Google Docs

Hello! I am a little worried about my writing tools. I only have access to Google Docs, and some other free writing programs. I am wondering if this is good enough for a nice novel setup. Thanks!

 

I use Google Docs too! Handy tip I learned: manuscript format. Double space everything with a nice serif font like Palatino or Times New Roman or even American Typewriter. Write everything in the same font and spacing. It means you can print it right off when you submit it to publishing. Also, in the top right corner, put page numbers. There's a setting for that. Then, without deleting the 1, write a keyword from your title, your name, and a number sign. If your name is Kara Nelson, and your book is called Over the Wide River, write Nelson / River #1. Then highlight the whole thing and change the font to match. The number also appears really close to the edge; you'll want to space it down a couple times using the enter key.

Your passages will look something like this:


Prologue (center this)

Aldous rubbed his hands and sat back in his chair, smirking at his captured enemy in the steel chair. The prisoner wore an off-white suit with graphite-colored armor on his gloves and boots, and the helmet that obscured his face was horned like a ram’s. He could feel his captive’s glare through the slit lens in the mask.

“So,” he said softly. “The hero I’ve heard so much about.”

“Really?” replied his captor in a deep voice. Aldous couldn’t see the hero’s expression from underneath the mask, but he sensed he had raised an eyebrow. “Of all the first words, that’s what you go with? You’re so cliché.”

Aldous grimaced in annoyance. “Well, I have heard of you. If you were trying to keep yourself a secret, you’ve failed miserably.” He pulled out his phone and opened an article, from which he began reading, “Masked Vigilante Involved in Museum Vandalization.”

“Involved?” the masked captive sputtered. “I saved it from being robbed by a group of thugs!”

“Yes, my thugs,” Aldous grinned. “I was quite interested to learn of a new super in the area. Did the Guild assign you here or were you already a resident of Quincy?”

“I work alone,” the prisoner boasted.

“Is that right?” Aldous mused. “Your powers seem to be… climbing, perfect peripheral vision, sonic screaming…” He raised an eyebrow and looked up from the article, from which he had been reading a list of the hero’s powers.

“Yeah, it’s really cool,” replied the hero. “Watch this.” He let out a bloodcurdling, high-pitched scream that threw Aldous backward. His phone flew from his hand and he flung back the other one to catch himself. The prisoner stopped screaming and panted.

Aldous glared at him, rubbing his tailbone as he stood up. He retrieved his phone from where it lay a few inches from his feet.

“I heard your ears pop,” the hero remarked.

Aldous slammed an adjacent table with his fist, seething. This man irks me too much to live. How dare he humiliate me this way. “What do you call yourself?”

“Goat Man,” replied the prisoner. “Hold on… I’ve got a card…”

He struggled to reach his pocket, clearly forgetting his hands were cuffed to the arms of the chair and the chair was bolted into the ground. “A little help?”

Aldous picked up a remote. “You are the most ridiculous superhero I have ever encountered,” he replied. “How does one even obtain such powers?”

“Bitten by a rabid goat,” Goat Man shrugged.

“Wouldn’t that give you rabies instead of superpowers?”

Goat Man shrugged again. “It was making dubstep noises, so it must have been some goat.”

“I’ll say,” Aldous groaned, kneading his forehead.

“What about you?” asked Goat Man. “Got any powers?”

“My genius, a degree in Egyptology, a small army of henchmen and all the machines I can invent to further my goal of summoning Apophis the Destroyer so that I can wreak vengeance on the world,” Aldous listed on his fingers. “You, on the other hand, have… goat-themed abilities. Most of them not even real goat abilities.”

“So… you don’t have superpowers,” Goat Man said, obviously making an effort to seem unimpressed with all the weapons of destruction that were hung on every rack in the lab. “You’re like John Whill without the owl suit.”

“Oh, shut up,” Aldous muttered. Why did everyone always bring up his trillionaire cousin John Whill? Hardly anyone knew Owltron even had a cousin. He lifted a communicator to his mouth. “Alphonso, Norman, please take the prisoner away and execute him before I waste a perfectly good vaporizer ray on him. He’s the most obnoxious person I’ve ever met.”

“You have a vaporizer ray?” Goat Man asked curiously. “Which one is it?”

The guards began to uncuff him. “Watch out, he kicks,” Aldous warned.

“Wait, I didn’t get your name!” Goat Man yelled as they dragged him away. “What’s your name?”

“Sphinx,” Aldous called. “Aldous Sphinx.”

“Sphinx?” Goat Man called back. “Didn’t you say you were an Egyp—”

The doors shut, mercifully sparing Aldous from further annoying jabs.

Aldous slumped into a chair and rubbed his face to clear his head. I’m so glad he’s going to be dead five minutes from now.

Norman barged through the door again. “Boss, he escaped,” he said urgently.

Aldous burst to his feet. “What?” he roared. “Well, don’t come all the way back to tell me! Find him!”

Norman dashed out again after the hero while Aldous suited up, donning a modernized set of ancient Egyptian armour and grabbing a sword and gun. He strapped the sword to his belt and rushed out the door with the rifle in his hands.

Norman rushed back again, panting. “He escaped, boss,” he said. “He climbs super good, like a mountain goat or something.”

Aldous sneered at him and fired his gun. Norman dropped to the ground with a smoking hole in his chest.

“Incompetence,” Aldous muttered savagely as he pulled his communicator from his pocket. “All minions, engage pursuit of escaped prisoner Goat Man.”

He heard footsteps clanking as his henchmen rushed through the compound to follow his orders. Aldous rubbed his head again and sighed. Why did I have to tell him my name? he groaned inwardly. I suppose it’s my own fault for assuming the guards would have had him killed before he could escape. Never leave the important things to other people.

He headed to the elevator that went up to the ground level. Well, this is far from over, Goat Man, he thought as he cocked his gun again. This is only the beginning.

Gosh, what a stupid name.



Now, the forum spaces the paragraphs instead of indenting; you shouldn't do this. You're already double-spacing it. But what I like to do is use double space to change the scene. You'll also notice my italics got deleted. Regarding indentations, I usually press space three times, but some people press tab, which gives them about five spaces.

 

Thanks for the tips! So the paragraphs will be double-spaced, and indented. I will try that! I usually use those type for fonts, so there is no problem!

 

Right. Be sure to use the font setting for double space instead of manually adding a space every single time, if that wasn't obvious already.

 

I've been using this: https://code.visualstudio.com/

Each scene is in its own text document. To create real documents from those, I use this: https://pandoc.org/

Kind of a programmery way of doing things, but oh well.

 

I disagree with almost all of @rktho's post... sorry, rktho! (Well, I didn't read the excerpt, so I don't disagree with that. Just the formatting advice).

Anyway... first up, you haven't said if you're planning to self-publish or look for a publisher - that's an important distinction in terms of how you want to format a manuscript.

Regardless, though, you should be making formatting changes using the formatting function of your software, not manual changes (like putting in spaces or tabs for new paragraphs - that should be done using the formatting function). Using formatting makes it possible to change the format of the entire document with a click or two, rather than going through and catching all the changes manually.

In terms of whether google docs is adequate... I write my novels all in one file, and I don't have great internet access, so I don't find docs works for me. It gets way too laggy for anything over about 10K words, and gets laggier and laggier as I go. I'm also not sure it's all that compatible with the Track Changes feature from Word, and that's how editors will be communicating with you on your manuscript.

I'd suggest some version of Open Office/LibreOffice if you don't want to sink the money into Word. They're a closer approximation of Word, so they're more compatible with it (as far as I've heard--I use Word, myself).

But if you're just experimenting and aren't ready for thinking about publication yet, google docs is great. Really, anything that lets you get words down is great. Carry on!

 

I use Open Office for the most part, but I also use Google Docs, pen and paper and even my old typewriter when the power's out. I find whatever I'm writing on is less important than actually writing. The only time I ever really have to worry about proper format is when I've got a final draft I want to submit and pretty much every word processor can do that. If you're self pubbing on Amazon, though, you should probably get yourself a program like Sigil to take advantage of the EPUB format and someone who knows HTML to help make it look professional. Avoid Comic Sans wherever possible.

 

I usually don't concern myself much with formatting a first draft, because every publisher (and I assume agent) is going to want something different. Some want double or 1.5 spacing between paragraphs, some want indents at the beginning or a paragraph and some don't, some want straight quotes and some want curly quotes...the list goes on and on.

Bay is also spot on about being able to use the Tracked Changes functionality, especially if you'll be working with a professional editor at some point.

 

I use Google Docs and it works pretty great for me. In terms of formatting, as others have said, that's something you'll only need to worry when your at your final draft and ready to submit to agents and publishers. For now it's just about writing and google docs, or any other writing tool/ word processing software for that matter, can do the job.

 

1) I don't trust google docs a lot, because of google's business model/privacy, and because it's a cloud service. If price is the main reason that you use it, there are plenty of free solutions that do not have these concerns, like the already mentioned OpenOffice/LibreOffice (the latter being my recommendation).

2) Writing and formatting are and should be two different tasks. Don't concern yourself too much with formatting during writing – except keeping in mind that it needs to be addressed for submission. That means making correct use of paragraph and line ends, and marking chapters, scenes, headings, emphasizing/italics etc. somehow so that you and formatting programs can use the markings. Indentations, font, line spacing, paper format, margins etc. are all formatting options that are completely irrelevant during the writing stage, and can be addressed later (think about it: the paper format, for instance, will be chosen by your publisher, and there may even be different ones for different editions like hard cover or paperback. And with self-publishing to e-books you don't need to worry at all – because how the screen of the e-reader will be filled is determined by the e-reader software and the settings of the user. So why worry about that AT ALL? Except at the back of your mind that at some point you need to submit a file, or a print-out [yes, such publishers still exist], formatted for standard A4/letter paper).

3) As far as specific programs to use, I personally can give two recommendations: a) Scrivener (doh). Yes, it costs, but not much, and has tools to die for as far as writing a longer, complex text is concerned. And it's designed around working the manuscript, and formatting/exporting as two different tasks. b) A mark-down capable text editor. There's a lot to choose from, each with their own quirks, and a lot free, but if you stick with the basic mark-down, you can always use the file in all of them, and try, and switch if you don't like the particular editor. Mark-down has enough markup options for fiction, and the editors are all designed to export into a formatted file at the end. Which means that a lot have options to change the formatting if you need it. (Mostly, they export to HTML and PDF – because mark-down originated as tool for web designers to edit texts they need without doing full HTML code – but a lot of programs have discovered the general writing purpose and offer exporting to word processor formats.)

 

I know that publishers/editors will almost always ask for documents in .pdf or .doc formats, so as long as you can export to it (which Docs can,) it's fine. I know a professional novelist who did half of his career on Leading Edge Word Processor (yes, a DOS program) and has used MS-Works since like 2001.

The only thing that I do not use Google Docs for is papers that require a lot of math, in which case there is no alternative for LaTeX.

 

Thanks for the replies everyone! I kinda got my own set-up going, after reading all of these! I did a mixture of some ideas and tossed my own in there. That way it's fair to all of us! I really liked the outcome too!