A diary is the most honest thing you will ever write and one of the fiddliest things to publish. The raw material is there already — the entries, the dates, the small details no novelist would dare invent. What trips people up is everything around the words: an unclear speaker, a photograph with no credit, a chapter that begins in March and ends in February. None of it is difficult. All of it needs doing before your manuscript lands on an editor's desk.

Work through the checklist below in order. It saves the tedious backwards-and-forwards that turns a three-week production schedule into three months.

1. Decide what kind of book you are making

A diary manuscript can become several different things, and each one needs different work. A straight transcribed diary, published as written, is a historical document. An edited diary has a narrator shaping the entries. A diary-form novel sits somewhere else again.

Before you format a single page, write one sentence at the top of your working file: This book is the diary of X, covering Y to Z, edited for length and clarity. If you cannot write it plainly, your reader will not be able to either.

2. Clear permissions before you fall in love with your own pages

This is the step most people leave until the proof stage, and it is the one that can stop a book dead. A diary is full of other people's material.

• Quoted letters, emails and text messages — copyright belongs to whoever wrote them. Ask.
• Photographs, even family ones, if someone else held the camera.
• Song lyrics, poems, passages from other books, lines from films.
• Extracts from published works you happened to be reading at the time.
• Transcripts of conversations you recorded.

Privacy matters too. Living people have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and if an entry accuses someone of something, defamation law may apply even when your recollection is accurate. Change names, or be prepared to justify keeping them. On permissions and privacy alike, take proper legal advice for your own circumstances — a publisher will ask, and "I assumed it was fine" is not an answer.

3. Lock down your formatting rules

Consistency is what makes a manuscript look professional, and inconsistency is what makes an editor sigh. Set your rules early and apply them everywhere.

Use one font throughout — a serif such as Times New Roman at 12pt is the safe default. Double-space the body. Number the pages. Indent new paragraphs consistently, and leave the first paragraph after a heading unindented. Use a single space after a full stop, not two. Keep italics for emphasis, titles and foreign words, and do not let them do three jobs at once.

Decide how entries are separated. A date heading in bold, a blank line, then the text is clean and easy to typeset:

14 April 1998

Rain all morning. Took the bus into town because the bike had a flat...

If you are mixing diary entries with later commentary, mark the difference clearly — a different font, a lighter weight, an indented block — and explain your choice in a note at the front.

4. Sort dates, names and chronology

Readers forgive a lot. They do not forgive a diary that cannot keep its own calendar straight.

Go through the manuscript date by date. Check days of the week against the year — a Tuesday in 1997 is not a Tuesday in 1998. Check ages, seasons and weather against the events around them. Where you have merged entries, say so. Where you have cut, use a clear marker such as an ellipsis in square brackets, and be consistent about it.

Then do the same for names. Auntie Jean should not become Aunt Jean halfway through. If you have renamed people, keep a private key listing real names against published ones. You will need it for the index, the acknowledgements and any awkward phone call later.

5. Proofread in layers, not in one pass

Reading the whole manuscript once, looking for everything, is the slowest way to find errors. Do it in layers instead.

1. Structure. Does the timeline hold? Are there gaps a reader will trip over?
2. Facts. Dates, places, school names, job titles, spellings of surnames.
3. Language. Read aloud if you can. An entry that does not sound like speech usually is not working.
4. The boring layer. Double spaces, straight quotes, inconsistent capitalisation, numbers spelled out in one place and set as numerals in another.

If your budget stretches to it, a professional proofreader is worth more than a new laptop. Fresh eyes find what familiarity hides.

6. Prepare the files and the front matter

Now assemble the whole package. Most publishers and typesetters want the main manuscript as a single, clearly named document, plus a title page with title, subtitle, author name and approximate word count. Add a table of contents if the book is divided into parts or years, a list of illustrations with captions and credits, any permissions documentation in one folder, and a short author note if you are publishing anonymously or under a pseudonym.

Name your files so a stranger can find them. Surname_Title_Manuscript_v3.docx beats final final NEW.docx every time. Keep a master copy and a backup stored somewhere else.

The final read before you press send

Print the manuscript. Yes, on paper. Sit with it for an afternoon and read the first twenty pages and the last twenty with a pencil in hand. Those are the pages an editor reads first and the pages a reader remembers. Check that the opening entry gives someone a reason to keep going, and that the last one leaves them somewhere deliberate rather than simply stopping.

Then confirm your front matter is complete, your permissions folder is closed, and send it. A manuscript that has been formatted, checked, cleared and named properly says something quiet but useful to whoever opens it: this writer knows what they are doing.

Photo: World-fly / Pixabay