Downloadable Novel Manuscript Format for MS Word
by
William Womack, March 23rd, 2008
I can hear your eyes rolling. “Manuscript formatting? Great, here he goes again…” Dinking around with MS Word styles is like watching paint dry, I get it. So rather than foam at the mouth yet again about how to properly format and structure your Word doc, I’m going to hand you a shiny golden Easter egg — a pre-formatted Word template that you can download and start using right away.
In a previous post, I dissected how to properly structure and format a novel manuscript. This downloadable template is already pre-configured using those techniques. All you have to do is save it to your hard drive, open it in Word, and do a “Save As” to start your manuscript. The template itself contains instructions for use, so be sure to read it before you paste your words over mine. If the template causes you any grief or you think it needs any modifications, drop me a comment below.
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hey,
what’s the best way to do speech with this template?
Cheers
Nat
I’m not sure what speech you’re referring to. Dialog is simply encased in quotes, with no other special formatting. Can you give me an example of what you’re trying to do?
yeah dialog. when i put speech into quotes and continue on to a new line it creates a big gap in between. Are you meant to continue new dialog on a new line with this or keep going on the same line?
thanks
The gaps are usually caused by a paragraph being specified as heading 2, which I reserve for the start of a new scene. If that wasn’t your intent, just click on the paragraph that has the space before it, and set it back to “normal” in the style menu. Word does odd things at times, so it’s hard to pinpoint what happened in your case.
Thanks very much
I have imported a manuscript into this format and notice that new chapters do not automatically begin on new pages as I would have expected. Do I have to insert page breaks after my final “normal” paragraphs of each chapter? Thank you.
Good point, Steven. I just updated the template above with an updated version that does two new tricks; first, it inserts a page break before the H1 (chapter heading) tag. Second, it automatically sets the paragraph following a chapter heading to H2 (new scene heading). I appreciate the feedback.
Hi,
If i double click on this then it opens encrupted? What do I do then? Also if i instead right click i can only choose the “save target as”. So I do, putting it in the programmes folder. Note the suffix says DOC. So then when I right click and choose open with… I select word and it opens again encrupted? I’ve tried lots of different combinations or suffix and where i open it etc… all the same result. I have no idea how to uncorrupt a doc. Can you help. Below is a sample cut and past of what I mean by encrupted.
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Anita, what operating system are you using (Windows XP, MacOS, etc.) and which word processing program and version are you attempting to open the file in?