Lifelong Goals
- Become King of Rynmere.
- Become Filthy Rich.
- Die of overdose with two dozen prostitutes in bed. Literally buried in women.
- Rename the Adult Forum to the Peake Forum
Thanks to Lazuli for this amazing template!
Moderator: Staff
Formatting Your Piece of Fiction
[tab]This piece outlines, and provides an example of some guidelines for formatting of a piece of fiction. You should follow them if you want to make your story easy to read, which you should. Reading fiction is hard, so you don’t want to make it more difficult on your audience by writing with haphazard and confusing formatting. This is especially true if you’re trying to find an agent or publisher for your work. You want to make life as easy for these people as possible. If you follow the rules for formatting, you’ll at least have one less thing to worry about.
[tab]‘I’ve started speaking,’ she said, placing the comma inside the quotation mark, not outside of it, ‘So I started a new paragraph.’
[tab]He thought this over on the next line, not on the same line, because he’s not the same as she, who spoke the line above, and also noted that new paragraphs were indented. If he’d chosen to reply to her, that would’ve been on a new line, too, but he kept his mouth shut instead.
[tab]Three days later, a lot of time had passed, so the author skipped a line to indicate the lapse. This isn’t, strictly speaking, always necessary, but it can be useful if you’re jumping time or space, to keep the reader from getting confused. The really important point here is that you don’t skip a line after every paragraph, only in special cases when the logic of your narrative dictates it.
[tab]‘Only in business letters do you skip a line after every paragraph.’ He scratched his head, and noted casually that the period goes inside the quotation marks, too, just like the comma.
[tab]‘Damn straight,’ she said. ‘And fiction isn’t a business letter. If you’re British, you call a period a full stop.’
[tab]‘Good point. Now, if you’re going to use ellipses, just make sure there’s only . . . three dots. Never more, never less.’
[tab]‘Oh, and dashes,’ she said, ‘are longer than hyphens, and therefore, are always made up of two hyphens—like this—so don’t go using one measly little hyphen when you mean a dash.’
[tab]After this little piece of dialogue, the story raced to its wonderful conclusion. Make sure you know the difference between it’s and its and that you capitalize Mum, Dad and Uncle George, but not my mum, my dad or my uncle. Finally, if you know the difference between that and which, which is a subtle difference, you’ll really look like you know what you’re doing.
(22:12:45) Malcolm: basically >>
(22:12:56) Malcolm: rynmeres heart is still beating
(22:12:59) Nir'wei: Malcolm, how would the Skye Verath Lodge react to that
(22:13:10) Nir'wei: Wait what
(22:13:17) Faith has done 2 reviews today.
(22:13:18) Malcolm: and gawyne decided to go down into the labyrinth and touch it
(22:13:48) Malcolm: and every now and then he tries to escape and it hisses at him and jacadon on the surface go cray cray cos >>
(22:13:52) Malcolm: mummy!
(21:02:59) Phobos_Tristal: I dare someone to piss into the volcano
Maybe I should write "Malcolm woke up, had a wank, and didn't wash his hands" - Kingdom