Icing the Cake: Formatting Your Manuscript for Submission

I wrote this up for a digital workshop on Manuscript Format that I delivered at Coyote Con 2010 on May 29, 2010.  Acknowledgments to Eric T. Reynolds of Hadley Rille Books and the instructors of Viable Paradise XI for their insight and advice on this topic. 

Why is manuscript format important?

I attended a writer’s conference once where authors were grouped into critique groups to read their work aloud and offer suggestions while published authors, agents, and editors “dropped in” to give their feedback.  It was an intimidating premise: “hey, unpublished, insecure writer! Put your work out there to be raked over the coals by strangers and, as a bonus, we’re going to throw in the truly terrifying prospect of Important People dropping in for a surprise critique!”

While my first instinct was to RUN AWAY FAST, I decided to stick it out.  And what happened next turned out to be an excellent learning experience not about the supportive nature of other writers, although that was certainly a bonus.  This became an enlightening experience about manuscript format. 

I was fortunate to have been placed in a group with a very young (16), very talented writer who was more frightened than I was.  As she was about to begin reading, a Famous Agent sat down at our table to listen.  She was everything we expected of a New York agent: pretty, stylish, and thoroughly intimidating.  After acknowledging the agent’s presence there, our young heroine took a deep breath, opened her mouth to read—and was immediately interrupted by a heavy hand on her shoulder. 

“Your format’s all wrong,” said the owner of the hand, who punctuated his criticism by grabbing the manuscript pages from her hands, drawing arrows and lines all over it, all while talking rapid-fire about margins and page numbers and font and “do this” and “don’t do that” while the rest of us watched, struck silent by the stranger’s brash, confident attack on the poor girl’s manuscript.  Just as I was about to leap to the girl’s defense, the stranger dumped the pages back down in front of our girl and whisked away as quickly as he had come.  As he left, I caught sight of his name tag: this was the Guest of Honor, a published and popular author.  So clearly, he knew what he was doing… right?

As soon as he disappeared, the Famous Agent leaned forward and said, “If you write a good story, none of that matters.”

Since this experience, I’ve heard many agents say the same thing, whether at conference panels, on blogs, on twitter, or in person at the bar.  On the one hand, this is good news: we, as writers, don’t have to sweat the small stuff! Yay! 

On the other hand, those comments often come with a great big “however.”  Often those same agents who will proclaim that the fabulousness of the story supersedes mere format will also chuck your query and partial into the bin after only a few lines.  For me, this situation falls under the same category as beginning a sentence with “and” even though your momma and your grammar teacher both told you that you could never, ever start a sentence with a coordinating conjunction.

“Once you learn the rules, you can break them.”

Contrary to what the Famous Agent told us that day, formatting IS important—at least, for us newbies.   When your first manuscript is published, you can then relax a little bit.  Until then, remember that your manuscript format is what makes the first impression on your reader.  And it is very, very important that you make a positive first impression.