Manuscript Formatting

I'm preparing to seek an agent, and one of the problems I'm having is formatting my manuscript. First, a style question: my manuscript formatting book (aka. most useful thing ever written) says you should not use underlines for chapter headings. How should they be formatted, if at all? I've been using bold as I work on it, but I was wondering if anyone knew.

Secondly, I have a technical question. I've read that you should start each chapter on a new page. But if I just did that by pressing ENTER ENTER ENTER until it went to a new page, that'd work. Until I tweaked the manuscript, which would move the text up and down, messing the whole thing up. Is there any way to do this "cleanly", ie. indicate to the program that I want the start of the chapter heading to continually align with the top of the page? As I mentioned in the topic title, I'm using MS Word.

Thanks!

I'm not sure about the first part of your question, but I can answer this part.

Secondly, I have a technical question. I've read that you should start each chapter on a new page. But if I just did that by pressing ENTER ENTER ENTER until it went to a new page, that'd work. Until I tweaked the manuscript, which would move the text up and down, messing the whole thing up. Is there any way to do this "cleanly", ie. indicate to the program that I want the start of the chapter heading to continually align with the top of the page? As I mentioned in the topic title, I'm using MS Word.

Insert ---> Break ----> Page break.

Thanks so much yrclever! That's saved me a lot of time now.

EDIT: Yet another formatting question. Should I insert three *** asterisks into the breaks between scenes to make them clearer? I have read this in a few sources, but the aforementioned Most Useful Thing Ever Written is a bit ambiguous and makes it sound optional.

If the point of view remains the same and there not to much time has passed then double-double line space. If the view shifts and or there is a large time lapse the double-double line space and then add the *** then space.

As for the chapters it should be left justified in upper and lowercase letters. Although you can center it and the agent has no qualms with it. I'm not sure about the bolding though.

Thanks Amon360.

Now I have another question about manuscript formatting. The book I'm reading says not to have the word chapter, just the number and the title. Do they mean like:

1. Hello

(where Hello is the chapter title)

?

Thanks!

I haven't formatted anything to send out before, but there are definitely about a hundred thousand resources on manuscript formatting that will help you immensely.

Here's one.

And here's another.

And that's just the top two hits I got when typing in "manuscript formatting" on Google. The other great thing about the interweebs is that you can find heaps of agents' and publishers' blogs/sites talking about the intricacies of publishing. They don't change much from genre to genre or publisher to publisher, but depending on your work, you might benefit more from reading a fantasy novel agent's blog than, say, a romance novel's agent.

Other things that might help you out:

Slushkiller, which is written by a publisher but could most definitely apply to an agent, as well.

There was also a recent event on Twitter where a number of agents from a number of different companies (some of them pretty prolific) Twittered about all of the awful submissions they received from authors. It was pretty handy for showing how beginner writers made a lot of similar and basic mistakes when submitting their manuscripts. (A big one was not reading the agent's guidelines of submission very well and submitting something of the wrong genre or audience or some other thing.) I tried to find the link for it but for the life of me, I can't.

But there are heaps of resources on the internet for you to peruse — take advantage of them!

And good luck.

Thanks for the links smaur.

I found a link to the #queryfail day transcript.

http://www.spontaneousderivation.com/20 ... 9-in-html/

You can get it in various formats, including PDF. I used PDF and it loaded fairly fast, considering the sheer length.

I have (yet) another question. Wow, I am so full of questions lately! Anyway, this is fairly simple: straight quotes or curly quotes? My computer defaults to curly, but are straight quotes more acceptable in a manuscript? What about straight versus curly commas?

Thanka again.