The Interweb and Formatting

So agent Nathan Bradsford is running a contest on good dialogue over at his blog. The rules are that entries must be less than 250 words, including both dialogue and supporting description. It's a pretty cool idea, and I can't wait to see the winning entries (there are over 200 for him to choose from so far, so they should be pretty good), and see him pick 'em apart to describe what's good about them.

Naturally, since there are some good prizes in the mix (partial critiques, query critiques, a 10-minute phone call) for the winners, I figured I'd enter. After combing through my various short stories and my novel, I finally found an appropriately sized entry that's decent. Not spectacular--my dialogue tends to be a lot of exposition followed by good, memorable short phrases, a formula that doesn't lend itself well to the 250-word length format, but I figure there's nothing to lose.

I struggled like hell with formatting though. He's only taking entries as comments in his blog, meaning that normal formatting just doesn't work, because the lines are so short, and to indent a paragraph would be to lose like half a line. So I had to try to rework my snippet for the internet, which I've done before (I got my start writing on message boards, actually), but not for a looooong time.

Eventually I got it looking halfway decent and fairly readable, but I realized that it just doesn't flow the same way it does on the page. An unfortunate realization given that it's a contest about good dialogue, and flow is key, and one that also made me gulp as I look ahead towards the day when my novel gets typeset and the formatting gets all fubared again, with much more important consequences. I don't know whether authors get a chance to re-edit after their book is typeset (and I imagine that policy changes from publishing house to publishing house and even book to book), or even how much format can change from manuscript to book form, but they seem like fairly important things to know. More questions for my next internship, I suppose.