Well, I’m honestly surprised this subject hasn’t come up, but today I am going to address formatting. Its actually something very important, and can make or break your writing. There are of course an infinite number of styles and no one is correct, but today we’re going to look at a few tricks you can use no matter what to make your work read better.

In this modern day of the internet and writing message boards, emails, etc, formatting is something most aspiring writers overlook. When posting online or in an email, the formatting can be severely messed up or even lost all together. Page layout programs employ a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make everything look petty, which is lost in raw text. Some web pages, like Gmail, and a few message boards, try to do their own layout formatting, but they do not always succeed.

There are a few different major office software packages out there; Microsoft Office is the staple, but Open Office has a significant market share(particularly among people who use windows but hate Microsoft), Corel also has a package, and there are some others(including at least one major one for the Mac). These all have their own internal “language” to format your page, which is the main reason its so hard to move documents between them.

Even the switch from different versions of Microsoft Office can entail issues. All versions from 95-2003 are largely cross-compatible. I remember for a time I had a very old laptop I liked to write on sometimes, that used 97, while my desktop and other laptop were running 2003. I had no problems moving documents back and fourth.

Then, starting in Office 2007, they changed the internal “language” of the files. If you’re a teacher, you may recognize this as the .docx that has made your life a living hell for the past 4 years. The ‘x’ stands for XML, which will hopefully solve the cross-compatability issue between office packages, assuming the EU can convince everyone to adopt it. For now, its just made cross-compatibility between two versions of Word a nightmare. Also, XML roughly triples the data, making your word documents 3 times bigger. Which means 3 times longer to open, transfer, save, etc, and also 3 times more likely to become corrupt. Have fun, office 2007+ users!

All that aside, let’s address what we really came here for. Formatting is the visual style that your work takes on the page. I always work in the “Print Layout” mode of Microsoft Office Word so that I can see what it will look like when it prints.

Now, it is important not to go too wild with it. I’ve had a few people give me stuff that was formatted to “the size it’ll be when its printed in a novel”. To these people: stop doing this! That’s not the size it’ll be! So many factors determine the printed size of your book which I will not get into right now.

Its mainly paragraphs that I want to address. Like all art, there are no “rules”, but there are techniques you can use to improve how readers read.

Short, punchy sentences convey action, suspense, and speed. Anytime you want something to feel like it’s happening fast, use short sentences. Let’s examine this very short excerpt from the beginning of The Road to War:

Darkness.

Eyes open.

Darkness.

Eyes closed.

Darkness.

Fear.

Hunter realized he wasn’t sleeping. He was lying in darkness, not dreaming, not sleeping.

Only fearing.

He wasn’t breathing. In the darkness he had to force his throat to open, force his lungs to draw air.

It was a kind of ragged gasp.

Gun.

Hunter blinked several times and sat up. The fear was very suddenly gone, and he was sweating hard. Why had he been so afraid?

Hunter glanced at the clock on his bedside and rolled onto the floor. He quickly dressed, and opened the window. The room was warm, but it was hotter outside.

The series of short, one and two-word sentences that make up the beginning immediately convey a sense of disorientation. The same thing could be said with a single paragraph and well-supplied with heavy description, but it would convey a very different feeling. This is what we mean by “show not tell”, I am “showing you” the disorientation, not just telling you the character is disoriented.

Here’s another example, this one comes out of The Concourse to Victory:

“Hunter, put your mask on!” Delphi ordered. “Put your mask on and PULL UP!”

Hunter ignored him. Despite the extraordinary G-forces and the thin air, he was thinking perfectly. It wasn’t good enough.

Silently, Hunter took his hands off the controls.

“Pull up Hunter,” Delphi said calmly. “You don’t have to prove anything to me. Pull up, now.”

Hunter closed his eyes, the ground approaching fast.

If it didn’t happen soon it wasn’t going to have a chance to. If it didn’t happen soon he would die. In that moment he made a silent promise to himself: this was it, if it didn’t happen this time he was done.

It wasn’t happening.

He was going to die.

In this, showing and telling become important. The short sentences and quick formatting convey the suspense, something is happening fast. Meanwhile the speech patterns of the instructor indicate he is cool under pressure. He either doesn’t care or knows panic isn’t going to help.

Let’s examine just this bundle of sentences:

Hunter ignored him. Despite the extraordinary G-forces and the thin air, he was thinking perfectly. It wasn’t good enough.

Compared to this one:

Hunter closed his eyes, the ground approaching fast.

If it didn’t happen soon it wasn’t going to have a chance to. If it didn’t happen soon he would die. In that moment he made a silent promise to himself: this was it, if it didn’t happen this time he was done.

It wasn’t happening.

He was going to die.

Throughout the excerpt, we are building suspense. In the first bundle of sentences, they could be re-arranged like so:

Hunter ignored him.

Despite the extraordinary G-forces and the thin air, he was thinking perfectly.

It wasn’t good enough.

The result is more suspenseful, but as there are important details still to come, the suspense would be built, lost, and have to be built again. By keeping them in the original configuration, we get a little bit less suspense but it does begin the curve.

As we come to the last part, we have this sentence:

Hunter closed his eyes, the ground approaching fast.

It could(and according to your English textbook, should) be properly written as

Hunter closed his eyes, the ground was approaching fast.

But by the exclusion of a single word, we convey the importance of the statement. The ground is literally approaching so fast that there isn’t time for an extra word.

And then we get a long paragraph:

If it didn’t happen soon it wasn’t going to have a chance to. If it didn’t happen soon he would die. In that moment he made a silent promise to himself: this was it, if it didn’t happen this time he was done.

It’s long, but very repetitious. The reader knows something is coming soon, but has to cross through this long paragraph to get to it. There are important details here, it can’t be glanced over, but you know something important is about to happen.

Finally, the last too sentences are broken up into individual paragraphs like so:

It wasn’t happening.

He was going to die.

This is followed by a scene break, so before you got there you knew something was going down. The effect is very well achieved. Even just from that short excerpt you can see how the formatting establishes a crescendo.