Help Your Formatter

I few days ago, I published an article about using paragraph formatting rather than tabs and said it was the number one wish of mine as an editor. However, it's hard for me to say this isn't #1. This one is strictly formatting, but doing this would save SO MUCH TIME. You may be paying by the job rather than by the hour, but it would get the finished product back in your hands sooner.

The desire to see your work look like a "real book" is strong. Especially for new authors. In fact, I used to to this myself, and then would berate myself over and over, later on, when I had to undo everything to actually format the book.

If you want to play around and see what your chapters will look like, or choose small art work to accompany breaks, or whatever... just do it with a few chapters for your own enjoyment or education. This is a good way to test things and see what look you like.

It would be best for the formatter if you just sent the text, with the paragraph indents created as described in Help Your Editor -1. Leave out any other formatting "stuff" except maybe a new page for chapter breaks.

Why? All the formatting you have added will probably need to be stripped out so it can be done correctly.

Things that are a nightmare for a formatter: Using the tab key. Adding a space before every paragraph (this makes no sense to me but I know two authors that must have a nervous habit of doing this). Using the space bar to center or arrange elements. Adding extra carriage returns.

DO NOT add your own page numbers. DO NOT add your own headers and footers. DO NOT set up the page size. DO NOT use two spaces between sentences.

If you want to show the formatter an example of your desired finished product, just send those sample chapters you've been playing with.

Even better... you could copy the manuscript into a program like Notepad that takes out all the extra stuff. It has to be something that truly reduces the MS to text. Even Wordpad will keep a lot of the formatting. Save it as a *.txt file and send that to your editor.

Note various of the no-nos I mentioned in the graphic below. You can click to make it larger. I have turned on the pilcrow (formatting marks) to show them. You can do the same thing, and then you can see if your MS is a mess.

Note the following in this sample: Author has created a page break by hitting the return several times. Author has tried to center text with the space bar. Author has added page numbers. Author has added a header. Author has hit the space bar at the beginning of the paragraph.

Here is what the final copy will look like for that same section.

Your formatter should be able to clean it up no matter what, but the time spent can affect your price and your working relationship.

Samples are from the forthcoming book, The Kommandant's Last Battle, by A. Katie Wood. It will be released in December 2024, assuming I can get the formatting done fast enough. The story is a WWII romance.

Fletch - Gregory McDonald

Gregory McDonald

Gregory McDonald won back-to-back Edgar Awards for best first novel, and best original paperback, in 1975 and 1977. These books are quite raw for the 1970s. The language and themes are definitely not "cozy," and there is plenty of casual sex. However, the plots are complex and clever. The style is almost entirely dialog, and quite clipped. The humor is tongue-in-cheek, which I find pretty funny.

Fletch is variously a reporter and an art writer, having been educated in both. He's a complete free spirit. You never know from one book to the next where he will pop up.

Recurring characters:
Irwin Maurice Fletcher, I.M. Fletcher, commonly known as Fletch.
Marilyn Moxie Moonie, Fletch's friend since childhood.
Alston Chambers, he begins as a rookie attorney in a big law firm, but moves to the DAs office.
Crystal Faoni, an overweight reporter
Jack Faoni, Crystal's son

#1- Fletch 1974
Winner of an Edgar Award. A rough-and-tumble tale of a reporter, Fletch, who is hired to commit a murder. Who is to be murdered? The man who hires him! Fletch is undercover to get the scoop on the local drug dealer in his beach town. His newspaper is giving him a hard time because it's taking so long to get answers. Meanwhile, he's busy also trying to find out why he's been hired to kill someone who seems to have a nearly perfect life, and he's also busy avoiding paying alimony to two previous wives.

An example of the humor: "At eleven-thirty, the phone began ringing persitently. He knew it was... any one of several News-Tribune executives who routinely became excited, one way or the other, in pleasure if they were real professionals, in anger if they were not, when a staff member had snuck a genuine, unadulterated piece of journalism over on them." ,

#2- Confess, Fletch 1976
Winner of an Edgar Award. Fletch has been living in Europe, but comes to Boston to track down some paintings that were stolen from his fiance's father. The father, Count deGrassi, was kidnapped and held for ransom, but without the paintings, the money demanded can't be raised.

Fletch arranges for an apartment swap through an agency so he will have a place to stay in Boston. He arrives, cleans up and goes out to dinner. When he returns, the naked body of a murdered young woman is on the living room floor. Naturally, the police would like him to confess.

There are more twists to this story than you can imagine.

#3- Fletch's Fortune 1978
Fletch is blackmailed by the CIA to bug the rooms of his fellow journalists at a national convention. They say they'll make his ever-mounting tax debt and crimes go away if he complies.

On the very first morning of the convention, the President pf the Journalism Association is murdered. He made lots of enemies over the years, but which one of them hates him enough to do the deed.

The recordings Fletch collects turn out to be useful in other ways, as well.

#4- Fletch and the Widow Bradley 1981
Fletch is back to being a reporter, but he gets fired from his newspaper because he quotes the CEO, Tom Bradley, of a company as being alive when it turns out the man has been dead for a year. Fletch is understandably put out because his boss is giving his incompetent girlfriend good stories and not firing her for little errors.

Meanwhile, he finds a wallet with $25,000 dollars in it, but is having a lot of trouble returning it to the owner. The man doesn't seem to want the wallet back.

Fletch sinks his teeth into finding out what happened to Tom Bradley. The answer is surprising for 1981.

#5- Fletch's Moxie 1982
Moxie has a job acting in a movie that is being filmed. It's not a good script and it's not going well. Moxie has become concerned about her finances- her financial manager has told her some things that are concerning. However, money is not her strong suit, and she has just signed whatever he told her to for years.

Fletch shows up at the filming of a talk show interview with Moxie and Steve Peterman. Steve is the director of the show and her financial manager. During the interview Peterman is stabbed and dies. Yet nothing unusual shows up on the tapes.

Moxie wants Fletch to find out what's wrong with her finances.

Secondary story is of Moxie's father, an aging, well-known classical actor who has been drunk for decades. Keeping him in line is almost a full-time job in its own right.

#6- Fletch and the Man Who 1983

#7- Carioca Fletch 1984
This book is almost a travelogue of Carnival in Rio de Janiero with a bit of story woven in. One of the characters from Fletch, Joan Collins Stanwyk, reappears in this book.

Fletch is enjoying a vacation in Brazil when an old woman approaches and insists that he is her husband, Janio, who was murdered 47 years previously. She wants him to tell her and her children who murdered him.

Fletch ends up being cursed with Brazilian voodoo, chased by a pack of kickboxers, and hounded by Janio's young grandson who has only one leg.

Joan, who reappears in this book, then disappears!

#8- Fletch Won 1985
Although written in 1985, this is really a prequel which tells the story of how Fletch got started in journalism.

As a rookie, he is assigned to write headlines, but he is too clever, and gets reassigned to cover the announcement of a gift to the art museum. The giftgiver is murdered in the News-Tribune parking lot, and he is reassigned again to cover a thinly disguised brothel. Then he gets fired! But that doesn't stop him from pursuing both stories.

#9- Fletch Too 1986

#10- Son of Fletch 1993
Events of Confess, Fletch are recalled in this story.

Fletch is confronted by an adult man who certainly appears to be his biological son. This encounter gives us the most sympathetic and human portrait of Fletch in any of the books.

The primary plot is a set in a neo-Nazi organization bent on creating anarchy and taking over the United States for white supremacy. There are a lot of stereotypes, but it's eerie for a 1993 book. This is my least favorite of the Fletch books.

#11- Fletch Reflected 1994
This is a fairly odd story. Fletch's son is called by an old girlfriend, Shana, to come investigate the estate of an eccentric genius. The genius, Chester, has built a huge closed community. He rigidly controls his wife and four adult children who live there.

Shana is convinced that someone is trying to kill Chester. There have been multiple accidents from which the man has barely escaped. Fletch's son calls Fletch, and while they are at the estate they learn the depths of the children's hatred for their father.

I would say the story is an allegory of some kind, but I'm not sure the Fletch books are that deep. It is an interesting plot, for sure.

Help Your Editor, Help Yourself - 1

There are many things you can do to help your editor/formatter return a clean manuscript to you. Here is one of them. This has a bit more to do with formatting, but, trust me, the better job you do, the better job they can do for you.

Maybe you are saying, "I don't need to do any of that. It's what I'm paying them for."

I respond, "Yes, but unless you are prepared to pay by the hour, giving an editor/formatter a sloppy manuscript is inviting disaster."

No human being can catch all the mistakes on one pass if the errors are numerous. I charge depending on how many times I have to go through a work to make it clean. My rates are reasonable (I want Indie Authors to succeed), but if I have to go through twice, it's going to cost more. And if the formatting is a mess, the formatting will cost correspondingly more.

Here is my number one tip. DON'T USE THE TAB KEY to start a new paragraph.

Using the computer is not the same as a typewriter. Sure, the tab key was what we did "back then," but I'll bet you were drilled to use the tab key rather than to hit the space bar 5 times. This is the same kind of thing. What I'm going to show you is way better, and more powerful for those people who will come after you to work on the manuscript.

Probably the most popular word processing program is Word. Instead of indenting paragraphs with the tab, do this. (different versions may have a slightly different interface)

Begin by setting the first line indent of every paragraph this way. Under Layout, click on expanded Paragraph options (arrow points to the icon). The window you see in this graphic will open. In the upper circle, choose Special/First Line, and then whatever indent you want. The default is 0.5 inch, which I usually think is too much. I like 0.3. In the lower circle, choose Set as Default. Then you will have an option for all documents or just this one. Whichever you like is fine.

In the above graphic you can see that all the text is aligned to the left. But after you choose OK in the window, Every first line of a paragraph in the text will indent by that magic amount. The result, below, is the half inch indent. You may agree that it's too much. So cut it back to something a little less. You can change the entire document in ONE flash!

Other word processors will have some similar option. I'll show you how in Google Docs another day.

I will stop for now with just this one tiny lesson.

Write Smart! Basic Dialog

Dialog is created when characters are quoted word for word. Bill said, "I don't like squash." This is dialog. Bill told us that he doesn't like squash. That is not dialog.

#1- Dialog is always set off with quotation marks.

#2- Words that describe the speaking are called Dialog Tags. Examples are: said, exclaimed, replied, yelled, etc.

#3- Action tags are not dialog tags. This is ambiguous, and there is some overlap. In this lesson, I'll use clear examples. This is an action tag.
     Bill stood. "I don't like squash." He whirled and left the room.
     "Billy, I try so hard to make you happy." His mother turned her head and began to cry.
     Bill's father threw down his napkin. "Give me a break!"

#4- The quotation marks are always outside the punctuation. All the above examples are correct. This one is incorrect. "Sally lamented, "I just can't stand this family"!

#5- If someone who is speaking quotes someone else, use single quotes for the interior one. Examples: Bill returned to the dining room. "The problem is, Sally, we are not really a 'family.'" [Interesting note, books published in Great Britain use single quotes for standard dialog and double ones for interior.]

#6- Use a capital letter to begin a sentence, even after a dialog tag. Example: Mother said, "Oh, not now, Sally."

#7- Every time someone new begins speaking, make a new paragraph. See item 3 above.

#8- However, if one person continues a speech long enough that it needs to be broken up, leave the closing quotation marks off the first paragraph. Example:
     Sally said, "Don't you think I know that? After all, you were adopted, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I didn't even love you when you were a baby.
     "And furthermore, you didn't like squash then, either. Mother made me try to feed it to you, and you always spit it back in my face."

There are other nuances to this issue, but this covers the basics.

Write Smart! Seen vs. Saw

There are a number of regions in the U.S. where most of the population does not use seen and saw in the same format as standard English. It's very difficult for people who grew up this way to switch to correct usages. But let's make it clear what standard English says.

Probably the fast and dirty answer is that you must use "have," "has," or "had" in front of the word "seen." However, "See" and "saw" stand on their own. Never use a form of "have" with either of those.

Here are three official categories. Columns two and three are the only tenses of the verb "to see" that use "seen."

Present tense	Present Perfect tense	Past Perfect tense
I see	I have seen	I had seen
you see	you have seen	you had seen
he/she/it sees	he/she/it has seen	he/she/it had seen
we see	we have seen	we had seen
you see	you have seen	you had seen
they see	they have seen	they had seen

So just remember to always use a form of "have" with "seen."

P.S. "Seeing" is a whole different ball game. Maybe another time.

Write Smart! I or me?

Should you use I or me in that sentence? Let's get the names of those things out of the way. "I" is a subject. It can do action. "Me" is an object. Actions can be done to it.

Most of us are good with simple sentences like "I went to the store," or "He gave the book to me."

Where we get in trouble is when we add extra people. "He gave the book to Meg and I," or "He gave the book to Meg and me." It's easy to decide which is correct if you take out Meg. Most of us know that "He gave the book to I" is wrong.

Lots of people say things like "Jack and me went fishing." Again, take out Jack, and you'll know in an instant it should be "Jack and I went fishing."

There are other permutations of this same problem of mixing subjects and objects. I'll cover some of those in other hints.

Write Smart! Introductory Word Group

If a sentence begins with an introductory phrase/clause, place a comma after it. See what I did there?

Other examples:
A. Buried under the apple tree for years, the box decomposed.
A. During February, Michiganders rarely see the sun.
B. In fact, none of what Mr. Smith said was true.
C. Unlike December in Australia, Ontario's Christmas month was snowy.
D. The rain slowing to a drizzle at last, we were able to go for a walk."

A. The phrase may be an adverb clause telling when, how, or why.

B. The phrase may be transitional such as "in fact," or "for example."

C. The phrase may express contrast such as "Not surprisingly," or "Unlike..."

D. The phrase may be an absolute phrase such as "The clouds hovering all week"