Formatting Your Wattpad Story

Indents & Line Breaks

This chapter is going to cover indents and why they're unnecessary, how much space to put between your paragraphs, and how to effectively use line breaks so your book will look its best when published.

1: Line Spacing

Line spacing is done differently depending on whether you are on a computer or a mobile app. In the computer editor, you do not need to double space your paragraphs. Pressing enter once, or simply pressing down at the end of your paragraph will produce the same gap you're seeing between paragraphs here! In fact, you want to avoid double spacing your paragraphs on Wattpad. This is because for readers, it creates a whole other line on which to comment. If you then delete it later, those comments have nothing to cling to and fall to the end of chapter list rather than appearing in line for readers.

For mobile app users, your editor functions somewhat differently (at least on Android; could an iPhone user confirm this for me please?). To achieve the same paragraph spacing I described above—and that you're reading here—you do tap enter twice. You want to have one single line between your paragraphs. If you add two lines, you will have a space like the one between this paragraph and the next title.

2: Indents

Everyone has different opinions on whether or not to start a paragraph with a TAB. In my opinion, I don't think it's necessary on Wattpad. With the way the paragraphs are spaced out, it makes discerning the start of a new paragraph quite easy. It's up to you whether or not you want to use indents on Wattpad. That said, if you like writing with a TAB at the start, here's a simple guide to make copy-pasting from word editors into Wattpad a lot easier.

You may have noticed that the TAB button doesn't work in Wattpad's editor. That makes adding spacing rather difficult, as you have to manually enter spaces to indent your writing. In my opinion, ten spaces seems to be a decent number for a noticeable indent.

If you write in an editor and then copy over to Wattpad, here's a little guide for you to make indents even easier than pressing TAB. It requires a few steps at first, but you'll never need to indent again after you do it. (Scroll a bit to get to more Wattpad based tips, this is the only truly external one.)

If you want to add a visual indent to the start of your paragraphs without adding spaces or tabs, simply enable your ruler under the View menu. This works in just about every word processor. If it has a ruler, you can do this.

If your ruler is not already visible, you can generally enable it by clicking View > Ruler. Once it is visible, you'll notice notches at either end. On the top ruler, look to the left side. There are two notches as such:

These may look slightly different depending on your word processor, but they all function the same. When you hover your mouse over them, the top rectangle says "First Line Indent" while the triangle beneath it says "Line Indent". Line indent will move every line over the distance you drag it, effectively narrowing the text margin without narrowing the page margin.

You want to drag the top rectangle over to the 0.5" mark, like so.

This will apply to the first line of every single paragraph in this document from hereon out! But what if you want the occasional paragraph to start flush with the margin? What then?

Well my friend, this answer works both in word processors AND in the Wattpad story editor. The wonderful button combo of SHIFT + ENTER will give you a new line directly below the first. This can be pressed twice to create a standard double space while having your next paragraph flush with the margins.

In Wattpad, however, this feature puts a line
directly below the first,
like this!

3: Line Breaks

See that? This is how I do my line breaks. In my fiction writing, they're how I indicate time passing between one scene and another within a chapter. It's totally up to you how you do them, or even IF you do them. But if you do, you've probably noticed that when you try to use a small image as a line break, it ends up zooming to fit the page margins after publishing and becomes pixelated and totally not what you're looking for.

Not to worry! Simply drop the image you wish to use into your image editor of choice (I'm a fan of GIMP and paint.NET, which are both 100% free) and change the canvas size. Generally this is found in Image > Canvas Size in the top menu bar. The image I used above has a transparent background, meaning I deleted the white (so the checkered background shows) and saved it as a .PNG file. Your background can be anything you want, but keep in mind that in dark mode, your image will be white on black if that's how you set your background. Transparent backgrounds now appear fully transparent in both dark and light mode, where they used to have a grey tint before to indicate the size of the image.

As for sizes, the one I used above is 4044x320px. I try to stay in that range. Anything narrower than 150px is very hard to see unless it's just a line. Oh, and make sure your images comply with Wattpad's community standards!

Now, there's a reason why I use images and not a simple ~*~ like I do in my text documents. This goes back to the previous chapter, of being unable to align these at centre. Aesthetically, it bothers me, so I decided an image line break would be a good alternative.

Show me what you come up with for yours!

Next up, we're going to discuss the miscellaneous things you can add and do to your story.