I said the single line got at the heart of what I learned, but in the end it was a really minor change. Over the course of the semester, I completely rewrote two stories, learning all the way what I was doing wrong. Here’s more:

“Building Plans”

That’s just one line, but it exposes many of the lessons I had to learn. I’d likewise taken for granted that Beth Anne’s crippling dependence would be clear, her real life need to take control (not just to find some money). Because of that, several readers found her entirely unsympathetic and the ending unsatisfying when she chose to run her own business rather than accept an easy payout.

I’d assumed also Beth Anne’s self-aware complicity in and acceptance of that dependence on her husband, but some readers took her for a victim of his bad money management (rather than a housewife willingly uninvolved), so they doubted her tender feelings for her departed husband as well as her desire to keep a property that had meant much to him.

All of that was meant as texture, meant as subtlety, meant as background shades to the immediate conflicts and confrontations I had structured my three short scenes around, as Beth Anne learned she had to sell the land, realized she couldn’t let it go, then decided she wouldn’t (and in the process, how she’d attempt to own her independence).

Unfortunately, none of it came through. It took two rounds of feedback before I even fully understood that. I felt, instead, the readers simply wanted to discuss a different topic (whether it was feminism or fiscal responsibility or parenthood). It took a while before I understood, not that they refused to engage with the topic I’d selected, but that I’d failed to make it clear what that topic was supposed to be.

“Handle with Care”

Of course, my second story went the same. I’d always wanted to write a protagonist with serious social anxiety, as a kind of challenge, and I succeeded just enough that the character’s quirk became the story’s topic.

I’d meant that story to be about connecting with other people. It was about loneliness and friendship. They seemed like easy topics for a character predisposed to avoiding people, but his vividness of trait stole the show.

I made it worse with my scene selection, narrowing my focus to just the scenes that mattered in my protagonist’s arc of growth—that is, his interactions with the pretty girl at the office. But then my readers tried to find the story’s theme of romantic competition or obsession or infidelity.

None of that was actually in the story I wrote. It all came from the stories my readers ended up telling themselves. But lacking clear guidance from me, they took the story in a direction that left it mutilated and left them unsatisfied. I’d picked those scenes in an attempt to solve one problem—my difficulty telling a whole story in such a small number of words—and in the process created a new problem altogether.

I was able to correct that problem, once again, by raising up from subtext some of the protagonist’s desires, but also just by adding a handful of other scenes without Kelly. I used those scenes to show what he was missing in himself, and that tightened reader focus on his actions and motivations in the scenes he did share with her.

Pursuing Mastery

That has been an education. I’m happy with these two stories, even with the mediocre grades the professor gave me, because I’ve done as much with them as I can clearly see. Any other changes I could make would be made blind, guessing what might satisfy.

That’s not to say I’m finished learning or that this is as good as I get, but it’s as much as I can do with these two pieces. I’m hampered there by the twin handicaps I mentioned Tuesday: an unfamiliar format and an unfamiliar genre.

I’ve learned enough now to succeed with short stories, I’m convinced, but if I want to thrive within the “literary” category, I’ll need a lot more practice, start to finish, before further polishing will do me any good. I’ll probably need research, as well, reading other mainstream works to learn the tropes and types and conventions.

Overall, I’m satisfied. I’ve learned to build a story arc in twenty pages. I’ve learned where my long-form instincts will tend to lead me wrong, and I’ve learned tricks to manage that.

I’ve learned (again) the importance of audience analysis in good storycraft, and I’ve learned the outer edges of an unfamiliar genre.

Best of all, I’ve learned enough confidence with the format to practice on my own, to wade through trial and error, and ultimately that’s the only way to grow.

“Advanced Fiction Writing” is an English class. The rest of my Master’s work has taken place in the college of Journalism and Mass Communication. The big difference? JMC focuses on commercial writing, while the English department focuses on “literary” writing.

For what it’s worth, I consider myself pretty well cultured. I don’t consider an opera to be good fun, but I’m capable of getting it. I recently discovered I tend to write narrative in iambic verse unless I consciously avoid it. I know my stuff.

But this English class was brutal. Still, I learned a lot from it. I was required to prepare a self-assessment essay as the class’s final, and figured I should share some of those lessons learned with you.

So, without further ado, here’s what I learned from Advanced Fiction Writing!

Writing Short Fiction

I have been a student of writing for fifteen years now, studying in literary and commercial programs, in formal classes and casual writers’ groups, and in the slow, erratic progress of personal experience. But through it all I’d managed to maintain one huge, glaring gap in my education: writing short fiction.

I’ve now finished thirteen novels I’d proudly share with anyone who asked, but before this semester I had never managed to complete a short story I liked. The beginnings that worked always tended to evolve into first chapters, and when I managed to restrain that impulse, to force completeness in a handful of pages, I generally ended up with something lifeless, dull, and broken.

I mention all this now because it shaped my goals for the semester. I didn’t come to the class hoping to learn how to create a compelling character. I didn’t come to the class hoping to learn how to make up an engaging circumstance. I didn’t come to the class hoping to learn how to manage dialogue or evoke a sense of place or pick perspective.

I only hoped to learn how to do those things in this format. Right from the start I knew the shape of my challenge, and I hoped with feedback, with revisions, with some strict requirements I might accomplish what I hadn’t yet in fifteen years of trying.

Playing with a Handicap

To complicate the challenge, the professor had some rules. The first page of the syllabus said, “No genre fiction, i.e. science fiction or fantasy.” That stopped me cold.

I’ve written all my life in genres. I’m not convinced there’s any other option. I understand the risk with speculative fiction of overindulging in setting, with any adventure tale of overindulging in plot, but every genre calls for characters, and every genre can explore them well.

My challenge there was not to write characters instead of plot and setting; all my fantasy and science fiction work receives high praise for the character work. My challenge was being required to work within the “mainstream” or “literary” category where I didn’t really know the genre conventions.

We started out with three published works hand-chosen by the professor, and that gave me some idea. I learned more in the first two weeks when all my classmates turned in their first drafts. I quickly spotted what kinds of plots and complications were the norm, and tried to build my stories around that.

That was my twin challenge: to craft a story I could tell within an unfamiliar genre in a much shorter space than I normally had available.

“Building Plans”

I started with the story of a woman recently widowed, previously much dependent on the men in her life and unprepared for managing her own affairs.

The simple shape of the story started with limited resources (she and her husband had not been rich before he died) and gained in stakes when I added a young daughter the woman would have to care for as well. The central point of the story, the one I wanted to investigate myself and challenge my readers to engage, was the terrifying helplessness of sudden independence. I had a scene in the first draft where Beth Anne “put on her best grown-up face” before trying to ask a difficult favor of an acquaintance.

That line did not survive the rewrites. The professor complained it “infantilized” the character, but in one line it captured her predicament—and that was a predicament I’d built on personal experience and interviews with dozens of friends, all roughly my age and from roughly the same background.

In my late twenties, with a college degree, a wife, a mortgage, and a steady job, I realized I still felt like I was just pretending to be a grown-up, and astonishingly no one had caught me at it yet. I asked around, and all but one of my peers said they felt the same way, though many of them were quite successful in their fields and certainly mature. That disconnect, I thought, deserved a story.

I learned a lesson from the professor’s objection, though: I was leaning too hard on my own cultural and societal experiences. It clearly didn’t read the same outside my crowd.

I suspect if I’d had a novel—or even a decent chapter’s length—to develop Beth Anne fully within her own context, that line would have survived. If I’d only meant the story for my peers, that line would have survived. But in this class’s context, it assumed too much and said too little. I replaced it elsewhere in the story with wordier, more explicit inspection of Beth Anne’s condition.

That’s just one line, but it exposes many of the lessons I had to learn. There’s more to the paper, and I’ll share it with you Thursday, but that gets you to the heart of it. Even in awful classes, good writers are always learning.

Besides, today’s isn’t really a post.  It’s a quick question (although it could have ramifications for Posts of Thursdays Future). See, my reasoning for cutting back on posts this fall is all the work I’ll be doing for school.

One part of that work is writing a non-fiction book. I’m thinking of doing a guide to Kindle Publishing, but I could also do a tech writing textbook, a description of the founding of the Consortium, a prewriting guide, or any number of things.

Whatever I do, it’s going to be something along the lines of things I regularly discuss here. And whatever I do, I’ll probably post some rough draft of its early “chapters” as blog posts, too.

So what would you like to see? Let me know in the comments.

Changing Orientation

By this point, I really do think you know how to use section breaks in Microsoft Word, though. So instead of spending a lot of time on that, I’m going to tell you where and how to adjust your page setup elements. Just remember that, for each one, when you make changes you can either make changes for the whole document, or just within the current section.

Modifying page orientation is a really straightforward example. If you want a document that consists mostly of Portrait Letter pages filled with text, but occasionally switches to Landscape Letter pages filled with landscape-oriented photographs, you would need to insert a section break before and after each of the pages you wanted in Landscape, then click somewhere inside the page and change the setting for that section only.

To do that, navigate to the Page Setup controls. In older versions of Word, you do that from the main menu by selecting File | Page Setup, which opens a new dialogue box. In newer versions, you can simply click on the Page Setup tab at the top of the screen to open a ribbon which contains all the same controls.

Make sure the Apply To dropdown box say “This section,” make sure your cursor is inside the page you want rotated, and then just click the Landscape orientation button. Just like that, you’ve applied a section-specific setting to manage page layout.

Maintaining Usable Margins

Then, of course, there’s margins. I spent a lot of time yesterday waxing romantic about page margins, but what do you expect? Spend as much time thinking about page margins as I do, and you’ll either end up loving them or hating them. Same goes for typos (hate), em dashes (love), paragraph styles that automatically jump to the top of a page (love), and publishing guidelines that require every chapter to start on an odd-numbered page (hate).

Oh, the glamorous life of a Tech Writer.

I think the only guideline I gave yesterday was that your margins should be “generous.” That’s not very specific, but it’s hard to give a fixed value across the board. A 1″ margin creates a much different effect on a sheet of Statement-sized paper than it does on 11″ x 17″.

It’s a handy reference point, though. 1″ margins all the way around are pretty standard on Letter-sized paper. If you switch to Legal (which is a lot taller), you might add a quarter inch to top and bottom. If your page is smaller, make it a little smaller. If it’s larger, make it a little larger.

In the same way, if you have a header make sure you’ve got enough room on the top margin to support it (you usually want at least a 1″ margin, so there’s at least half an inch of whitespace outside the half-inch header area). And if you’ve got a footer make sure you’ve got enough room for it in the bottom margin.

I also talked yesterday about “mirrored margins” — handling right and left margins differently on right-hand and left-hand pages. That’s a far more important thing to get right. Luckily, Word makes it pretty easy.

Once again, open the Page Setup controls, and then look for a checkbox labeled Different odd and even. (On the dialogue box, you’ll find it on the Layout tab.) Once you check that box, the margin fields will switch from saying “Left” and “Right” to “Inside” and “Outside.”

You’ll also see the “Gutter” field, which lets you add extra margin in that inside edge of the page trapped against the binding. A regular 1″ outside margin is usually enough if you’re planning to do a top-corner staple or hole-punch for a 3-ring binder, but if the edges of your pages are going to be bound together, I’ve often heard it recommended to add 1/8″ per 50 pages.

Making Your Document Smarter

Today’s article isn’t a terribly complicated one, but you can give credit for that to Microsoft. Page Setup is a crucial part of professional document formatting, and they made it pretty easy.

Next week I plan to finish up this series with a look at a little bit more complicated tool, but also one of the coolest (and handiest) features for polishing the professional appearance of your document. We’ll talk about adding smart text to your headers and footers, and keeping track of your references.

Definitely come back for that one. You’ll be glad you did.

Your tax dollars at work.

Paper Size

One of the first choices in a document’s page layout is the paper it’s going to be printed on. If you’re going to have to deal with printing and binding a document (and the associated costs), paper size becomes a critical concern. Standard sizes will usually print cheaper (although not always), but you’ll have to think through what size of pages will most effectively contain the information you need to present.

If you’re really involved (or really trying to manage costs), you’ll also have to think about what size sheets the pages will be printed on. In large print runs, there’s often four or more document pages per sheet of printer paper. These large sheets are then cut or folded to create document pages, and every additional cut or fold adds to your document’s manufacturing cost.

In all likelihood you won’t have to deal with any of that, but even if you’re just working on the $60 inkjet in your home office, you still have choices to make. Do you want to print your document on a standard sheet of Letter paper (8 1/2″ x 11″), or a taller Legal page (8 1/2″ x 14″). Most office printers will also come stocked with 11″ x 17″ sheets, which can be quite handy for foldout illustrations.

Another standard print size, common for trade paperbacks, is 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″, which you can get by folding a sheet of Letter in half or cutting along its center line. You can sometimes get a professional look for a short booklet by setting up your book as two columns of text on a landscape sheet of Letter, then folding it and stapling it along the middle.

Paper Orientation

Landscape pages are pages wider than they are tall. It’s a popular layout for printing posters and heavily-illustrated documents like children’s picture books. Landscape isn’t as effective for text-heavy pages, though. Generally, you should manage your text columns so readers don’t have to turn their heads at all while reading a row from left to right.

In our documents at work we’ll often use landscape 11″ x 17″ pages for engineering schematics, tucked between 8 1/2″ x 11″ portrait pages of body text. It takes a little bit of work to manage those transitions in Word but it creates a much more readable document than we’d get spilling all those text pages over sprawling 17″-wide pages or trying to cram detailed drawings into an 8 1/2″ space.

And of course we don’t get to use all 8 1/2″. In fact, we use the same 1″ margins you remember from school papers, so we’re left with a text column that’s only 6.5″ from left to right.

The Purpose of Margins

Have you ever stopped to think about page margins? As a technical writer, I certainly have. Margins steal significant amounts of print area from every page in your document, but they serve an important purpose. In fact, depending on your perspective, they serve several.

They’re popular places to scribble comments and notes, but margins exist for much more practical reasons: to protect the information contained in a document.

The page edges are the weak link in the book as a storage format for information. If a closed book gets wet, the water damage is worst along the outside edges. As a book gets old and tattered, it’s the edges of the page that crack and fall apart. Keeping wide margins allows us to respect the physical limitations of our media and still protect the information we’re trying to convey to readers.

And readers certainly benefit from margins, even if the document they’re reading isn’t a water-stained antique. Generous outside margins give readers a place to hold the document without blocking text with their hands. A wide top and inside margin lets a reader staple a loose-leaf document without losing the ability to read the top inside corner of every page.

I said “inside” and “outside” there instead of “left” and “right,” because they change when you’re printing pages front-and-back. If you think of a thick paperback book, there’s a lot of page next to the spine that can be tough to read. On a left-hand page that’s the right margin, and on a right-hand page it’s the left margin, but in either case it’s the inner margin. We call that unreadable edge next to the spine the “gutter.”

How to Use Section Breaks in Microsoft Word

That’s a lot of stuff to manage, but if you’re trying to produce a professionally-formatted document, you need to consider every aspect of your reader’s experience. The good news is, modern word processors provide tools to handle all of it, and to handle it well.

I’ll show you where to find the necessary options tomorrow, when we look yet again at how to use section breaks in Microsoft Word.

And actually…I complain sometimes about my day job, but I’ve always been a pretty technical sort, even when I’m caught up in my creative side. Technical Writing holds a real appeal to me whether or not I need it to pay the bills, and for precisely that reason it took me a little while to settle into using scribblebooks.

My first scribblebook was a gift to me in high school, and it came with the sincere dedication:

Aaron,

This book is for you to sketch down your thoughts and poems.

Love, Lindsay

It seemed far too small for the grand, world-changing ideas I was busy with in my writing, but I used it to capture notes to myself. The pagers were unlined, too, so it made a handy sketchbook, and I’d scratch out rough sketches of scenes from my book from time to time (usually while I was bored in some science or history class).

A couple years later I got to college and needed to take a lot more notes to keep up with everything I was doing. I dug out my old, almost-forgotten scribblebook and put it to use for class notes (and, once again, doodling when I was bored in Gen Eds).

That’s when I really started seeing the potential of it, too. I carried it with me everywhere, and it became my address book, my datebook, and it finally started to serve its initial purpose as I started capturing snippets of prose I wanted to put in a book someday.

On my mission trip, it became a security blanket, and I’d dive into its pages when I needed to escape all the people. I wrote poems about the cold loneliness of religion that made it into my college literary magazine, and notes to myself trying to capture the memories of these fascinating people I met for a moment, and wanted to remember for a lifetime. The last page has a tally of all the things I’d bought while in Britain, scribbled during the last half hour of my flight home so I could report it all to customs.

I got back from that trip absolutely dependent on my scribblebook, and devastated that it was full. Trish got me a new one right away, and after I filled that one, too, I ended up going back through both of them and filling up every half-inch of whitespace I could find with a rough outline for a non-fiction book on grilling that I never got around to writing.

Page Layout

I wouldn’t expect everyone to see the beauty I find in a well-abused scribblebook, but there’s a certain magic to the humble piece of paper. It’s amazing how many different purposes it can serve, how many forms of communication it offers — formal and informal, private and public.

This week I want to talk to you about pages — paper size, page orientation, and margins. It might seem like a trivially basic concern, but getting the foundation right will make the whole rest of your structure stronger. So come back tomorrow for a look at the various aspects of page layout in a professionally-formatted document.

Because that’s what we’re doing. Whether you’re trying to manage text columns, headers and footers, or any other page layout elements in Microsoft Word, you’ve got to understand and work with the program’s Sections and Section Breaks.

I’m not going to duplicate the content, though. This week I want to talk to you about how to use those sections to fill your headers and footers with the document context information I talked about in yesterday’s post, so if you skipped the first post on section breaks in Microsoft Word, go back and read it now. Once you’re up to speed, we’ll get right to work.

Modifying Header and Footer Text

Now, before you start messing with the sections, the first thing you need to know how to do is put anything in a header and footer. That depends a little bit on your software version, but it’s not too hard to find.

If you’ve already got a header or footer, you’ll see it as grayed-out text above or below the document’s page text, and even though you can’t select it or type over it, it’s really easy to get access to modify. Just double-click anywhere in the header or footer area (the easiest way to make sure you’re in the right place is to double-click the gray text, but that’s not strictly necessary), and now the page text will become grayed-out and uneditable, and the headers and footers are yours to control.

At that point, we’ll say you’re in Header and Footer Mode. Word basically toggles between the two — either you can edit the headers and footers, or you can edit the page text. You can never work on both at the same time.

If you don’t already have something in the header or footer, though, Word doesn’t bother tracking your mouseclicks in that area, so you’ll have to access it another way. In older versions of Word, you’d use the menu to go to View | Header and Footer, which toggles you into Header and Footer Mode and places your cursor in the header of the currently-selected page. In newer versions, you’ll find Header and Footer as an option on the Page Layout ribbon, and once you enter Header and Footer Mode Word will provide an extra ribbon just for that.

Managing Word’s Helpfulness

Once you’ve got information in your headers and footers, that’s when you need to start worrying about Word’s section breaks. If you’re trying to make a really professional-looking document, anyway, you’ll want to manage your headers and footers, and Word goes a long way to help you with that…and sometimes goes a little too far.

There are three key things you’ll eventually want to do:

• Different odd and even pages
• Different first page
• Different front matter

I’ll address them in reverse order, because the last one is the easiest to explain.

Different Front Matter

“Front matter,” in case I haven’t already explained it, refers to things like a Foreword, a Letter from the Author, an Introduction if you’ve got one, and (most commonly) a Table of Contents. The reason you want a different header and footer in the front matter is because of an old standard: Roman numeral page numbers.

So you’d want your Table of Contents to start on i and maybe run through to iv, but then Chapter 1 should show, in the footer, “Page 1″ (even though it’s actually like the seventh or ninth page in the document).

The way you handle that is with Sections. Insert a Section Break between the end of the front matter and just before the beginning of the body (put your cursor before the “C” in “Chapter One” and Insert | Breaks | Section Break – Next Page).

Now that you’ve got a break, switching into Header and Footer Mode will now show a little title in the box outlining the header and footer, labeling it as “Header (Section 2)” or something to that effect.

By default, Word will go ahead and duplicate your initial Header and Footer across all the sections. It uses a setting called Same as Previous which you’ll find highlighted in the Headers and Footers toolbar. As long as that’s on, anything you change in the Section 2 Header will also change in the Section 1 Header (and vice versa).

Once you turn it off, though (just click on it, and it’ll toggle off), you can change the Page Number settings in Section 1 to Style “i,  ii,  iii…” and Start With “i,” then change Section 2 to Style “1, 2, 3…” and Start With “1.”

That’s all it takes.

Different Front Page

You’ve got a couple more options, too. You can tell Word if you want a Different First Page header and footer (and that’s the first page of the section, not necessarily of the whole document).

This feature is often handy when you’re dealing with something other than a book, because the first page almost always contains all the information you would put in a header and footer (author, title, section, subject, and even the page number should be pretty apparent).

By far the most common way to use Different First Page is to turn it on, and then just delete everything in the First Page Header and First Page Footer.

Different Odd and Even Pages

You can also turn on Different Odd and Even, which lets you format the fronts of pages in a bound document (right-hand pages, or odd pages) differently from the backs of pages (left-hand, or even). They’re usually done as mirror images of each other, so instead of the page number being right justified in the footer, it’s right-justified on the odd pages and left-justified on even pages, meaning it’s always on the outside edge of the page.

That only matters when you’re printing front-and-back, but it can add a really professional look to documents produced that way.

And if you read the article when it went live yesterday…swing back by today. I finally added an illustration to it, and it’s just about the most adorable illustration you’ve ever seen.

Establishing Document Information

I’m not supposed to be talking about Annabelle today, though. I’m supposed to be talking about document design, carrying on a series I started a few weeks ago on finishing a fully-formatted document.

That’s a bit of a broad topic, because “document” covers too much ground, and so does the toolset available under the heading “fully-formatted.” There are a handful of style elements that are critical to creating a professional-looking document, though, and their elements are pretty consistent no matter what document type you’re working with.

One of the most important of those is the statement of your document type itself. A good template not only tells an author where to put critical information, it also tells a reader at a glance exactly what they’re looking at. In the same way, the header and footer elements of your page setup can inform (or remind) a reader exactly what they’re looking at any time they glance at any given page of the document.

Remember that, the next time you’re reading a professionally-formatted document — whether it’s a textbook or a memo from middle management. Look over the header and footer and see just what information is there. Chances are good you’ll find a page number, giving you constant context for the information you’re evaluating. You’ll also probably find the document’s title repeated, and may find something more detailed, whether it’s the document’s form number, its preparation date, maybe a chapter heading, or even just key words for the current section.

Whatever elements are included, they serve as an anchor on every single page of the document, reminding you what it is you’re reading, and where you currently are within that information.

Establishing Author Information

One of the most valuable of those elements (although, admittedly, I might be biased here), is author information. That’s where yesterday’s story fits in, because there are certain things that take on different meaning coming from, say, a dragon, than they would from a toddler — and even that would come across differently than it would from an infant.

As readers we constantly evaluate the information we’re reading based on who it is providing that information to us. And I’m going to tell you the same thing I’ve been telling my creative writers for the last three weeks: it’s your job to tell your readers everything they need to know before they need to know it.

That’s why your title page comes at the front of the document, and it’s why the name of the author is one of the most common elements to stick in a header. The very first line of every single page in the document tells the reader exactly who it is that’s telling them this.

Managing Section Breaks in Microsoft Word

So…you’ve seen headers and footers, you’ve got a basic idea what they’re for and how you should use them…but how do you use them? The short answer: it depends. On your writing software, among other things.

I’ve promised to walk you through document setup in Microsoft Word for this whole series, so that’s what I’ll show you. If you want to skip ahead, I’ll tell you that Headers and Footers are a Page Layout element that you’ll want to View — the caps in that sentence should be enough to cover your software version, one way or another, for at least the last decade. If you’re using something older than that, you’re on your own.

If you don’t feel like sleuthing it out, just come back tomorrow. I’ll provide screenshots, and walk you through setting up headers and footers in Microsoft Word.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here, but one of my proudest moments as a father so far was when, barely a year old, Annabelle first started playing dragon. I started growling at her when she was teeny tiny — it was adorable, seeing her startle, and then clap and laugh. As she got closer and closer to her birthday, though, she started growling right back, chasing me around the living room and down the hall….

And…well, it’s not just that she was playing dragon, but that she was playing dragon nine months before she ever started playing princess. “That,” I’d tell visitors, as they watched her stomp around and swipe at them with her terrible claws, “that’s my girl!”

When she got old enough for words, I taught her how to use that pretense. If she told me she was scared of something, I’d act a little thoughtful, and then ask, “Well…would a dragon be scared of those shadows?”

And she’d laugh and say, “No, silly!”

And I’d say, “Well, why don’t you just be a dragon? One good growl at those shadows, and they won’t dare mess with you!”

I didn’t mind too much when she finally did start playing princess, though. That went hand-in-hand with playing dress-up, and she was just so terribly lovely, clopping down the hall in kid-sized attire that still looked monstrously oversized on her tiny frame, preening as perfectly as any pureblood princess ever did.

I love the way she sees every story as an interactive opportunity, new material for her pretend time, no matter how much she likes the actual show. And she sees that sort of opportunity everywhere she goes, in everything she does.

I never know, from one day to the next, what I’m going to come home to. Sometimes it’s, “Hi, Daddy! I’m glad you’re home! I’m a puppy!” Sometimes, “Hi, Daddy! I’m glad you’re home! I’m a medical doctor!” And, no matter what else, she’s also always a superhero.

It’s absolutely precious…most of the time. The last year it’s taken on a new aspect, though. See…she’s paid especially shrew attention to the new interloper in her home — Baby Alexander — and she picked up with an astonishing rapidity that he got away with things she doesn’t get away with.

And, ever since, she’s added a new persona to her repertoire. “I’m a baby!” She throws a toy, or grabs something away from her brother or cousin, and then when we go to scold her, she looks up with a big smile and says, “I don’t understand. I’m just a baby.”

She remembered lessons I’d taught her a year earlier, and figured out how to use pretending to her advantage. All of a sudden, it wasn’t so cute.

One night she was sitting in her chair at the table when Trish brought her a plate of dinner and she grunted, “Nuh uh! I don’t want this.”

I looked her in the eye, and said, “That’s what we’re having.”

“It’s not what brother’s having.”

“Brother’s a baby,” I said, knowing immediately what her answer would be.

“I’m a baby!”

I thought for a moment, and then said, “Are you sure?” She nodded, and I shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “Well, you may not know this, but babies don’t get to do a lot of the things big girls get to do. They don’t get to watch TV.”

Her face fell. I went on gravely, “And they don’t get to play with crayons or paint or bubbles. They don’t get to play on all your big girl toys outside. And they don’t get to go swimming, or eat ice cream, or read at bedtime–”

And I watched her eyes get wider and wider through it all, thinking to myself, I am such a genius. As I rambled on, she finally waved both hands frantically to get me to stop, shaking her head.

I cut myself short, and she took a deep breath, and then said, “Silly Daddy. I’m not that kind of baby. I’m a big girl baby.”

I smiled patronizingly (appropriately enough). “There’s no such thing as big girl babies.”

“Of course there is!” she said seriously. “Me!” And she beamed, thrilled in her total victory. “Now get me some cereal.”

I hope to remedy that today. I’m going to walk you through the basics of setting up columns in Microsoft Word.

Setting Up a Columned Layout

The easiest way to set up columns in a document is to do it from the very start. Open a new document in Word, or load an existing document (assuming it doesn’t have any section breaks, which we’ll discuss later), then go to Format | Columns to open the Columns dialog.

Choose a two-column layout, and start typing (or, if you opened an existing document, just watch what happens). The whole document is now two-columns, and you can see in the following image how the extra whitespace breaks up the text density on the page.

Switching to (and from) a Columned Layout

Now, somewhere in that process, you should have seen a dropdown marked “Apply to Whole Document” (or, if you’re working in an existing document, it might have said, “This Section Only”). It’s easy enough to create columns in Word, but managing them can be a nightmare until you understand a few other elements of the software.

The first is “sections.” In Word, a “section” is a block of text with its own page formatting. Every document has at least one section (and, by default, only one), and with it a page layout (which includes the paper size and orientation, the margins, the header and footer text, and of course the column layout).

If you want to switch from a TOC with roman numerals for page numbers (in the footer) to a body section with Arabic numbers, you’ll need a section break between the two. If you want to switch from mostly vertical pages to a couple horizontal pages with illustrations on them in the middle of the book, you’ll need a section break before and after the change.

And if you want to switch from single-column body text to a multi-column offset section, you’ll need section breaks. Word handles breaks by inserting non-printing characters into the text flow, and there’s an option to display these non-printing characters. It clutters up your screen a little, but it’s incredibly helpful when you’re trying to figure out why a document isn’t cooperating with you.

To display non-printing characters, look on your toolbars for a paragraph symbol. (It might be hiding in a drop-down at the end of one of the toolbars.) Turn it on, and you should see (at the very least) all the paragraph marks on your page indicating where your paragraphs end. Depending how complicated your document layout is, you might see a whole mess of extra information on your page.

Now, move your cursor to the end of a paragraph partway through the document, and insert a new section break. From the menu choose Insert | Break… and you’ll get to see all the different types of break available. For our purposes, we want Continuous. Ignore the rest for now.

Skip down a point further down in the document (at least a few paragraphs down), and then insert another Continuous Section Break. Now your document has three sections: one before the first break, a second after it, and a third after the next break.

Click your mouse anywhere within the second section (between the two breaks), and go back to the Columns dialog. This time, instead of applying your change to the whole document, choose “Apply to This Section Only” before you hit Next.

For the illustration above, I turned the non-printing characters back off, so you could more easily see the visual effect we created. Some writers like to leave them off all the time, but I toggle back and forth all the time — sometimes you need to see what your readers will see, but other times it’s important to manage all the quirky effects Word is playing with.

Columnating a Selection

Of course, there are times when you have no desire to manage Word’s quirks at all. If you’re trying to create a quick effect, or if you don’t anticipate having to maintain the document later, there’s a much easier way to force a separately-columned section without inserting breaks or even understanding them.

All you’ve got to do is select the bit of text you want to modify:

And then, with it selected, go through the steps I defined above. Now, instead of choosing to apply the new layout to the whole document or to the current section, choose Apply to Selected Text.

Easy as that. Maybe I should have led with that method…but you know, eventually, you’re going to run into problems. And the only way you’ll ever be able to fix them is if you understand what’s going on behind the scenes.