As Pogo once said, "We is met the enemy and it is us."
Which is a nice way of saying that we often bring on our own
failures. Like, in the writing game.
There are many places where you can find succinct
descriptions of "manuscript mechanics." The salient rules are
simple: make the margins big enough, use double-spacing except
on very short pieces, identify the work and yourself adequately.
Okay, so you use margins in the inch to inch and a quarter range
and you double space. At the top of your first page you write
your name, your pen-name, your address, your e-address or phone
number, the name of the work, and the approximate word count. If
you understand what you are doing, add the rights you are
selling with the work. How you actually arrange these
identifying features is not rigidly controlled. Common sense is
good.
Then, of course, you drop down a few lines, then center
the BOLD title and, beneath, the author's name. Again, common
sense. On all the succeeding pages, your name, the title and the
page number are put into the heading. At the end of the work you
write a BOD "END" or "THE END."
So, what's so hard about that? Welp, not much. But what
can you do to make your manuscript less attractive and, thus,
less likely to be accepted?
Okay, how big a font is appropriate? I use 12-point in
submissions. Yeah, for my own aging eyeballs, I use a larger
font in my working proofs, but 12-point is usually okay. So,
what typeface? My favorite is the Times New Roman because it is
quite readable. There are many other choices, but remember, they
must be readable first, "cute" second.
A few editors prefer a constant-width font for easy
word-counting and say so in their guidelines. Of these fonts,
the most familiar is the Courier. (This was developed for the
early typewriters, since each letter uses the same line space
and has serifs large enough to make the printed area constant,
which was important when we were using the manual bang-writers.)
Avoid the slanted (italic-style) fonts to avoid confusion.
Italics normally are used in printed matter to designate foreign
words, the names of periodicals, and the "thoughts" that a
character has. In fact, standard manuscript protocol insists on
underlines as indicators of words to be italicized in the
finished page.
What else? How do I "break" between scenes in my action.
Normal protocol is a skipped line, the blank space being a
simple and unmistakable sign that something has stopped and is
now going again. Like any good idea, this has some traps. If
your break comes at the bottom of one page or the top of the
next, it will certainly be lost. What to do? Break the rules. I
use a couple of non-alphabetic characters centered in an empty
line. The editor can find them easily and deal with your breaks
in whatever style she chooses. Like this, for an example:
*
* *
Don't be cute! (Oh, I said that.) Exaggerated indents or
BOLD lettering for the opening phrases of a paragraph are a
don't-ever. Again, the editor has his own way of breaking
between paragraphs. (And leash-training wayward writers.)
How do you transmit your work to the editor? I won't go
into all the electronic ways it can be
done. I learned to my chagrin
that there are several different systems used by e-mail servers,
and I found myself unable to communicate with some editors with
my antique system. Fortunately, these systems can all use plain,
unformatted text, and so you can just pretend you are typing the
work and mailing it in the old-fashioned way. If you use any of
the enhanced-format systems, be aware that you might have to do
it over until you get the right combination.
Sure, the old-fashioned postal system does work. But,
again, like anything that seems foolproof, there is a trap. The
editor, no matter how rich, is not too happy about paying to
send you a reply or returning your manuscript. Send along a #10
envelope for a reply, or a suitably large envelope for return of
the entire work, if you wish. And don't forget to put enough
postage on the envelope to carry the thing home to you!
Oh, yes, do put your address where it belongs on the
envelope. A simple thing? Penny and I have spent too much time
guessing where a return goes. And, and, and - if you don't want
the manuscript back, SAY SO in your submittal (cover) letter.
Now, how hard is it to follow a few simple, common-sense
rules? Not too bad, although I think when I was publishing my
magazines I found about twenty percent of the submissions to be
lacking something that made it necessary to guess, squint or
curse. That is not a good thing for your future, pal.
That's why I said, in the title, you could be nice.
Editors are nice people and usually work for about seventeen
cents an hour. So anything you do to make their work harder is
not only apt to reflect badly on you work and your commitment,
it's just bad manners!
About the Author
Loring Emery, a retired (1988) engineer, lives in
Albuquerque. His work has included many short stories, a few
series of columns for sundry magazines, several articles for
encyclopedia, and three modestly unsuccessful novels.