Well, I've written and edited my first novel, but can anyone give me some advice on formatting.

It's double spaced etc - same as I do with the short stories - but I'm absolutely crap at formatting - for instance the sort of thing I do is press the space bar to get where I want.

So, I've been trying to tidy it up, and I'm having a hellofa job!

I just noticed that there's a bigger gap at the bottom of some pages than on others, so I've gone through and tried to make it the same on each page, but then the grammar check tells me the first word on the next page should be capitalised, but it shouldn't, it's carrying on from the last section, but is obviously messed up because I've moved it manually...

...does anyone get what I'm going on about?

So, how the fuck do I get it all looking nice and neat with the same gaps on each page and no spaces where there shouldn't be etc?

Any help will be much appreciated.

Kat x

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PS can anyone tell I'm a bit harrassed? I don't think I've ever used the F word in the 5 years I've been a member!

A useful thread on this subject:

http://www.writewords.org.uk/forum/112_290860.asp

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If you're using Word, to double space Select All then click on the 'Line Spacing' icon on oyur tool bar, and select 2.0.

Katerina, are you using Word and, if so, which version?

Dee

Dee, yes I'm using Word 2007.

Also, I use the enter key - the one that moves things down the page - not the space bar, but you know what I mean, I think.

Naomi - double spacing isn't the problem, as I already do that.

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I saw in that thread you linked for me, that Emma says not to use the space bar to indent your paragraphs, - eek, that's exactly what I've done!

Emma or someone, how do I now change it and do it with the tab?

I gave up on 2007 and went back to 2003, so I'm not sure how much help I can be. I don’t know of an easy way to undo the space bar indenting. The worst case scenario is having to go through your ms and backspace the indent line by line. Once you’ve sorted that, you can set a standard first line indent. In Word 2003, you go to Format then Paragraph then Special and click on First Line. Hopefully 2007 won't be too different.

Using space is _not_ the way to go!

What I suspect has happened is that you have a large number of white space characters (tabs, spaces, returns, soft-returns) that prevent Word from doing all of the layout for you.

There are a number of simple search and replace tasks that you can do to sort this out and then you can use Word styles to keep it simple - it will even generate a table of contents automatically for you if you use the styles correctly (which is easy when you know how).

There are some simple codes you can use to clean up and get it all together such as:
^p searches for a hard-return
^t searches for a tab character
^l searches for a soft return
^w searches for white space
^= searches for an en dash
^+ searches for an em dash

So, to remove all manually indented paragraphs, you could replace ^p^w with ^p for example.

However, although it is a very straight-forward process when you know what you're doing, if you don't, I don't want to be responsible for you bolloxing up your file! So I won't give a detailed list here but, if you want to do it the easy way, feel free to WW mail me and if you send me a sample chapter file, I can perhaps write a quick tutorial on how to clean it up for the whole novel.

G

Thanks Gaius