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News
Formatting Fan Fiction |
| As of late, the Archivists have found themselves dealing with an immense number of submissions that are improperly formatted. I shall endeavour to explain one of the standard ways that a fan fiction should be formatted for your convenience, the convenience of whoever reads your story, and the convenience of the SIYE Staff. I find it useful to stick the Author's Note at the very beginning or the very end of the submission. This way, it is not confused with anything else. Author Notes on SIYE should not have review responses as that feature is built into the review system here. A/N's don't go toward the word count and neither are they acceptable as a submission by themselves. You can stick the Disclaimer after the A/N on the first chapter of your story. One disclaimer per story rather than per chapter is sufficient. For each chapter, I've found it handy to stick the story title, author, and chapter title centered on the page next. (One per line) You can also do the "Story:Chapter" format. The body of your story is what matters the most. Stories should be divided into paragraphs! It is nearly impossible to read a 1000+ word story that does not have a single paragraph break. At this point, the SIYE Staff are now under direction to automatically send such "one paragraph" submissions back to the author. A paragraph consists of about 5-6 sentences that are related to each other. If it goes longer than that, you should probably throw in a paragraph break for the heck of it. A line of dialogue also constitutes a paragraph. Even ONE word of dialogue is a paragraph. When the speaker changes, new paragraph. When the speaker finishes speaking, saying, doing, you should also move to another paragraph. In addition to that- a pet peeve of mine: If Harry says something in one paragraph, you shouldn't have Ginny say or do something in that same paragraph. Then I have to wonder who said and did what. Paragraphs should then be divided up from one another. When you reach the end of a paragraph, hit the return key twice. This results in a story body with a empty line between each paragraph. This makes fics easier to read. Sidenote: Paragraphs in fan fiction don't need to be indented either. If your chapter/submission then ends with an A/N, you should make it clear that it is an A/N rather than the story continuing. Please keep these guidelines in mind while writing. Thanks! Lord Dreadnault |
| Lord Dreadnault on 2006.02.08 - 11:26PM () |
Comments
dramaqueen came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.09 - 09:08AM to say:
Thanks for bringing this up! It bugs me when there's an improperly formatted story. It isn't that hard people! :)
jenn came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.09 - 11:13AM to say:
Thank you for saying that. It's always been a HUGE pet peeve of mine. Why can't people use the return key a couple times?
Torak came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.09 - 12:45PM to say:
It's extra wear and tear. This way, their keyobards will last a week longer.
PhoenixAeternum came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.09 - 01:13PM to say:
It's a conspiracy to drive us Archivists mad.
We're dealing with the people who killed Kennedy...
bibliophile19 came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.09 - 02:34PM to say:
You know that some websites and computer programs changed from "Press ANY key" to "Press the RETURN key" after people called up tech support asking where the "ANY" key was?
This is the same sort of thing; most keyboards made nowadays have the "ENTER" key, so people look for the "RETURN" key, don't find it, shrug, and continue writing.
That's my theory at least.
Professor Scroll came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.09 - 02:40PM to say:
Joseph, that's such a diplomatic response.
Torak came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.09 - 03:19PM to say:
In the case of a certain IT department which shall remain nameless, I think it#s more a question of the staff consisting of illiterate cretins who don't believe in reading manuals and FAQs before installing, say, a university-wide campus management system.
Spenser Hemmingway came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.09 - 04:04PM to say:
Even with my new glasses, I prefer a well-posted story. I prefer not to have to increase the prescription anytime soon. Those stories that meet basic format requirements, but are presented as if they were originated from my six-year-old's classroom...well...hmm. I am becoming adamant about the disclaimer as well. It isn't that difficult, and is absolutely well-deserved. Torak, I think that those cretins need a dictionary to understand the word. Eric B.
Magnolia Mama came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.09 - 11:47PM to say:
While I applaud any effort to establish and maintain uniform formatting conventions on any archive, a couple of the comments here compelled me to point out a cultural difference in formatting that y'all have probably already run into more than once (we see it all the time on Checkmated). In some parts of the world (I think mostly around the Indian subcontinent and SE Asia, though I could be mistaken), people are taught to write stories in which you have narrative in a block of text followed by a break, then several lines of dialogue bunched together with no spaces in between each line, followed by a line break to set the dialogue apart from the next block of narrative. While I'm not saying authors who format their stories this way shouldn't be asked to correct the formatting in keeping with SIYE's guidelines, it would be prudent to keep in mind that people who follow this pattern aren't clueless, they're just doing it the way they've been taught.
bibliophile19 came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.10 - 12:07AM to say:
We've seen that, which explains a few things.
Then again, we've seen stories where the entire text is one BIG paragraph, with no breaks, and, frequently, with either little or no punctuation.
Just to give an example, I recently had one story that was somewhere in the region of 5000+ word count. No paragraph breaks- just one solid block of text. How the author wrote it like that is beyond me.
Torak came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.10 - 02:41AM to say:
The annoying thing is when people from anglophone countries - not only the US, I must admit - write horrible bunched-up tracts. No excuse there.
Sir Ollivander came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.10 - 12:26PM to say:
Hello everybody - Magnolia Mama brings up a very good point. Not all countries and cultures read and write in the same syntax that English or Americans do. In the Middle East, I believe they read and write from right-to-left. And look at a Japanese written book. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples when dealing with punctuation and grammar. However, two things still stand out.
The solid block of text or a few paragraphs in a 5000+ word story is not the way the author probably wrote it. That appears to be a format error of some kind. But when paragraphs appear properly formatted and the author has a two or three way conversation in the same paragraph, that's an author writing problem. A little education is needed here.
The second thing is that SIYE is an English language web site. With respect to other languages and writing cultures that Magnolia Mama properly pointed out, you have to follow the English writing syntax. Posting a story written in Hebrew or formatted for the Arabic language will not work on SIYE.
Not everybody is clueless, on the contrary. However, if you're going to submit an English written story on an English language web site, it has to follow English syntax, including formatting, grammar, punctuation, and even spelling. That's all we at SIYE ask.
herekittykitty came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.12 - 12:49AM to say:
I was having formatting issues with my submissions using the Safari browser, Mac OS 10.4.4. When I pasted my update in the box, none of the paragraph returns would stay in my submission. It was like they were never there. I pasted from Word, Pages (mac word processing), and rtf, and had the same problem every single time.
I tried IE, however (although i HATE IE), and it worked. Maybe there are other browser incompatibility problems??
AdminQ came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.12 - 01:39PM to say:
ATTN: herekittykitty
THe issue is with Safari and MAC If you can upgrade to OSX and use FireFox this issue is resolved for that platform, if not then you have to use IE. The issue isnt with the site it is the browsers ability to format and sent data to the servers PHP engine. The update is the only fix for you, I'm sorry
herekittykitty came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.13 - 11:24AM to say:
i'm on OS10.4.4 - I'll try Firefox instead of Safari... thanks muchly!
DQBunny came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.26 - 02:32PM to say:
Ah, reading the notes about Safari solves my problem as well. I noticed that when I submitted a chapter using Safari for the first time, it stripped out all of my formatting when I did a preview. So I'll go back to Firefox for fic submissions here.
The thing that got me was when I got a letter back from one of the Archivists about there being a problem with my story formatting and got one of the form letters explaining what story formatting, etc. is. It really bristled because I've been submitting fanfiction to various sites for six years now. I don't need to be told that I need a beta or how to format my stories.
Thankfully, Cori was very understanding and explained how it was just a form letter, etc. She was very sweet about it! ^_^ I just wonder if the full explanation is needed in the e-mails notifying people if they have a problem - especially if they've submitted stories here before with no problem. Maybe instead of the full paragraphs explaining what paragraph formatting and Beta readers are, perhaps provide links to the site saying where this information can be found? It's very useful to a new author, but to older authors who might just be running into the occasional technical glitch, the tone of the form letter seems quite off-putting.
Telwyn Dubois came out of the woodwork on 2006.02.09 - 03:39AM to say:
I'm glad that problem's finally been brought to the attention of the general public. It's such a terrible tragedy that some authors can't take the format their stories for different websites. :)