistent text attributes streamline ebook and print book creation for yourself or your formatter.

Styles establishes text consistency over the length of your manuscript with a few clicks rather than dozens.

Styles sets up your text to automatically create a document map and a table of contents. Don’t worry if you didn’t follow all that. I was peeking ahead. We’ll gradually work through each step to get you to there.

With Styles you can create a synopsis in three steps! Yes, really!

Styles simplify the writing process. Don't fight your book, write your book.

Direct Formatting vs Styles

Direct formatting is accessed via the Font and Paragraph groups on the Home tab. These two groups provide the building blocks of the appearance of text in a document, e.g. typeface (font), size, color, white space before and after paragraphs, indentation, and tabbing.

Even though it's easy, don’t use these groups. You’ll have to reapply the attributes over and over again, getting some wrong, as you work through your story. More work you don't need.

A Style is a pre-set, or user-set, group of direct formats. For example, the Normal Style in the sample documents is Times New Roman 12, black, left justified with a first line indent of .5”, single spaced, with no extra space between paragraphs.

Why Change the Default Styles?

Word is delivered with default Styles. A fiction manuscript is a simple document with specific requirements to which the default Styles don’t comply in the following ways:

• The Normal Style is Calibri in block paragraphs with a blank line between paragraphs. Fiction requires a serif font like Times New Roman laid out in indented paragraphs with no spaces between them.
• There are no special fonts for letters and etexts. Direct formatting must be applied.
• Styles are missing for the front and back matter of books, e.g., title page, copyright page, about the author and more. If you're formatting your own books, you care about your layout.

Styles and Templates

Every Word document has an underlying template. Word opens with the Normal template already in place.

For the mock manuscripts, I’ve designed and used a template for fiction writers that is different from the Normal template.If you develop a collection of Styles that you’d like to reuse, they can be saved in a template and loaded into your manuscripts.

We’ll delve into template details later, and I’ll give you the two templates I’ve designed for this course.

The Styles Group

All Styles are found in the Styles group (the green outlined box in Figure 1) on the Home tab of the Ribbon.

Some of the Styles are hidden from view. To see them click on the arrow with a bar on top (bar arrow) to the right of the Styles group. There are many more Styles, also hidden by me in the MockMS documents, that won’t be found in a work of fiction.

Another way to view the Styles is to open the Styles pane by clicking on the expansion arrow in the extreme bottom-right corner of the Styles group. This will open a floating pane. To permanently anchor the pane as shown in Figure 1, drag the pane a bit beyond the right side of your screen and it will lock into place.

I usually have the Styles pane open, so when I go to another tab on the ribbon, I can still see the styles. Plus, the pane shows more Styles so I don’t have to scroll so much.

Applying a Style

To apply a Style to text you may either:

• Click on the desired Style, then type your text, OR
• Type your text, select it, then click on the desired Style, OR
• Move the insertion point to any spot in a paragraph, then click on the desired Style.

Following are the attributes assigned to the basic, and most common, Styles used in the body of your fiction manuscript.

Normal Style

This is the Style you will use for the bulk of your manuscript. Most documents open with this Style pre-selected.

Italic, Bold, and Underscore Styles

Italics are considered the industry standard to indicate emphasis in narration, dialogue, or the internal monologue of a character. The other two Styles are included for occasional use.

Some people use the keystroke combinations of Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, and Ctrl+U to add Bold, Italic, and Underscore formatting, respectively, to text. However, the Ctrl+ keystrokes apply a Direct Format rather than a Style.

So?

To people, there appears to be no difference.

To computers, there's a big difference in the HTML code working behind the scene.

When it comes to using Find and Replace to convert the text from one Style to another Style. There’s more later in Lesson 3: Find and Lesson 4: Replace.

It also makes a difference in conversions for self-publishing. For some ebook conversion applications, you’ll have to replace all the direct formatting with Styles. So why not begin as you mean to go on?

Note: It is possible to change the Ctrl+ keys to apply a style instead of direct formatting. Search "change keystrokes Windows X" where X is your version of Windows.

Letter, Emails, and Newspaper Styles

Sometimes your characters write letters, emails, or texts to each other. Or they’re reading a newspaper article. These communications require special indents and fonts to set them apart from the story.

For the templates embedded in the MockMS documents, I’ve used the following text attributes with fonts available in all versions of Word:

Etext	Calibri 12, indent .5” on both sides, block paragraph. Use this Style for communication in any electronic form, e.g., email, tweet, FaceBook post, text message, blog post, etc.
Letter	Times New Roman 12 (same as Normal Style), italic, indent .5” on both sides, block paragraph. Use this Style for handwritten communications, e.g., hand-written note, snail mail, to-do list, recipe card, etc.
Newspaper Article	Georgia 11, indent .5” on both sides, block paragraph. This font closely mimics the font used for the New York Times newspaper.

Hyperlinks

Word automatically formats active links to URLs with bright blue underscored text. Which is fabulous for headers in agent/editor submission or the front and back matter in an ebook. Of course, you won't add identifiers to contest entries. Some examples of links used in manuscripts are:

• Author email address
• Author website
• Cover designer and photo credit
• Interior designer and format
• Buy links to next book.

Hyperlinks won't work in hardcopy, so show them in full.

Scene Break Style

Scene breaks indicate a change in setting, time frame, or point of view. It’s usually three asterisks (***), centered on the page, with evenly-balanced white space above and below.

Blank Lines vs White Space

A blank line is added with each click of the return key. It’s visible when the formatting marks are displayed (more about that later). It can be removed with the delete or backspace key.

White space is attached to a Style and can’t be deleted. The amount of white space can only be changed by modifying the Style (again, more later).

Purpose of the Heading Styles

Heading Styles are used to format the titles for each section of a book, e.g., the table of contents, each chapter, and the author page. While drafting a work of fiction, you will need two levels at most to separate text into scenes and then to group scenes into chapters.

Heading 2 Style for Scenes

The “magic” of heading styles is an attribute called Outline Levels. If text has this designation, Word uses the text to create an entry in the Navigation Pane and the Table of Contents.

During the drafting and editing of my own stories, I create scene headings for each scene composed of a scene number and a short description of the significant event and its outcome, e.g.Scene 1-Cathy arrives expecting rejection, she's welcomed home by her aunt, Scene 7-Asher is rescued from a bear and acquires a dog. As my draft grows in word count, I have a high-level story outline which is visible in the Navigation Pane.

Both the Navigation Pane and the Table of Contents will be covered later.

If you don’t care for my color choice, that’s okay. I’ll show you later how to modify it to suit yourself. For now, let’s leave it. I'll also show you how to auto-number the scenes.

About Word Counts

Yes, using the Heading 2 Style for scene descriptions does increase your word count. I use about ten words per scene, multiplied by the number of scenes, then subtract that amount from my word count.

Even with 50 scenes, that's only 500 words over the entire length of a manuscript. Unless you're writing extremely short (less than 1K for magazines), then you've only got four scenes (40 words) at the most anyway.

If you're doing a daily word count, ignore the scene headings count. For me, it's just not enough to fuss about.

Besides, those paragraphs of Heading 2 Style will later be used to create your synopsis in three steps, so they're well worth their territory.

Some people have tried changing the font to "invisible" for submission, but it's way more trouble than it's worth. The headers show in weird ways with different programs. It's best to get rid of them altogether when you're submitting. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.

Heading 1 Style for Chapters

Chapter Headings attach the font, size, and white space to the text. Delete or move the text, and all the formatting is deleted or moved with it.

In my own practice, I insert Chapter Headings after I’m all done with edits and revisions and just before I submit a manuscript or send it off to my formatter. Otherwise, there’s too much moving the headings around.

Typically, there are three scenes per chapter. But it’s not carved in stone. If you have one scene per chapter, use Chapter Headings and skip Scene Headings.

About Page Breaks

Chapters in a fiction manuscript submission are required to start part of the way down the page, centered within the margins.

Without using Styles, you must insert a number of blank lines to get to the correct spot. When you insert text above them, you have to fuss with those blank lines, and fuss, and fuss, and fuss some more. You could insert a page break to start a new page, but you still have to fuss with blank lines.

As with all things Word, there are several ways to achieve the same end, or almost the same end.

• Page breaks can be inserted manually by going to the Insert tab and clicking on the Page Break button in the Pages group. You still have to deal with the required white space above the chapter heading. And those are a pain. Click the pilcrow so you can keep track of them.
• Page breaks can be added to the Heading 1 attributes along with the preceding white space. Which is a genius plan, except the white space doesn’t stick when using this method. No, I don’t know why; wish I could fix it. However, the template in the MockMS documents has a page break attribute.
• To get both a new page and the white space, you have to use Section Breaks which are covered in the formatting courses.

About Styles That Won’t Go Away

There’s an occasional and very aggravating quirk in Word involving the use of Styles.

It only happens when the last word in a paragraph is italicized, whether or not it's the only word or the entire paragraph is in italics. It does not happen when the italics are in the middle of a paragraph.

When you click on the Normal Style, Word doesn’t seem to recognize the Style change. The Italics won’t go away.

Clear Styles

The trick is to clear the Style from the new paragraph. You can do this either with an empty paragraph or by selecting the entire paragraph that should be Normal Style. There are three ways:

1. Click on the bar arrow (see Figure 1) in the Styles Group.
   • Beneath the Styles display click on Clear Formatting.
2. Right-click the selected text.
   • Click on the Styles options at the far right of one of the drop-down lists.
3. Click Clear Formatting at the very top of the Styles pane.

And, yes, the bar arrow is another way to view, select, and apply Styles.

Modify the Styles

So you’re not completely enamored of my design choices for the Heading 1 and Heading 2 Styles. That’s fine, everyone’s taste is subjective.

You can modify any of the text attributes via the Styles group. In the Modify Style dialog box, you can change type face, color, size etc. From the Format button, you can change paragraph attributes to add more white space before a Heading Style.

Show/Hide Formatting Symbols

There are a lot of hidden codes in Word that control the display and printing of text; and drive people crazy into the bargain. To see all the hidden formatting, click on the Show/Hide button, represented by a pilcrow, in the Paragraph group on the Home tab.

Watch for instructions to “click the pilcrow” in the exercises to show the formatting symbols.

Widows and Orphans

No, this isn’t a Dickens tale.

Occasionally stray words will appear at the top of a page, or a single line will be abandoned at the bottom of a page. These are Widows and Orphans, respectively.

In the Template used for the MockMS documents, Widow/Orphan control has been turned off.

If you turn the control on by modifying the Style, the text will be re-arranged to push more text onto the next page. However, white space may be left at the bottom of a page, often many pages, as a result. In a longer document, this may add several pages. This is not a problem unless you cut off that last paragraph or two of a submission or contest entry.

It’s your choice. Agents and editors are generally accustomed to Widows and Orphans and won’t reject you for a few stray words.