Manuscript format question

[FionaW]

Just a quick one:

say that in your story you have a point where you jump ahead X years. In order not to confuse the reader you start the story with 'March 27th 1965'. Some chapters later you need to tell them it's 'December 4th 1975'. In the finished book you would (with luck) have a blank page containing just the date, before the next chapter started.

How do you indicate this in manuscript format? Somehow the idea of having an essentially blank A4 sheet doesn't feel right.

Oh, and another:

Songs and letters in manuscripts; single or double spaced? I've had conflicting advice on this one and can't find anything definitive.

 

[The Judge]

Is there any reason you can't use the date as a kind of side-heading underneath the chapter heading? If you had quotations at the top of each chapter, I guess it might look a little busy if you had a date as well, but otherwise I'd have thought this was OK. Actually, it might be better -- people might pay more attention to it there than on a previous blank page.

As for the single/double spacing, I don't think I've ever read anything about this. I suppose a lot will depend on how large the extract is. Try printing the page out and see what it looks like in both formats. For myself, I might be tempted to use 1.5 spacing, but I don't know how that would muck things up at a later stage.

J

 

[Ursa major]

Alastair Reynolds, in his Revelation Space trilogy, occasionally gives a date to mark the start of a new scene. (Because his characters travel through space at sub-light speeds, with most people on board in "reefer sleep", he sometimes needs to place actions at very different dates side by side in the same chapter.)

Note that most of the time (no pun intended) he uses the standard blank line to mark the start of a new scene.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I think you're fine with the page that just has the date.

Now, as to what to do in terms of double or single spacing those letters or songs, my advice is to indent at least an inch on both sides. Then I don't think it matters so much about the spacing, because you've left the editor room to mark things up, and at the same time set the whole thing off from the rest of the text.