I finished reading aloud for typos, punctuation, and spelling; to make sure the story flowed without interruption; and for readability, so that it could be read aloud to an audience. I managed to do this all in one pass, instead of three. Despite all the reading and editing I had already done up to that point, I found that there was still much to be corrected, adjusted, rearranged, and so on. And that done, I have now begun, as in the title, the formatting for publication. 

I compose using Scrivener, a word processor which allows me to have each chapter in a separate folder, listed in order on the left sidebar. This makes it easy for me to, say, jump from chapter twenty three to chapter seven, for whatever reason, without having to scroll. The right sidebar is for for sketches and notes for each chapter. Scrivener can then compile all the chapters into one PDF document for printing. But I don’t do that, because I’m concerned about widows and orphans, and Scrivener doesn’t allow that kind of editing, because the chapters do not have page numbers, and the margins sometimes change, and editing a PDF offers it’s own challenges, and, as far as I know, cannot adjust pagination. Some writers use Scrivener for everything, but Ogden House requires that I do the page layout, formatting, and final editing myself.

To do this, I copy every chapter into an RTF Nisus Writer file, another word processor which enables me to attend to the fine details, so that I can make the script to be the way I want it to be.

Widows and orphans. Widows are when a single line of a paragraph is by itself, at the top or the bottom of the page. Orphans are a single short word, such as “it,” or final syllable, such as “ducing” from “introducing,” which are the last line of a paragraph. 

Some software allows you to click on Widow/Orphan Control, and takes care of that for you. Very roughly, as fixing one widow can affect the pagination of the whole text, and may introduce more widows that weren’t there before, whether the software does it or I do it. Even if those are taken care of in turn, the text, as “Controlled” by the software algorithm, looks clumsy, at least on some pages, which can sometimes take a reader right out of the story. 

That kind of work is best done by a live copy editor, who prepares a document for the printer. There is more to fixing widows than can by done by an algorithm, and more ways than by just moving the single line up or down. Which is why I do it myself, so that the page, when it’s printed, looks good, not just “correct.” It takes a while. I have seen books, by major publishers, which have too much or too little line spacing from page to page, the bottom of a page looks like an unmarked scene break, and some lines have too much white space between words. But then, an algorithm is cheaper than paying an editor to do it.

I won’t describe what I do, it’s really not very interesting, other to say that I have a number of methods with which to make a printed page look good. And that is important to me.

And, at the same time, I am doing one more read-aloud. In order to correct some widows and orphans, I may have to I change a word, or a phrase, so that the correction will be invisible. These changes inevitably make the story better. Sometimes, on this slow reading, word by word,  in a low-pitched voice, I discover things which I should have changed before anyway. 

In a sense, every text, no matter who the author, can be improved, even if just a little bit. Ernest Hemingway, who was very particular about his chosen style of writing, took as much time as he needed in order to make it just the way he wanted it to be, and to make it consistent through the whole story or novel. That is a good part of his success and popularity. If you liked one of his works, you could be pretty sure that you would like others.

It’s going to take me a while to get my story to be exactly the way I want it, not the way some editor thinks it ought to be. While I hope that I’ll have readers who enjoy my novels — and, actually, some of them do — I am writing my stories for myself first. If it were only for myself, I could finish them much more quickly. Or not finish them at all. But when I read them as if I were someone else reading them for the first time, I see how much needs to be done to get the story right.

M. A. Foster drove a truck for a living. He spent his time thinking about the book he was working on, while driving for eight hours or so a day, and when he got home, after supper, he’d roll a white sheet, a carbon, and a yellow sheet into his typewriter (oh, such a long time ago), and type up the two or three pages, which he had composed and polished in his head during the day. His books sold well. He was exceptional in is working methods as a writer. 

But then, every writer works differently.