Bywater Books manuscript submission notes, found in Learn Writing with Uncle Jim.
On proper formatting…
If there is some really good reason, like you are using a typewriter, and not a computer and it’s a royal pain to re-format, then you can be the exception. Note the ‘really good reason’ part. ‘It’s a pain and I’d rather spend my time writing’, ‘the Xena rerun/WNBA game was on and I was too tired afterward’, ‘my ex-girlfriend set up the computer for me and I haven’t a clue as to how to reformat’ are not good reasons. Life is a learning curve. Your next girlfriend may be into needlepoint and not computers, so you might as well learn how to re-format now.
It was the needlepoint thing that got me. Elsewhere on that Learn Wrting page, Jim dissects a scene from his forthcoming short story, “A Tremble in the Air,” sentence by sentence.
