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Unconventional Formatting: Difference between revisions
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== Other writers may use it to visually represent the action being described in the text. ==
The technical name for this is [
A subtrope of [[Painting the Medium]]. Sometimes used in [[Meta Fiction]] and [[Scrapbook Story|Scrapbook Stories]]. If employed throughout a work it may be a kind of [[Constrained Writing]]. See also [[Footnote Fever]] (with which this sometimes overlaps), [[All Lowercase Letters]], [[No Punctuation Period]], [[Rainbow Speak]], [[Censor Box]], [[Bold Inflation]], [[Color Coded for Your Convenience]] and [[Page Turn Surprise]].
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nevertheless. }}
* ''[[Tristram Shandy (Literature)|Tristram Shandy]]'' is probably the [[Ur Example]].
* A favourite device of [[EE Cummings|e.e. cummings]], as can be seen [
* [[Terry Pratchett]] uses this quite often:
** In ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Maskerade|Maskerade]]'' many readers were puzzled by a sentence fragment on the page, floating near the right margin saying "up here?". Near the bottom of the page a character is asked to demonstrate her skill in throwing her voice.
** In ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Reaper Man|Reaper Man]]'' Death who is famous for speaking in {{smallcaps|all caps}} meets ''his'' boss, who speaks in "caps" so huge and bold they took up an entire page. Pratchett stated in interviews that he spent quite a bit of time arranging the prose so that this would happen on a left hand page and thus be a surprise to the reader. ''Reaper Man'' also uses two different typefaces for the A story and B story.
** When the god Om regains his strength at the end of ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Small Gods|Small Gods]]'', he speaks with chapter and verse numbers inserted between his sentences.
* In ''[[The City of Dreaming Books (Literature)|The City of Dreaming Books]]'', right after the villain is revealed, he hands the main character a book which will "answer all his questions" on page 333. As he flipps through the book, all pages are completely blank until he gets to page 333. The next two pages of the novel are completely filled with tiny letters that only say {{spoiler|''"[[Finger
* ''[[The Demolished Man (Literature)|The Demolished Man]]'' uses unusual type layout to depict telepathic conversations (sentences trailing down a page and interweaving like braids; a party game where the image formed by the words is a kind of charade clue).
** ''[[The Stars My Destination (Literature)|The Stars My Destination]]'' by the same author uses this trope as well.
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** Fforde also uses this to graphically show what's happening in the text. Mycroft's Bookworms in ''[[Thursday Next|TheEyre Affair]]'' produce apostrophes' as a waste product, as well as amper&s, and when they get upset, they hyphen-ate. These marks show up in the text of the dialogue to illustrate this.
* Parodied in one of the [[Monty Python]] books where there's a self-referential page of coloured letters on a black background.
* [
* ''In Search Of Adam'' by Caroline Smailes changes the placement of its words and shades of grey whenever Jude becomes obsessed over that thing in particular. For example when she's counting the words will zig-zag down the page.
* ''[[Penn & Teller]]'s Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends'' is printed in such a way that if you flip the pages front to back it's full of large fonted black print but if you flip it back to front it's full of tiny red print. This is used to trick your friend into believing that a special pair of cardboard specs (included) make things magically appear.
* Not sure if this counts, but artist Tom Phillips made an art book called ''[
* ''The People Of Paper'' has an interesting one: some characters have the intrinsic ability to conceal their thoughts and actions ''from the author'', and others can do so by lining their hat or their house with lead. In-text, this shows up as [[Censor Box|Censor Boxes]] over the concealed events (in some cases, entire pages of black).
* [[Harlan Ellison]] complained about one author doing this in a story he submitted to one of the ''[[Dangerous Visions]]'' anthologies. It had entire manuscript pages that went something like:
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[[Category:Self Demonstrating Article]]
[[Category:Unconventional Formatting]]
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