Formatting Quotes

Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.

It is formatted, and I'm tired of using vi. I get really bored.

Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula.

A 300pp novel can easily become a 200pp novel by printing with smaller type; a 100pp screenplay can potentially become a film of between 60-140 minutes in length; a 200pp stage play could be performed in anything from 30 minutes to four hours. For all these media, the script length is agnostic to the final work.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

Personally, I read a lot of scripts.

Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'

Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly.

If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.

Another time factor is output: proofing and printing. That is, getting your work out of the computer and onto paper and having it satisfy you. It can be time consuming and expensive.

When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.

TV writing is different than other mediums, involving the writer.

It's hard writing screenplays.

Why wouldn't - how couldn't - an author care about how his or her books look?

Structure is more important than content in the transmission of information.

I'm really happy to have the chance to talk about the editing process. It's something that I think doesn't get the weight it deserves, especially with the rise of self-publishing.

If you are a professional writer - i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed - Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

So, in a sense, the verification piece is irrelevant to the format issue.

I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.

In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography, man compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit.

The more I read scripts, the more I learn about scripts, basically.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.