Poets: Use this drop-down menu to type your poem exactly the way it should look

Use the "More" drop down menu, select "Poetry" and insert the lines of your poem between the lines, and other typesetting tricks available on Substack on your laptop or PC. Not your phone. Plus...

The backstory

The first time I tried to type a poem in Substack, I clicked through on all of the icons and search the drop-down menus. You are just going to have to believe me that Poetry was not on the “More” menu at that time. I checked several times.

Then I searched Reddit for the answer, which informed me of that the old-school trick “Hold down CTL while pressing Enter” line break. That was useful but tedious, but created a new problem—lines that needed to be indented.

But the indents weren’t displaying in the way I wrote the original. (I was toggling Draft and Preview to see if it made a difference.)

I finally gave up, created it in Word, turned it into a .PNG, and posted it in that way. (I am going to repost it directly after I am done with this—and making breakfast for the grandkids.)

Then I posted an SOS plea on Substack asking for help, and when I checked a few hours later, a Substack friend had directed me to the “More” menu, and when I looked again, there it was. Honest.

But it’s there now and I just posted one of my poems using the “poetry” drop-down and it works! (I even indented the second line, even though I didn’t write it that way, to see if a spacebar indent worked, and it does.)

Latest update: This works only on your PC or laptop, not on your phone.

Happy poetry writing! And typesetting! New features like the callout block are breaking this week!

THE NEW CALLOUT BLOCK IS LOCATED ON THE QUOTE MENU

Here’s the way it should look when you are typing or pasting your poem or text while using your PC or laptop (not available on phones):

• Back to Poetry—In the text editor, go to the more button and select Poetry. Type or paste your poetry inside the lines.

• It will look like this when you Preview or Publish it:

• In this screenshot I highlighted the key features in orange to direct you to the correct places:

• If you are editing an existing Substack page, you will need to click the ellipsis (three dots) edit button at the top of the post, and then the above steps to type or paste your poem.

Here’s what’s going on, and a few tips for getting type to behave:

Substack is set up for prose, not poetry. If you are typing a poem, there is too much white space between the lines, and if you want to indent a line, well forget about it.

1. The answer, of course, is to use the drop-down menu “More” and select “Poetry” and as long as you type or paste your text in the box it will display like poetry, not prose. Easy-peasy, no problem. Except the first couple of times I looked at that menu, “Poetry” wasn’t there.

2. If you want to insert a photo or photos inside the poem block, leave a line of white space between lines. Click in the space, click on the image icon (dragging it into the page doesn’t work with the Poetry setting), select your photo or art, and hit return.

   Other Tips:

3. Set photos for full width for users who rely on their phone app to read Substack. Most Substackers read on a desktop computer or laptop. The phone app does not have the robust settings menus that are available on the website.

4. If you need an apostrophe before the first letter of a word, such as ‘zine (notice what just happened? apostrophe going in the wrong direction?) here’s what to do. Type any letter, then the keyboard apostrophe, then the word. Then go back and delete the random letter. Having trouble seeing the open and closed apostrophes and quotes? Check out these examples I created just for you:

   

   This old-school typeface is Garamond, a serif typeface.

   

   This modern typeface is Calibri, a sans serif typeface.

   • Without: I finished the final draft of my ‘zine in time to send it out for the holidays. [It is easier to see the apostrophe using a serif type or larger type size, above.]

   • What you type: I finished the final draft of my z’zine in time to send out for the holidays. [Then delete the first “z”.]

   • Now it looks like this: I finished the final draft of my ’zine in time to send out for the holidays.

5. If you want to center text on a line of type (Substack doesn’t think you need it), try using the Block quote command. Warning: It will take up a lot of space, so while you could use it for subheads, they would have to be major story breaks, as in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, if you set it like the original:

STAVE ONE

Marley’s Ghost

(There is a new centered line feature I’ve seen discussed on other Substacks, and I don’t believe it is the one I’ve used below. These features are generally rolled out gradually. I don’t have it yet.)

But this may be too much white space. Perhaps if you have long passages of text it would offer respite to a dedicated reader. Otherwise, most Substackers have chosen to write one sentence paragraphs with lots of bullets and boldface type, which is their work-around. I’m not criticizing. Substack designed it for old-school pulled quotes, where there is no paragraph space between the lines, like this, again from A Christmas Carol:

“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” –Page 16

Still quite a bit of white space. (Note the En Dash I added before “Page 16”)

The backstory

Of course the first thing I did was to click on all of the icons and search the drop-down menus. You are just going to have to believe me that Poetry was not on the “More” menu at that time. I checked several times.

Then I searched Reddit for the answer, which informed me of that the old-school trick “Hold down CTL while pressing Enter” line break. That was useful but tedious, but did not solve the problem of lines that needed to be indented.

But the indents weren’t displaying in the way I wrote the original. (I was toggling Draft and Preview to see if it made a difference.)

I finally gave up, created it in Word, turned it into a .PNG, and posted it in that way. (I am going to repost it directly after I am done with this—and making breakfast for the grandkids.)

Then I posted an SOS plea on Substack asking for help, and when I checked a few hours later, a Substack friend had directed me to the “More” menu, and when I looked again, there it was. Honest. But it’s there now and I just posted one of my poems using the “poetry” drop-down and it works! (I even indented the second line, even though I didn’t write it that way, to see if a spacebar indent worked, and it does.)

Happy poetry writing! And typesetting!

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