Inhuman Swill

A reader writes to ask:

My manuscript contains text messages from one character to another. How would you suggest I format them?

When you present an exchange of text messages in fiction, you're essentially presenting a different form of dialog. As such, if I were doing it, I'd treat the messages the same as any other dialog—except that I'd underline the text instead of enclosing it in quotation marks.

Underlining (or rather italics, which is what underlining in a manuscript indicates) is the generally accepted way to indicate in a story that you're quoting from written or printed material—say, a note or a sign. Or, in today's world, a text message or email.

In fact, I can show you an example from the novel I'm writing now, Waking Vishnu. This passage involves instant-messaging on a computer, but the principle is the same:

The chime sounded again:

am i dreaming

Hasta tried to type, but her shaking fingers turned the words to mush.  She backspaced furiously and tried again:

I dont know.

Then, because that seemed somehow insufficient, she typed:

Sometmies when I deram, I cn fly.

The typos made her wince--as did simply typing with her hurt fingers--but a moment later a response came:

i always can fly

I wish I cd fly, Hasta typed.  Id fly right out of here.

stay in school, chimed her mysterious chat partner.  education gives u wings

She snorted.  Big help, thx a lot.

It might be that, in print, your editor or book designer will decide the text messages should be set in bold instead of italics, or in some contrasting font. That's fine, but it's a decision that'll be made down the road. For your purposes now, though, just underline.


Crossposted from Proper Manuscript Format

I wrote the original version of my manuscript formatting guide in 1993, modeling it after a much older two-page guide I received from Damon Knight in 1985. Back in those days, even for those who'd made the switch to composing prose on computers, the goal of formatting was to produce a document for submission that looked as much as possible like it had sprung to life rolling through the platen of a typewriter, offspring of holy intercourse between paper, typebar, and ink ribbon.

The world of writing and publishing has changed plenty in these past seventeen, or twenty-five, or God knows how many years. A manuscript used to be the mere blueprint for a printed book or story, instructions in a coded language to the typesetter who would laboriously rework the entire thing into clean, finished type. Now the gap between manuscript and book has shrunk to the size of a computer file. Electronic submissions mean that the only physical keystroke in the life history of a given letter in a published work may well be the one executed by the author himself.

The accepted and acceptable standards of manuscript formatting have evolved to reflect this. Proportional fonts are used more and more in manuscripts, while typographical tricks that were necessary on typewriters now no longer make sense. More and more writers are submitting manuscripts that would have looked unacceptable a decade ago, and more and more editors don't mind this one bit. With the almost complete dominance of the word processor, topics like word-count approximation and end-of-line hyphenation are no longer relevant to most of us. It was long past time to update my format guide to reflect this new reality.

You old-school writers and editors, don't worry. I won't abandon my Courier font and double sentence spacing (more on that topic in a future post) without a fight. If I have my way, the manuscripts I produce fifty years from now will look the same as the ones I produce today. But I did want to acknowledge that mores are changing, and that not everyone agrees anymore about what proper manuscript format even means.

The basics still remain, even if some of the details continue to evolve. To those hundreds of sites that have linked to my format guide over the years, I hope you still find it useful and relevant, if not more so than before. To those who've disagreed with it in the past, sometimes vehemently, I hope you find more common ground here now. And to those stumbling across it for the first time? God help you poor kids for wanting to be writers.

Please let me know what you think of the revised and updated version of "Proper Manuscript Format," and best of luck with your writing.


Crossposted from Proper Manuscript Format

A reader writes to ask:

How should I differentiate the character's thoughts from the rest of the narrative? Some people have suggested I put them in quotation marks, but I find that when I read novels in which the character's thoughts are in quotation marks, I initially think they're speaking rather than thinking. I have seen novels in which the thoughts were italicized, but I know it's not advisable to use italics in a manuscript you're submitting to an editor. Should I instead underline all the thoughts? It makes for long underlines, but maybe it's the best way. What do you think?

There are three basic ways of indicating literal thoughts in narrative: setting them off in quotes, setting them off in italics, and not setting them off at all:

"I have to get out of this place," John thought, "if it's the last thing I do."

I have to get out of this place, John thought, if it's the last thing I do.

I have to get out of this place, John thought, if it's the last thing I do.

Each method has its adherents, and you're free to choose whichever one you think will help you make your prose as clear as possible. I'm with you on the quotes—I find it too easy to mistake those thoughts for dialog—but my own personal stylistic preference is for the third method. I find that italics gives thoughts such a strong literal flavor that seeing this technique employed often breaks me out of the story. I don't know about you, but rarely do I find myself thinking in complete literal sentences. (Except when I'm writing)

But I'm something of a cantankerous reader. I think it's safe to say that the italics method is the one most commonly used these days. It's a solid choice, and if you go that route, do not be afraid of long chunks of underlining. You are correct to avoid using italics in your manuscript; it's just too easy for editors to overlook when reading your submission, especially in Courier font. Underlining is the correct and accepted method for indicating italics in a manuscript (as demonstrated in the second example above), and no editor is going to blink at encountering a long string of it. That's what she's accustomed to seeing, even if it looks graceless to your eye.

I've written more about italics in the entry Italicizing long blocks of text.


Crossposted from Proper Manuscript Format