Twine Formatting Tips

Hello all,

Here are the promised tips. If you are re-submitting your story from Friday (today), please re-submit it no later than the start of class on Monday and send me the link via email.

As for everyone else, you are expected to have all of these formatting elements incorporated naturally into your stories prior to your presentation and will not be permitted to make any changes after.

1) As mentioned in the guidelines, typos and spelling errors need to be eliminated. Check these in advance. Then, check and double-check your story for errors before submitting.

2) When using dialogue, you need to use what are called dialogue tags. This is not net-speak; rather, a dialogue tag is simply a means of letting the reader know who is talking at a given moment. Every time a character speaks, clarify who is talking. For example:

"I am coming," yells Johnny. (The tag is "yells Johnny." Note as well the comma preceding "yells.")

You say to Johnny, "Great!"

Mom says, "Nope."

"Whatever," you say.

This is standard dialogue formatting in books. If you are confused, open the novel OUT, and look the dialogue tags. You need to do this in your story. Every time anyone talks, whether it is "you" or someone else, you need to include a dialogue tag.

3) Make sure your choices are stated as phrases, not one word choices, for the most part. I know it's sometimes hard to know when this applies and when it doesn't. The trick is to look at the question leading up to the choice. For example:

Do you run down stairs or do you go up in to the attic?

Run downstairs

Go up into the attic

In this instance, it's fine to have short phrases, because the question that leads to the choice is clear.

The following, however, doesn't work:

You walk into the living room.

Attic

Upstairs

See how in this example there is not enough information for your reader to know what is going on?

4) Make sure you have paragraph breaks in your story. These should essentially match the paragraph breaks I am making here on this blog post. I am not indenting as a standard book would do, but when I end this paragraph as I am about to do in this sentence, there will be a one space break before the next paragraph.

See, here is the beginning of the next paragraph, and above it is a space break. Notice how the space break is just one space break, not several spaces.

5) Do not bold or italicize things. If you want to clarify that something is a reader's thought, just write something like:

Damn, I thought. That's a really stupid idea.

6) I already said this, but please proofread for strange typos and be consistent in your punctuation, especially with choices. Either use periods for them, or don't.

7) Make sure your verb tense is all present tense unless you are talking about the past. Don't switch verb tenses throughout your story.

That's it. Let me know if you have any questions. Loved your stories!