Hi. I'm new to this forum and new to publishing as well. I would like to take this moment and introduce myself. I'm from London and have long loved the written word. I've been reading and writing for many years but never published. My stories have sat on hard drives and read by friends. I've been thinking, recently, that I would like to try to give them a life beyond my and my friend's computer screen. They say there is no such thing as a stupid question. I would like to test the theory! I've been reading how to properly format a manuscript for submission. At the moment, I am trying digital submissions. I think that I understand the formatting but one thing is still unclear. What do you do when you get to the end of the page? I'm thinking it would be bad form to split a paragraph? So would you simply move the paragraph down to the next "clean page" even if there is a large gap? Or do you, indeed, split the paragraph? Probably a silly question but I want to get it right and I couldn't find an answer with Google. Thanks for your patience and your time, gents and ladies.
I would just split the paragraph. Or you could try moving the title down and see if this fixes it. It's a submission and not how it's going to appear when published so it's really not something to worry too much about. But I don't think you want to do the whole big gap thing. That would be a bad idea, in my option.
Split the paragraph. Having a large gap may create a confusion that the chapter has ended when it hasn't.
Depending on what program you're using, there should be an option somewhere called something like "Widow and Orphan Control." In Word I'm pretty sure it's under "Format" and "Paragraph." In printing widows and orphans refer to the one or two line bits of paragraph that at either the start or bottom of the page. Turning that option on will automatically format your manuscript it so those don't happen and, depending on the file format you're submitting, may be a lot more flexible option than trying to manually insert page breaks.
