Standard Manuscript Format in Word and Scrivener

[@coachjulieartz]

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[@shannonmackinnon8262]

Thank you so much Julie! This was extremely helpful. Thank you!

[@erichannemann9713]

Thank you!

[@outcast-tk3gv]

hey Julie, how would I format a poetry passage in a fiction book manuscript?

[@coachjulieartz]

That depends on whether it's poetry you've written or poetry you're using (with permission and attribution) from another poet and how long the excerpt is. If it's more than a couple of lines (i.e. a whole stanza or a couple of stanzas), you'll want to offset it from the text in some way, typically single-spaced and indented. If you're just using a line or two, you can just use quotations as you would with dialogue, but use a / to mark line breaks. A short example: I read her a line from my favorite poem, really going for it when I got to "Thou art more lovely and more temperate: / Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, / And summer’s lease hath all too short a date." A longer example (imagine the poem being a bit more indented than the text and maybe also italicized--the comment editor won't let me do that...): I read her my favorite poem, hoping it would convince her how much I loved her. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

[@outcast-tk3gv]

@@coachjulieartz thank you so much that helps a lot!

[@mariadarcy3182]

Watching a video to learn how to format a document in Word is so lame!, just take the time, type up the instructions and I'll follow them…