While getting my Tal'Avern fantasy books prepared for paperback editions, I've had my fair share of frustrations -the latest one being in how 'clean' they look.
Choosing the font, the size, and what kind of paragraph layout you want are fairly easy personal choices. But what I want to focus on in this blog is one of the most common 'mistakes' writers make.
I just did it in that last paragraph, actually. Do you see it? I'll do it again. See the difference?
For some reason, it's very easy to get this mistake ingrained into your writing, and you may not even realize that it is a 'mistake'. It's putting that extra space before starting a new sentence. I know, shocking, right?
Look, I'm guilty of making this mistake, so if you're sitting there gasping and saying to yourself 'oh my God, I do that!' don't worry. You are not alone. I've been doing it for years and never realized that it was a mistake until tonight.
Being my own worst critic, I want my paperbacks to look flawless. Perfection is what every author strives for, after all. It's the reason we could easily edit our work forever and never feel that it's perfect.
Luckily, that need for perfection is how I found out I've been making this mistake, and I wanted to share it with you all because there are certainly others out there that make the same simple mistake. Like me, you may be guilty of the 'two-spaces-before-every-sentence' habit as well. And the first step to solving a problem is knowing that the problem exists in the first place. Until tonight, I didn't know about it.
Now, you may be thinking 'it's only one extra space, what's the big deal?' That extra space before a sentence is what will keep your books from looking clean. Like many authors, I use Word, and I can tell you from experience, Word does not like that extra space. It completely throws off the justification, and you can literally spend hours trying to 'fix' it. Again, I'm speaking from experience.
So how do you fix something like that? A 300-500 page document with thousands upon thousands of sentences will take weeks to go through, sentence by sentence, hitting that delete button and taking out that extra space before every single sentence!
I actually started doing that. Yes, I honestly thought that was my punishment for not realizing I had made such a simple writing error. But after two pages, I thought to myself, maybe there's an easier way to go about it. A simpler way. Okay, maybe 'simpler' isn't the right word. 'Sneakier' is more appropriate.
Word has a wonderful tool called Find, and another called Replace. I've used them on occasion. I am now in love with the Replace tool.
So for those of you who have that habit ingrained in you as well to put two spaces before every sentence, here's what you do to save yourself a lot of time, grief, frustration, and retain a full head of hair rather than pulling out entire handfuls at a time:
Click on that Replace tool, and in the 'find' section, start at the beginning and hit the spacebar twice and then A. Tab down to the 'replace' section, and hit the spacebar once and type A. It will look something like this:
Find: A
Replace: A
Now just hit the 'replace all' button, and let Word do all your work for you fixing every sentence that starts with A by taking out that extra space before it. I had 583 replacements in my document, if you were wondering.
Obviously you'll want to go through and take care of the rest. B, C, D... every letter of the alphabet should get checked for a fix. And don't forget to do a fix for any sentences that have two spaces in front of a " (I just remembered to do that one myself!)
In the end, all of my sentences were fixed. I didn't keep track of just how many times I made this simple mistake. Suffice it to say, the document was over 350 pages long. It was a lot of 'mistakes.'
Now, is this going to change that bad habit of putting that extra space before every sentence? Honestly, I don't think so. For this blog, I had to consciously tell myself 'one space once space' before each sentence.
And yes, I did go back and 'fix' a few two-space-sentence-starters. I'm just so used to putting those two spaces before each sentence that I'm not sure I can break that habit, so don't feel bad if you find yourself doing the same thing.
But as long as you remember to take a few minutes to fix this common error when you're all done writing the world's next best-seller and looking it over, it will come out looking that much closer to perfection. And that's what we strive for. Oops. Ahh well, nobody is perfect.
