How to Create Your Own Writer’s Style Guide






I learned about style guides in the late 1990s when I was a baby newspaper reporter in the actual Armpit of America.

A style guide is simply a book full of writing rules. Do you write out numbers or use numerals? Is there a period after Dr? Should we use an Oxford comma?

That sort of thing. As a journalist, I used the AP (or Associated Press) Style Guide. My editor gave me a copy my first day on the job. As a student, I used the MLA (or Modern Language Association) style guide.

As a novelist? I mostly use my very own personalized style guide.

I won’t sit here and try to convince you that there weren’t a ton of cool things about having my first novel published. There were. Obvs.

But one of the coolest and, arguably, the one that’s helped me the most over the last ten years, was being presented with a personalized style guide. I had no idea that this was a thing that happens.

The copy editor who worked on my novel created a guide for me. It was full of all of the edits they had to make. The mistakes I routinely struggle with. Plus, a basic story Bible full of information about my own story.