It goes without saying that you won’t make any money. (This generally goes without saying for professional fiction writers too, but I digress.) And unlike profic writers, you likely won’t get any respect, much less admiration, from anyone outside your fandom.
You do it for fun. You do it because you’re obsessed. You do it because … well, whatever. But chances are, you don’t do it because you love grammar and spelling (although you might also love those things.)
Nevertheless, in your obsessive little fic writer’s heart, you want your work to be as good as it can be. Not for you those author notes that start I’m terrible at grammar LOL! No. You are a no-excuses kind of writer.
Aren’t you?
Of course you are.
You, my friend, need a style sheet.
A style sheet records the decisions you’ve made about your story so you don’t give Harry and Draco’s son black hair in chapter one and blond hair in chapter ten. So you don’t capitalize Accio on page three and lowercase it on page fifty. It’s the barrier between you and a commenter who wants to criticize your grammar and spelling rather than engaging with your rich worldbuilding and deep characterizations.
So, how to go about it?
It starts with familiarizing yourself with a good style guide or three. I realize I have said this before, but it bears saying again: get to know a style guide.
Style guides give writers and editors a set of guidelines for presenting written material. They serve as authoritative sources of information on grammar, punctuation, usage, and document design. Although some folks wield them like a cudgel, ruthlessly enforcing grammar “rules” hither and yon, style guides are meant to be exactly what’s on the tin: guides. Above all, they help writers communicate clearly and consistently. (You do want to be clear and consistent, don’t you? And when you don’t, you want to be unclear and inconsistent intentionally, yes?)
The problem, for authors and editors of fiction, is that most industry-standard style guides—including The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) for American English and Oxford’s New Hart’s Rules for British English—are geared toward academic and other nonfiction writing, with only minor attention paid to the peculiarities of fiction. While CMOS and New Hart’s cover dialogue, for example, they aren’t especially comprehensive on the topic.
Another challenge is that most style guides are big. You don’t want to have to sort through forty-three entries (as in the eighteenth edition of CMOS) on commas to figure out if you need a goddamn comma before the generational suffix III in Sirius Orion Black III (spoiler alert: you don’t).
Yet another issue is that the standard style guides often don’t include the guidance you need to perfect your little snowflake of a work. Worldbuilders are left to their own devices in figuring out how to style the particular words that make up their fictional universes.
That spell you cleverly invented somewhere back in chapter 23 to help Harry get pregnant with Draco’s spawn—should it be capitalized? Set in italics? And how is it spelled again?
This is where your style sheet comes in.
Assuming you’ve followed my sage advice and become familiar with at least one industry-standard style guide, your first task on the path to fic copyediting nirvana is to make decisions about your work’s style.
These include point of view (POV) and narrative tense, and you’ll be a happier author if you make deliberate decisions about them before you begin drafting your magnum opus. Trust me when I tell you that fixing major POV problems after you’ve drafted fifty chapters of your Drarry fic is painful and time consuming. Fixing tense problems is also a pain, albeit somewhat less so than fixing POV.
Almost everything besides POV and tense counts as small stuff, but collectively, it’s stuff that can either create an immersive experience for readers or prompt the more persnickety among them to nope out of your story. Here, the two watchwords are: consistency and invisibility.
Invisibility of your style means it provides the reader with the clues they need to understand what’s going on, without shouting, This is My Style!!!!
As the great copy editor Benjamin Dreyer, former copy chief for Random House, said of a celebrated magazine (in)famous for its fussy style:
“If you’re going to have a house style, try not to have a house style visible from space.”
Consistency is the cousin of invisibility in that it helps prevent readers from being swept out of your story by an unexpected uppercase letter or set of italics. It provides helpful signposts for readers, reassuring them that, yes, this part is, say, a song, just like that last bit where you added italics and yellow highlights. (Don’t do this.)
These small-stuff choices aren’t things you necessarily need to worry about before you start writing; you can make up your mind as you write or even afterward, during the initial copyedit. Whenever you make them, though, jot them down on your style sheet so you remember what you’ve decided.
Among the small-stuff decisions you’ll want to make are:
If you, like me, are writing Harry Potter fic, and you, like me, are not British, you’ll want to decide whether you’re going to use your native English (e.g., American, Canadian, Australian) or British English spellings. (You will, of course, want to use British language conventions; more on that in another post.)
If you decide on British spelling, will you use -iz/-ze or -is/-se suffixes? (Either is acceptable.)
You will also need to decide on a convention for quotation marks.
British English uses both double and single quotation marks as a base, although singles with nested doubles are more common in fiction:
or
The dash is a useful little item. It can provide an extra bit of space where the lowly hyphen doesn’t quite do the job, as in number ranges, or create a smoother interruption where parentheses (known as round brackets in British English) might be too jarring.
For most purposes in fiction, there are two types of dash: the shorter en dash (or en rule in British English) and the em dash (em rule).
The “correct” uses of the various dashes are beyond the scope of this post, but you do need to make one crucial decision regarding their use: do you want to use the en dash or the em dash to set off parenthetical statements?
British publications tend to use a spaced en dash, while Americans are partial to the em dash, spaced or unspaced, depending on the publication. Here’s how these look in use:
or
or
Decide which you like best and stick to it. (Note that interrupted dialogue always uses the em dash, while number ranges—e.g., “Harry’s first Hogwarts year was 1991–1992”—always takes the en dash.)
Abbreviations (of which there are several types, including acronyms, contractions, and initialisms) merit long entries in style guides, but the main decision you need to make is whether to use periods (full stops in British English) between the letters of abbreviations that use more than one capital letter.
or
Ah, numbers. The bane of every fiction copy editor’s life. Or at least, the bane of mine. While nonfiction publications generally have clear guidelines on when to spell out numbers and when to use digits in text, fiction requires a more nuanced approach.
In general, fiction editors advise spelling out numbers in text (especially in dialogue) unless doing so would introduce awkwardness or confusion. You’ll want to create some general guidelines for how you treat numbers, but you should also remain alert to the rhythm and appearance of numbers in text and make exceptions where warranted. Here are some examples of how numbers might be styled:
Ellipses (technically called suspension points when they indicate trailing off) can be styled in several ways, so you should decide which looks best to you and stick with it.
One choice is to use the ellipsis character, which has the advantage of always keeping the three dots together, but can look a bit squished.
Or you can use three spaced periods, but you’ll want to use a non-breaking space (Ctrl+Shift+Space on Windows; Option+Space on Mac) between each period to ensure they don’t break apart at the end of a line.
If you’re really fancy, you can use a narrow non-breaking space (google how to do this in your system) between the periods; however, this is a pain if you’re posting your text online because you’ll have to insert the HTML codes for that narrow non-breaking space every damn time.
However you style them, you want to put a space before the first period and after the last. Yes, you’ll see lots of works that omit those spaces, but it looks terrible. If you want the spaces (and you do), use a non-breaking space before the first period so the ellipsis doesn’t inadvertently end up on the next line like a sad little lonely blorbo.
While the possessives of most singular common nouns end in ’s and plural common nouns end in s’, proper nouns are more complicated. Most style guides will give you the general rules, but you’ll need to decide how to style those proper nouns that end in the pesky s sound.
These can be styled with either an added ‘s or by simply adding an apostrophe to the end: s’. Some folks style them differently depending on whether pronunciation would be hampered by adding the ‘s, but you can decide if the extra work is worth it for you. Compare the following, all of which are technically correct:
There is lively debate in the professional fiction world over how to treat non-English words and phrases used in an English-language context.
The traditional advice is to set in italics any non-English word (other than a proper noun) that isn’t in the dictionary of choice, so as to alert the reader that the word … isn’t English. The idea is to prevent readers from becoming confused and paging (metaphorically) through their dictionaries, vainly searching for the unfamiliar term.
More current thinking is that italicizing non-English words risks “othering” characters who speak languages other than English. It also calls attention to such terms when the author has no reason or desire to do so.
The abovementioned Benjamin Dreyer has an elegant suggestion that relies on context and intention, and I think it makes for a good solution:
Let’s say you’re writing a novel in which the characters shimmy easily between English and, say, Spanish. Consider not setting the Spanish (or what-have-you) in italics. Use of italics emphasizes foreignness. If you mean to suggest easy fluency, use of roman normalizes your text. …
On the other hand, if you’re writing a novel about, say, an isolated young Englishwoman living in Paris who is confounded by the customs, the people, and the language, it would certainly make good sense to set all the bits of French she encounters, in narration or dialogue, in the requisite italics. You want that French to feel, every time, strange.
(Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style)
It goes without saying that you’ll follow the conventional rules for capitalizing proper nouns (won’t you), but what about words you’ve invented or are using in an unconventional context?
J. K. Rowling and her editors were notoriously capricious about using capitals for her invented words and for existing words she used in the context of the magical world. Why Muggles but wizards? Why Mudblood but pure-blood? Why Quidditch but football? Why capitalize Boggart (a word that has existed in folklore for centuries) but not banshee (likewise)? Why, why, why?
There is a similar challenge with verbs that are used to refer to both magical and non-magical activities. (Do you Summon your broom or summon it? Rowling does the former, but your characters might not.)
As I see it, fic writers and editors have two (okay, two and a half) choices:
The advantage of choosing upper- or lowercase across the board is simplicity. Also, if you lowercase everything, you run less of a risk of pulling a reader out of your story with an unexpected capital letter.
The advantages of approach number 2.5 are nuance and avoiding potential confusion.
If you want to emphasize the … magicness … of the magical world, you could do worse than to capitalize magical words as JKR did. Moreover, no one will wonder if you’ve stunned Draco (“Darling, I’m pregnant!”) or Stunned Draco (“Stupefy!”)
This is related to the prior two entries.
In canon, JKR uses italics for the incantations of various spells. This is likely partly to emphasize their magical nature and partly because most of them are in (or vaguely derived from) Latin, and thus covered under the conventional “italicize non-English words” guideline.
You, however, can decide for yourself how to treat incantations, based on the factors I mentioned above for non-English words and capitalization.
If you are like me (Merlin forfend), you use too many a fair few snippets of poems or songs in your fic (always paying careful attention to copyright law, of course), you’ll want to set them off to ensure folks know that these are quotations of existing works.
For short bits, italics are a good choice, but for longer bits, you might prefer to set them off with extra line spacing and/or indentations and use roman typeface. (Long bits of italics tend to be wearying to the reader’s eye.) Behold:
“I met her in a club down in old Soho
Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca-Cola.
C-O-L-A, cola.”
Your choice.
The same decisions should be made for letters, notes, and texts, as well as any non-spoken dialogue such as telepathy or mind-reading.
Also, flashbacks and dreams.
If you must write a flashback or dream sequence, you’d do best to set it in roman unless it’s very short. In general, I think it’s best not to attempt to set it off, format-wise, in any way (such as italics or indentation) unless you want to draw attention to the fact that it is a dream or a flashback. Most flashback sequences work much better when they are integrated into the narrative via a smooth transition rather than an abrupt change of format or (shudder) an interpolated author’s note like Begin flashback. (Same goes, BTW, for POV changes if you’re going to make them.)
Whenever you run up against a spot where you need to make a style decision in your writing or editing, make it, note it in your style sheet, and move on. Keep a list of words at the end of the style sheet where you note exactly how you’ve styled a problematic word, including capitalization and italics, and exceptions, if any. You can always go back and change it as you edit, but you want to have a record of your decisions.
For each story you write, you’ll also want a section to keep track of things about your characters (name spellings, physical traits, etc.), your locations, and other items like spells or potions. Jot these details down as you write so you never tell readers that Harry and Draco’s son has black hair in chapter one and blond hair in chapter ten.
I’ve recently updated the style sheet I use for my Harry Potter fic. Feel free to download a copy and alter it to your heart’s content. A few notes:
These are my decisions I’ve made for my work; your mileage may (and probably should) vary.
The style sheet is in British English, since I write my fic in it.
In addition to style decisions, the style sheet also includes standard style things I look up frequently. You may (or may not) want to delete these to simplify the style sheet.
The highlighted parts under Story Elements are decisions I make for each fic individually; I’ve included all the choices in the style sheet for convenience.
The list of words at the end contains both canon words and words I made up in various fics.
No affiliate links, just things I think are useful.
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