Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

  • The first and last words in a title are always capitalized, no matter what part of speech they are.

  Avoiding basic blunders with easily confused words

  Don’t undermine your story with errors that you can avoid by memorizing a simple rule, running your computer’s spelling/grammar checker, or simply proofreading one last time. It’s easy — and quite fair — to say, “Hey, no one’s perfect,” when a mistake ends up in a submitted manuscript. But these next six blunders are so elemental and so easy to spot that it’s downright embarrassing when they reach the hands of an editor or agent:

  To/too: Mixing up these two words falls into the Typos category. Actually, make that Ridiculously (and Unnecessarily) Frequent Typos. Your finger can easily hit the o key an extra time, and your eyes can slide over the short word without fully digesting it when you’re proofreading. But understandable or not, this word mix-up should never happen in your manuscript because you can easily catch the error through a combination of careful proofreading and a spelling/grammar check.

  Your/you’re: This, too, is a common typo crime. Your is a possessive adjective that indicates ownership, and you’re is a contraction of the two words you and are. This is an easy oopsie to spot if you just step away from your writing for a day or two before proofreading and spell-checking. It’s so easy to spot, in fact, that its presence in a submitted manuscript makes the writer look lazy or careless.

  Their/there: Here’s another typo that can make you look careless. There is usually an adverb indicating time or location or a noun indicating a place, but it never indicates ownership. That’s the job of the possessive adjective their, as in “That’s their locker.”

  It’s/its: This mistake shows up often for two reasons: 1) simple typo and 2) confusion about the difference. It’s is a contraction of the pronoun it and the verb is, and contractions always get apostrophes, as when “It is my car” becomes “It’s my car.” By contrast, its is a possessive adjective or possessive pronoun like his, her, and hers, indicating ownership of something: “He fixed its engine.” Just as you wouldn’t stick an apostrophe in his or hers, don’t stick one in the possessive its, either.

  Between you and me/between you and I: This phrase causes all kinds of angst, with people often mistakenly choosing “between you and I.” The biggest reason for that choice is that I just sounds far more proper than me. But proper doesn’t make right. If this phrase shows up in your story, type it in two parts first: “Between you.” Yes, that makes sense. You is the object of the action. Something can be done to you. Now for part two: “Between I.” No, that’s not right because you can’t have something done to I. Something can, however, be done to me. Or heck, just memorize the rule. Much easier.

  Lie/lay: Confusing lie and lay may be the most common mix-up in the entire English language. Here’s a simplified rundown:

  • Lay means to put something down, and its variations are laid, laid, and laying:

  Today I lay my book down.

  Yesterday I laid my book down.

  Many times I’ve laid my book down.

  I was laying my book down when I tripped.

  • Lie means to recline horizontally, and its variations are lay, lain, and lying:

  Today I lie on the sand.

  Yesterday I lay on the sand.

  Many times I have lain on the sand.

  I was lying on the sand when a crab ran up my shirt.

  Regardless of whether the mistakes are due to typos or confusion, these errors are easy enough to spot. Run a search for these words in your manuscript so you can review each one in context. If any of these six items is an ongoing bugaboo for you, type up the rule and post it on your bulletin board for easy reference.

  Running spell-check

  You don’t have to depend on your all-too-human eyes to spot spelling and punctuation boo-boos; just run spell-check to flag potential errors. Too many people forget that this function is available in their computers. Or maybe spell-check seems to take forever on your manuscript because you’ve intentionally relaxed your grammar and punctuation. Be patient. You’ve had your manuscript this long, and rushing the final few moments can only hurt you.

  If unusual names or spellings appear frequently in your manuscript, speed up your spell-check pass by adding those spellings to the word-processing program’s dictionary (just click “add” when the spell-checker offers you spelling suggestions). Or add a custom dictionary to your spell-checker. You can activate this dictionary whenever you’re working with your manuscript and then turn it off again for all your other documents. For example, you can create a custom dictionary called “My Novel” and include words that may be spelling mistakes in documents that aren’t your medieval Mars sci-fi story. If this interests you, directions for creating custom dictionaries for your particular word-processing program are readily available online (type “custom dictionary” followed by your program’s name).

  Making Passes: Professionals Proofread (Twice)

  The last thing you should do with your manuscript before sending it out is the final read-through, which has two goals: to catch stubborn typos and to double-check your facts. Even if you’ve proofread this thing a million times, do it again, because every time you make a change, you risk introducing a typo. Don’t brush that off — a single keystroke can accidentally delete lines, full paragraphs, even entire pages. Or more! I’ve had manuscripts submitted to me with chapters missing right from the middle. Don’t risk having editors and agents think you’re lazy or careless.

  When you do the final proofreading pass, do not read your story. Instead, read your words. That sounds impossible, I know, but it’s what you should strive for. Here are tips to help you ignore your story while you read:

  Read elsewhere. Get away from the place you wrote it. You’re not in writing mode.

  Limit distractions. The final pass is serious business — no TV or e-mail nearby to distract you.

  Read it like a book. Mimic a book-reading experience. Print your manuscript; don’t read it onscreen. Set it in a three-ring binder or get your manuscript bound at your local print shop.

  Give it several passes. Check sentence structure and punctuation on one pass, and then flip through to check formatting on another.

  Look over the formatting. Eyeball the white space. Run your eyes down the page to see whether your paragraphs are all indented. Do a pass where you check only your chapter title capitalization and spacing.

  Verify the facts. This is your opportunity to check any facts or figures that lurk in your fiction.

  Use a checklist. Create a list with your most common boo-boos. That way, you can remind yourself to look for those specifically during your final read-through.

  Make notes as you go. If you discover a big issue, such as formatting that you need to readdress, make a note of it and then go back later so as not to interrupt your focus right now.

  Read out loud. Your eyes can skip over words — and probably will at this point. Read your manuscript out loud to hear it. This helps you spot left out or doubled words. Or if you’re really brave, have someone read the story out loud to you.

  Remember, your focus is on specific words in the proofreading stage. If you’re making sentence changes, then you’re still in editing-and-revising mode. This final proofreading pass is for mistake-catching, not rewriting.

  If you do make the rare substantive change during the proofreading pass, reread the entire paragraph with the change in place. Many errors and typos are introduced in the final moments when you’re fixing something else.

  Do you hate the whole idea of trying to be an objective reader and patrolling for nitpicky details? Then hire a freelance proofreader — someone who specializes in sniffing out errant typos, punctuation, and grammar. You hire a proofreader in the same way you secure a freelance editor, which I
cover in Chapter 11. If you don’t want to hire a pro, call in a friend to do a final proofreading read-through. Try to choose someone who hasn’t already read the manuscript, thus ensuring that the new pair of eyes is fresh. Or consider paying a sharp-eyed college student to do a read-through and specify that you’re not looking for opinion, just typos.

  Formatting the Standard YA Manuscript

  The goal of standardized formatting is not to drive you nuts, although it can. The goal is to ease your readers through your manuscript with the fewest possible distractions. If everyone does things in mostly the same way, agents and editors can ignore the tiny details and lose themselves in your story. In this section, I cover the standard ways of laying out your manuscript.

  Page setup and such: Tackling the technical stuff

  Your final manuscript should

  Be on 8.5" x 11" white paper

  Be printed on one side of the paper only

  Be double-spaced

  Use a standard 12-point font such as Times New Roman or Arial

  Have 1-inch margins all around

  Be left aligned and right ragged

  Have your last name, the title, and the page number in the upper-right corner of every page after the first one: Smith/TITLE, 42 (Tip: Insert this info as a header and use your word-processing program’s automatic page-numbering feature.)

  If you do deviate from the norm in formatting, deviate just in small personal details, not in big ways. For example, no violating the font rules and using Comic Sans MS font for your manuscript. Yes, it may emit a youthful bouquet, but it’s also super distracting.

  If you have text messages or something of that nature in your manuscript, bend the “no distracting fonts” rule for the sake of clarity. Readers need to follow who says what during a text message exchange, and you need to distinguish those exchanges from the regular narrative. In that case, pick a font that’s different from your narrative font but complementary, and consider using gray, black, and, if necessary, a complementary shade of blue to distinguish each speaker. You want clarity, not distraction. Lauren Myracle’s TTYL lays out IM (instant messaging) lines very clearly. Don’t include graphics (such as phone-screen backgrounds) in your manuscript, though. That’s gimmicky. Leave that for a seasoned book designer when your book is being readied for production.

  You may massage the rest of the formatting details a little without incurring anyone’s wrath:

  Scene breaks: Mark scene breaks with about three asterisks (***) or pound signs (###) or some other visual indicator. Leaving a large white space could signal the break (it does in published novels), but if one of your scene breaks falls at the end of a page, then the spacing flag disappears. Your designer will decide what to do with scene breaks in the final manuscript. For now, keep them as clear as possible.

  Chapter breaks: Start each chapter on a new page, with the chapter title several lines down from the top of the page. You can center the title or set it flush left, and it can be bold or not. That’s all up to you.

  If your story doesn’t have chapter titles, then use numbers, as in “Chapter 1.” This isn’t a permanent designation. Bound books often omit indicators at the top of new chapter pages. But in your manuscript, make things clear by noting “Chapter X” or the title.

  Start the first text line of the new chapter flush left, with no chapter indent. That’s another visual clue to ease the reader through your manuscript.

  Parts: For books that are divided into parts, go ahead and insert a full page labeled simply “Part I: [Title]” or something similar to make sure everyone’s up to speed.

  Front matter and back matter: Clearly label everything if you have front matter (everything that precedes the actual beginning of the story, such as a prologue) or back matter (everything that follows the end of the book — perhaps an epilogue or author’s note or even a bibliography, which is fairly common for historical fiction).

  Putting the right stuff on the first page

  The first page of your manuscript is your master information page, with your full contact information: name, address, phone number, e-mail address, book title, genre, and word count. The generally accepted format arranges the items in the following manner:

  Contact info: Place your first and last name in the upper-left corner, 1 inch from the top of the page. Single-spaced below that are your address, your phone/fax numbers, and then your e-mail address and website URL if you have one.

  Manuscript info: The category of the manuscript (MG or YA) goes in the upper-right corner, 1 inch from the top of the page, along with the genre. Single-spaced below that is often a copyright line (more on copyright later in “Copyrighting your manuscript”). Below that is the manuscript’s word count rounded to the nearest 100 and preceded by “approx.” (To get your final word count, use the word count feature in your word-processing program.)

  Title and author: Write the title in ALL CAPS, centered, about 5 inches from the top of the page or halfway down the page. Single-spaced below that is your name in a “By My Name” fashion.

  Story: The story should start about two line spaces below the title. No need to indent the first sentence of that first paragraph. The rest of the story uses regular paragraph indents and traditional double-spacing. Do not insert an extra line space between paragraphs. Include the chapter designation on this first page only if you’re using chapter titles instead of chapter numbers.

  Don’t include a page number on this first page. Figure 12-1 shows a sample first page of a manuscript.

  Figure 12-1: Include all the important details on the first page of your manuscript.

  Protecting What’s Yours and Getting Permission

  Copyright refers to the ownership of a work after it’s committed to paper, canvas, computer, or some other fixed form. You can’t copyright your idea; what you copyright is the way that idea is expressed. That’s considered intellectual property, which means property rights in creations of the mind.

  You can’t copyright a title, but in some cases you can trademark a title through the United States Patent and Trademark Office (www.uspto.gov). Some states use “unfair competition” law to protect titles that have acquired secondary meaning. In that case, an association between the title and the specific work has been established in the public mind.

  As the copyright owner, you can give (grant) someone the right to use some portion or all of your story for reprint or for other use, such as film or merchandise. That’s what people are talking about when they refer to rights in a book contract. See Chapter 17 for details on granting rights.

  This section is about making sure you understand basic copyright needs and what it means to secure permission to use someone else’s work. I explain how to ask others for permission to reprint some of their material if you want to use it in your book — and why sometimes you don’t need to ask permission at all. I also explain what you need to know about copyrighting your manuscript.

  Copyrighting your manuscript

  Here’s the deal: You own the copyright to your story — not your publisher (who is buying only the rights to publish it) and not your agent (who is only representing you and that work to publishers . . . for a fee, of course).

  Now here’s the deal with that deal: Although U.S. copyright law automatically protects your ownership from the moment of the work’s creation, you or your publisher should formally register the final published version of that work with the United States Copyright Office so you can provide legal proof of ownership should you ever become involved in litigation:

  If you’re self-publishing, you do that registering yourself. Visit the U.S. Copyright Office’s website (www.copyright.gov) for the forms and how-to of it.

  If you have a publisher, its in-house staff registers the copyright for you in your name as part of the publishing process. You never ha
ve to lift a finger. Your publishing contract details this, right down to verifying how you’d like your name to appear on the copyright registration.

  This is where writers can get confused: Because copyright law protects your ownership of the work from the moment of its creation, you don’t need to copyright your manuscript before submitting it to publishers. It’s covered. In fact, you never really need to register copyright. It’s mostly a legal safety precaution. If it makes you feel better, you can register copyright for your manuscript prior to submission. It’s your time and money. Even so, your publisher will register the final published version when it’s ready.

  It’s standard practice for writers to include “copyright © [year] by [your name]” on the first page of their manuscripts. Technically, you don’t even need to do that. It’s covered, remember?

  U.S. copyright law sets the term of the copyright for works created after 1978 at the author’s lifetime plus 70 years, after which the work goes into the public domain and no longer has copyright protection. At that point, anyone can print or distribute the material for free because all property rights have been extinguished. If you incorporate some public domain material in your novel, you have copyright in your novel, but that copyright extends only to your new and original elements. Adaptation of public domain material does not remove the material from the public domain.

  Don’t confuse public domain with fair use, which is an exception to the exclusivity of a current, active copyright. I talk about fair use more in a moment.

  Understanding plagiarism, permission, and perfectly fair use

  You may want to quote someone else’s work in your fiction. In that case, you must get legal permission from that copyright owner (see the next section for details). If you don’t, you violate their legal rights and can be sued. If you reprint someone else’s words or ideas and pass them off as your own, you’re committing plagiarism, which is stealing and can carry serious penalties.