About a year ago I made a video about writing fiction in Obsidian — about how I’d fallen in love with the format and the tools I’d built to make it work for serious fiction writers.
The video did well, but what surprised me were the comments. Overwhelmingly, people weren’t talking about themes or dashboards or analytics. They were asking about one specific thing: the plugin I’d built to export short stories into Shunn manuscript format.
Write in markdown. Press a button. Get a professionally formatted manuscript, ready to submit to a magazine.
I’d mentioned it almost in passing. The response told me it was something people genuinely needed.
Making It Public
It took longer than expected to release. The version in that original video was, to put it charitably, cobbled together for my own machine. Making it into a proper, installable Obsidian plugin that someone else could actually rely on was a different job.
But it’s done. It’s live in the Obsidian community plugin store. It had around fifty downloads before I’d said anything publicly about it, which told me something.
How It Works
The workflow is straightforward.
You write your story in Obsidian using standard markdown. When you’re ready to export, you open the Shunn Exporter from the sidebar. Most of the fields are pre-filled from your file’s metadata. You can adjust the font (Courier New by default), toggle whether to include your address, abbreviate a long title for the running header, choose whether italics appear as underline, or anonymise the manuscript entirely for blind submissions like Writers of the Future.
Then you click export.
The output is a .docx file: correct font and size, double-spaced, first-line paragraph indents, contact block on the first page, word count rounded to the nearest hundred, running header from page two onwards, properly formatted scene breaks. Everything the Shunn format requires, generated automatically from your plain markdown file.
A Few Rules to Know
The exporter works by reading your markdown and interpreting it according to a consistent set of conventions. They’re straightforward, but you do need to know them.
Paragraph breaks are a blank line between paragraphs, which is standard Obsidian behaviour. Scene breaks are markers like # or * * * on their own line with a blank line before and after. Italics use single asterisks or underscores. Em dashes are typed as two hyphens, which the exporter converts automatically in the output.
All of this is documented in full on the Shunn Export plugin page. If you’re starting a new story it’ll become second nature quickly. If you’re migrating an existing one, there’s usually very little to change.
Getting It
The plugin is free and open source. Install it directly through Obsidian’s community plugin browser (search for “Shunn Export”) or find it on GitHub.
If you write short fiction and you’ve been putting off moving to Obsidian because formatting for submission felt like an unsolved problem, that problem is now solved. Write in markdown, export in seconds, submit with confidence.