Alynwa's Mind: It's Crazy in There

I am currently posting stories on AO3 and I've run into a problem I hope someone can solve for me because I'm being dense.  If I paste a work, it comes up plain text.  If I click on "rich text"  I can't edit it even though the different text options bar shows up.  It just turns into one huge paragraph.  When I clicked on the, for lack of a better term, "help" button, the explanation is over my head.  Do I have to use all the symbols they are talking about?  Like <em> and <H1>, <H2>, etc? so I can have the text I want bolded or italicized?  Am I making this harder than it is?

And, I tried to import a story from google docs and the site says it can't do it.  Has anyone else tried to do that?  Is it possible?  And, of course, fanfiction dot net won't allow AO3 to import docs.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.