Aesthetics: Formatting

A banner can tell you a lot about a story – the feel that the author has in mind, their character concept and often times, if you pay enough attention, the type of characters you’re likely to find within, but a banner can’t make the experience of reading a story more pleasurable and a nice banner doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re about to read a story that was well thought out and from an author who put time, consideration, research, and original thought into the work they put forth. The titles and summaries that accompany every story and chapter are, again, illustrative and important, but they are temporary – they are merely the thing that you see on your way in the door. A nice foyer does not a Victorian mansion make.

Thus, we ask ourselves, what is the most important aesthetic choice I can make? If banners, summaries and titles bear relevance, but not the supreme relevance, what should I be focusing my time and attention on? After hours of deliberation (all right, minutes) and a long time with the site, I’ve come to theorize that the most important visual choice you can make is the one that determines how you plan to format your chapters.

Each chapter is a window into the world that you are attempting to create and the laws of grammar, as well as the restraints wrought by HTML, ease of use and carriage returns have to be balanced alongside that which makes your writing uniquely you – that which makes it identifiable.

Grammar: The Quiet Beast
My understanding of grammar and punctuation is sadly, remiss, but even my somewhat juvenile comprehension feels confident in venturing the following suggestions.

First, sentences and paragraphs should always be started with a capital letter.

Second, quotation marks, no matter how ‘boring,’ are the appropriate and socially accepted method of delineating when someone is speaking. It’s not nice to substitute an asterix or a hyphen or a backslash in their place. Yes, your method may be cuter, but it’s also jarring to the reader and it might inspire them to move on to another story rather than continue to struggle with yours.

Third, do not underestimate the power of the punctuation mark. Sad though it may be, many authors find that it gives their stories some sense of “self” to leave out the many periods, commas and apostrophe’s that might make their stories grammatically correct. While I’m not a stickler for grammar and I seldom notice a misplaced comma, it is important to use at least rudimentary punctuation when getting something ready to post. Periods to separate sentences are a must, at the very least.

Finally, learning to properly space dialogue is crucial. To learn how to do this, you might reference one of your favorite novels or even a book from the Harry Potter series…or, you might just consider carrying on reading this. When composing a story, many authors overestimate the importance of putting a complete thought into a paragraph. While that is important, construct provides that we separate characters dialogue into separate text clumps. Take the example below as an illustration.

Where you had expected friendly outrage, Paige stared resolutely at the rough wood and took another sip of her drink

“What?” Silence. “What?!”

Another sip.

“Nothing … I just …” Silence. “It might be a good thing.” Her voice was sheepish, quiet, and coy. Your eyes widened, and as she began to embark on her reasoning, you reached out for the nearby bottle and poured yourself another drink. “Look around, Alexis. You’ve got nothing in the Muggle world. We’re witches. I don’t have a choice; this pays the bills until I can afford to open my own shop, but you have a chance. You have an investment fund for crying out loud. Your parents will give you the money to open that little gallery you’ve been talking about.” Sensing your fury and the unmitigated look of shock, she spoke more quickly, letting her words slur together. “You only have one more exam before you’ll have your Auror certification and its Stealth and Concealment. If you finish that up, you could work at the Ministry for a few years and afford to open your gallery on your own. It’s just something to consider …” Paige added placatingly, seizing a push broom.

“Oh, screw it!” and with a swish of your wand, the floor was pristinely clean. “Lock up on your way out.” You said in as husky a tone as you could muster, heading for the door.

Note the way that when a new character speaks, a new paragraph is begun. You can include more than one ‘quote’ from a character within a single would-be-paragraph so long as it is not broken or interrupted by the speech of another character. Doing this correctly will work in the favor of your writing tremendously.

HTML – The Brute Force
HTML – the language with which your intentions communicate into your web browser – and those of your readers – is a force to be reckoned with. Where grammar has its preferences, there is no negotiating with HTML. What you see is what you get and you have no choice but to bow to its iron fisted rule.

The most crucial way in which HTML impacts an author submitting their works to our site is in their paragraph spacing. Grammatically speaking, it is almost tremendously inappropriate to format an article as I have done here – the gratuitous spacing would be frowned upon by your English professor and editor alike and, thus, one is inclined to think that it is inappropriate for this environment as well but the internet has its own sub-set of rules that impact grammar.

“Tab” is not something understood by HTML so the standard five-space indent that we are so accustom to using when we want to delineate between an old paragraph and the new one is quite a bit more difficult to accomplish than we might be used to. True, it can be done. HTML does understand a command for a ‘blank space’ and, entering five of these before the beginning of any new paragraph would enter an instruction that looks a whole lot like tab, but it is not only cumbersome to do, it’s not something most people are comfortable with viewing on the web. The best bet, instead, is to simply enter an extra return between each given paragraph as I have done in the formatting of this article or as you would do in the event of a forum post or otherwise.

In addition to the physical spacing which HTML impacts, it also presents you with additional tools of emphasis – most importantly bold and italic. The biggest thing to remember when using these is that they are tools – not toys. Now, I know, that seems a little extreme, but from your reader’s perspective, too many changes between standard format characters and bold, italic, underlined and center will drive them batty. It is common, in fandom as well as published literature, to use italics when one wants to point out a thought that the character is having, including their recollection of a memory. Note the way the intermittent thoughts as well as the larger “flashback” or memory is delineated using simple italics. This allows you to ensure that your readers notice what you are doing and do not get mixed up while reading without inserting an authors note that can risk taking a reader out of their environment.

Fourteen days. What’s another 182?

As the days passed, this was feeling a lot farther from anyone’s definition of ‘worth it.’

”Vogel!” An all too familiar voice was shouting to you from the path into Hogsmead. Instinctively, you flinched, almost losing your place in the novel leaning on your knees.

Soren James – one of the many among the privileged children of your mother’s friends. Soren paid your 14-year old self no more attention than an occasional nod or an obligatory smile during dinner since your first year and you returned them all with an equal excitement. He was, like most of the rest of the students at Hogwarts, little more than background noise that kept you from your studying. Not that you were particularly studious, only that it seemed one of the few things left to do when you paid no attention to your classmates.

“Isn’t it a bit cold to sit outside reading a book? Come on, a couple of us are meeting in the Three Broomsticks for a butterbeer before Honeydukes.”

One of the simplest principals of psychology is the science behind returning to your roots. It brings back memories; helps us to sift through our present by understanding our past. You weren’t great with ‘sifting’ of any kind…through anything… Sifting was messy. Sifting dragged up the demons. Sifting got your hands dirty.

Underlines are used somewhat less often. The most common “correct” use of an underline is something not often done in a fictional environment – to reference a written work. (i.e., to underline “Hogwarts: A History”) but they are also used in other instances as a means of emphasizing a statement.

The final, and most irritating method of use for HTML employed by authors who write each chapter from the perspective of several different characters. For them, it is common to give each character a combination of bold, italic, underlines and base text and issue a “key” along with the chapter that explains who is whom. While this is an arguably good way to separate the point of view of one character from another, it takes something away from the reading experience to constantly need to refer back to a key to determine who is speaking. In this event, I will reference a written and published work – Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins – as an example of a written work that does vary perspectives throughout the story, moving from a human character – Ellen Cherry Charles – and several seemingly inanimate objects. To do this, Robbins uses a series of symbols to break between the varying perspectives but does not note it with a change in text, font, or with a veritable authors warning. Instead, he relies on the intelligence of the reader (which really needs only to be rudimentary) to gather that the change has gone from one character to another. To get a feel for how to do this, I would recommend popping down to your local library and taking a glance at this novel.