So I'm just curious what other people do. When I'm typing up the rough draft of my story, I type single spaced, font size 10, Times New Roman. Another teenage writer I knew used font size 14 and different page margins. Thus, we ended up with wildly different page counts with similar word counts. What do you do? What font size do you use? Do you use single spaced type, 1.5 spaced type, or double spaced type? And about how many words end up on each page?
Don't worry about words per page. I can't think of a modern word processing program that doesn't give you a word count, so use that to know how much you've written. And then just use whatever feels good to your eye. It's the words that matter, not the size of the letters.
If you plan on submitting the manuscript to contests or agents, then you may consider a "standard" manuscript format. A typical format is: Double spaced Indent paragraps No space between paragraphs 12 point font Times New Roman This can save you the trouble of trying to reformat a whole book when you are ready to submit. That being said, I don't like how this format looks, so I do 1.5 spacing.
For the first draft write in whatever font and size that works for you. After all you are the one person reading it at this point so your opinion is the only one that matters. For my first draft I set my margins to "wide" and I use size 12 font in Georgia and space at 1.5. I like "wide" margins in word because its easier to see everything and it looks more like a book. The main thing to pay attention to is your word count. Page numbers do not matter now.
I write in the standard format listed by Mrieder79 here, but I use Courier New instead of Times New Roman.
I use Scrivener as my word processor. It's important to know that the way your work looks on the screen in Scrivener has nothing at all to do with the format it creates when you compile your draft, which is a standard Schunn format. With that said, I agree with @BayView. These eyes of mine have been in service for 46 years now and their precision is on the wane. I use a size 16 Georgia font. It's easy on the eye.
