Pre-writing settings on
Word’s Styles
Warm up the program and get it ready for the shape your manuscript deserves – page break and paragraph indentation stunts
While researching for my previous article –
'A book’s life without tabs and extra spaces' available here – I explored a few tricks you can apply on Word to format your novel effectively. I’d like to show these awesome hacks to you, so let’s move on!
What are we going to cover?
The program on the images is MS Word 365, and we will use the Styles functions. What we’ll do is set up certain styles to automatically create:
1. Page break for a new chapter;
2. Full out first line for the new chapter’s first paragraph;
3. And full out first line for a new section’s first paragraph.
Now, these settings are pretty handy if you just start a novel – create the styles before you begin typing a brand new idea or one of your drafts, and Word will do the formatting for you. However, if you’ve converted a Word file from a different software or you are simply not satisfied with your current formatting, you can also apply these changes to your manuscript easily.
So, first let’s open a brand new Word document and look at the styles on the Home tab. You might have changed the fonts and alignment of some already, or you might be happy with one of the available styles from the Design tab, and that's totally okay. For now, we will stay on the Home tab.
1. Assign a heading style to your chapter title that will automatically start on a new page.
Why? Starting a new chapter on a fresh page is useful to create division and a nice flow for your novel. Also, assigning heading styles will give you and your editor an extra little tool to spot any problems through the Navigation pane.
A possible solution: You can assign page break for your headings.
To do this, simply click on the heading type you’d like to have this formatting option and chose Modify > Format > Paragraph > Line and Page break tab, and here make sure you have the Page break before option accepted. And ta-da! Whenever you pick this heading style for a title, it will automatically start on a new page.
If you’ve already assigned a heading style throughout your document but forgot to start the chapters on a new page, don’t worry! Do the same changes – you don’t even need to select the heading – and once you’ve pressed OK in both windows, Word will update the whole document to your freshly set style!
2. No indentation for the first line of the new chapter’s first paragraph
Why? These lines are called full out, and they signal something new. Yes, the start of a new chapter, but it can also be also a new section where there’s a different location or a timeline shift – in a way, it is informative, but also conventional in publishing.
A possible solution: You can create a special style for it.
You have your Normal setting for the body of text, and we need it to indent the first line of a paragraph. But not the first paragraph's first line, right?
So let’s create a second style – I named it No. 1 but you can go creative with the name – and we will base this on our Normal style, so the two style will be the same. Except! We won’t set a first line indentation to this one.
This is the basic, which is enough if you already have text in your document. If your chapter headings are formatted with styles, through the navigation pane you can easily jump to each chapters beginning – simply place the cursor anywhere inside the first paragraph and select the style that doesn’t have first line indentation.
However, if you’re just starting a new document and you’ve done the above steps, then there are two more steps I’d like to show you.
First, select the style you’ve created and click Modify. On this window you find the option Style for following paragraph, and chose your Normal style here. This means that after your first paragraph the rest will be automatically indented.
But how can we make Word to recognise our first paragraph? With the headings! Pick the style you use for your chapter titles and select modify. Here, set the Style for the following paragraph to your full out style. Once you typed in your chapter title and formatted it, after the enter it will automatically start the line without indentation.
3. No indentation for the first line of a section’s first paragraph.
Why? The same reason applies as for new chapters.
A possible solution: You can set a style for your section breaks.
In the early stages of your novel, I’d recommend using three asterisk for section breaks – you can replace them when it comes to design.
Let’s create a new style! We name it nicely, base it on our own Normal style, and let’s say we want it to be centred. If you’d like to start your novel’s sections on a new page, you can set this up with the above steps by ticking the box of the Page break before option in the Paragraph settings.
But! We also want to set the Style for following paragraph to our previous Style with the full out setting. This is the step that will ensure that the first paragraph’s first line after the section break won’t be indented.
I hope I could show you something new and useful. The right formatting is crucial for a good-looking book, and by doing these simple steps you can save time for yourself, and for your editor and typesetter.
Can I help you with anything else? Check out my Advice Corner for further articles!
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