Today, I want to talk about a novel writing tool that I didn’t know existed until recently when I was searching random templates on Microsoft Word. That tool is the Microsoft Word Novel Template. The program also has a book format, story format, and non-fiction format that offer different nuanced changes to the overall style, but the novel template offers the most detailed tips as well as a few extra features that seemed lacking in the others. I’ll outline some of those features and perks so you can decide if it sounds like a good match. Later, I may go over the other templates in a single comparison article to point out what’s different, better, or lacking about each.

Quick and Easy

This template really takes the guesswork out of formatting. Between the fill-in-this-here bubbles and the blue text tips scattered throughout, it doesn’t take a computer genius to put a story in an acceptable layout that you and your editors, agents, and beta readers will love.

Most major pieces of formatting are either done for you (header, footer, page count– all done), selectable from the styles bar on the Home tab of the ribbon, or spelled out in detail like you’ve never used them before. This is good because I’ll admit I had never used the page break tool in Layout and would have had to search it online if the steps weren’t written out for me.

Amusingly, some of the tips are surface level writing tips like: “use the opening few paragraphs to hook you reader’s interest,” “use visual writing,” and “make sure there’s enough motivation at the end of your chapter to keep the story moving forward.” It’s a mixture of funny and mildly terrifying to think of someone opening this kind of in-depth template with zero prior work done on their novel. Perhaps that’s just me.

Layout

There are several pages of information that are available before even reaching the actual story content, ranging from necessary to optional, this template has in store for you to fill out.

The first page is, rather obviously, the title page. There are boxes to fill in: any agent information that you may have if you are going a traditional publishing route, the title, your author name (which can be your legal name or a pen name), the approximate word count to fill in at the end, and your legal name and contact information.

Second is one of the technically optional features that I think is very necessary; the table of contents. I don’t think I’m the only one who gets a bit indignant when books don’t have one of these, even if they don’t title their chapters. Don’t make me flip through trying to figure out where something I’m trying to reference is located! Please?

The table of contents is also an active table in the document. As you add chapters using the heading and sub-heading styles you are able to hop up to the table of contents page and right click to update the field. Once updated, not only will your chapters be in the table of contents, but they will appear in the navigation side panel which makes it easier to jump from one point to the next while working.

The next major bit of formatting are the header and footer that appear on all but the title page. The header contains the author last name, title, and an automatically tracking page number. The name and title are linked to their title page counterparts and the page number is even programmed to use lower case roman numerals up until the Chapter 1 page like a fancy novel. It’s even smart enough to keep track of your table of contents taking up four pages or you adding an extra page because your novel is split into three books. (I picked the habit up from one of my favorite childhood authors, Brian Jacques and now stories seem a bit odd without it.)

The footer contains the full author name and a year insert for copywrite information. You wrote it and if you decide to print out your 200+ page manuscript for some reason, you’re going to want people to know when they come across the pages that it’s owned.

The final bit of layout to mention are the heading, scene, and body formats. Each one helps you to keep your chapters consistent from start to end.

Things I Learned

Apart from now knowing how to operate a page break and what tables and headings are good for in a word document, there were a few things about book formatting in general that I had either never noticed before or completely forgot that were pointed out to me in the blue tip text. Somehow, I managed to take two college level creative writing classes, score high nineties in both, and still never had most of these things pointed out to me.

When you start a new chapter, the title is located 1/3 of the way down the page. I found this to be true in most of my books and reason I might have overlooked it because many of the books I’ve read don’t care much for blank space. They usually have a square illustration in that gap before the chapter heading that can seem more like an illustration choice than a formatting one.

The opening paragraph of a new chapter or a new scene within a chapter is not indented! This honestly blew my mind; if there’s one thing that elementary school taught me about paragraphs it’s that they are always indented! Except if they start a chapter as I quickly learned when I searched through my bookshelf for confirmation.

I had known it was possible to have more than one scene in a single chapter, but what I didn’t know was that when formatting a novel, you will use a center aligned # to indicate the break. The template does have a new scene style on the Home tab, but it doesn’t affect the navigation side bar or anything else, so it’s much easier to just ctrl e in my opinion.

This last one was more of a reminder; you don’t underline things in your novel. I think the wires were crossed for this due to writing reports for classes. You definitely underline things like titles in those reports (or some of them anyway, there are so many different rules) however, when it comes to novels, italics are your best friend for emphasis.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a very helpful tool for a writer, especially one further along in their process. There are a few features that don’t pan out exactly as expected, but overall it makes formatting simple and quick. And if you can check one thing off your nightmare list of things to research and piece together yourself, a smart writer will take it.

In my current novel, I have finished Book 1: Debut and transferred it from the working documents onto the novel template so I could see it in all its pulled together glory. So far, I have 252 pages of content, 31 chapters, and 67,314 words. My table of contents is already two pages long, and I’m excited. Thank you for reading this post, and happy writing!