A full-length novel manuscript is usually somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 words. That’s a lot of words! It takes months and sometimes years to string that many words together. When I wrote my first manuscript, I didn’t realize how much could change between the time I started my first draft and the time I finished. I definitely didn’t realize how much there was to keep track of. Now, as a freelance editor, I often recognize myself in the drafts of the manuscripts I edit…I recognize what I didn’t know—what I couldn’t know. One of the things I’ve learned is that it’s absolutely essential to create a style guide for your manuscript. 

What is a style guide?

A style guide is a set of rules for your writing. This includes spelling, punctuation, grammar, and even formatting. There are a lot of formal ones out there such as the Chicago Manual of Style  and the MLA Handbook for Writers. Those are great for providing basic principles of style but they shouldn’t dictate your personal style, they should merely guide you. What you need is your own personal style guide. Here are five reasons why.

1. Consistency

The most important reason to create your own personal style guide is to create consistency. When you’re writing tens of thousands of words there are bound to be discrepancies in spelling, formatting, and punctuation. For example, you may put a foreign word in italics on page 10 and then write a foreign word without italics on page 194. You may spell the name Sarah with an “h” twenty-four times and without an “h” sixteen times. There could be dozens, even hundreds, of inconsistencies in your first draft. Unless you create a style guide you won’t notice those inconsistencies until you start reading your first draft. 

2. To keep your readers engaged in the story

Readers are perceptive. They’ll notice when something’s not right; when something’s different. If you’ve been using the Oxford comma in the first ten chapters of your novel and forget the Oxford comma in chapter eleven, they’ll pause and for a moment they’ll be pulled out of the story. One missing comma, of course, isn’t enough to drop your debut novel from five stars to two, but the accumulation of dozens of inconsistencies will. 

3. To maintain your voice

Your style is your voice and believe it or not, the reader wants to hear your voice. If you use an em dash in one place and a colon in another, that could leave your reader wondering why. If you fluctuate between capitalizing and not capitalizing a character’s lucky trinket, that could be startling. How you write is absolutely unique to you. Yes, there are basic principles to writing and the craft of storytelling, but that shouldn’t stop you from making your voice your own. That means breaking some of the rules and making some of your own rules. A personal style guide can help you do that by forcing you to declare what that style is. Then, it’s just a matter of sticking to it.   

4. To save you a lot of work

This should come as no surprise, but creating a style guide before or during your first draft will save you a lot of work later on. Without keeping a record of the little details it’s impossible to remember what you did or didn’t do twenty or fifty thousand words earlier. Not only is it impossible, but it’s maddening to try and figure out. Sometimes, when you do figure it out, you’ll still find yourself debating between one style and another. But if you create a style guide up front, it’s a lot easier to stick to the rules. And, in the end, you’ll save yourself a lot of editing work. 

5. To save you a lot of money

Finally, creating a style guide for your manuscript could save you a lot of money. If you can maintain consistent spelling, punctuation, grammar, and format, you may save yourself from requiring the services of a copy editor—or, at the very least, an in-depth and expensive copy edit. Copy editors look for inconsistencies throughout the entirety of a manuscript. But if there are no inconsistencies to find, there is a lot less for them to look for and a lot less for you to pay for. 

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