@allisonwyss @orionkidder @joehumphrey

[R]eaders really do need breaks! And they like breaks! And sometimes it means they come back to the story even more ready for it.

Not disagreeing, but I believe it important to force readers to choose.

I don't often stop reading a story never to pick it up again, but one thing -- other than it being a really bad story -- that will make me stop reading is a writer resolving stuff before a chapter break. Given a choice of stopping, I might.

Stop.

Permanently.

This stuff I'm discussing here I don't do consciously, I'll admit. This is an analysis of my writing. I'm an unabashed pantster, under the spell of loquacious characters living their lives breathlessly, barreling along toward their destiny (writing toward a known ending). I throw breaks when it feels right, but not after plot or character resolution!

Except... After the climax or denouement (penultimate chapter), and again at the end of the epilogue (end of story).

For me, some of what flags that I can chapter break is a sense of mystery, foreboding the character might be doing the wrong thing, or a cliffhanger in the action that will proceed subsequently at another time or place. Something to be curious about.

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@allisonwyss @whatzaname @orionkidder @joehumphrey When I don't break, the characters and action does. I do it only rarely, and only when it feels right. It's always a sprint not exactly a marathon, but the reader is welcome to grab a bottle of water before jumping back into the race.

In the context of the current 130K novel, one chapter wants to be like this and it's 10K. It goes from MC and love interest, each of who are competing for control, feeling a weird synergy (love, [spoilers], or both?), to dinner, dancing, desserts, and asking about his "etchings", to... uh, hem. The next chapter is the greatest mystery of the whole book, and is 600 words long.

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@allisonwyss @Trajecient @orionkidder @joehumphrey When I am at my best in chaptering or naming the books/parts of a novel, the title is always a mystery to be solved by the time you reach the end of the chapter or part. Sometimes I even do that with the title of the novel. Moreover, I like it when the cover art is a scene from the novel you have to look for, also, not merely something evocative of the spirit of the work (tho that's advertising for the publisher and you're lucky if you get consulted).

This are things that engage me when I find them, so I also do them in my stories.

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Love according to (antagonist) Braph:

“Do you know when the seeds for our belief in love get planted?”

He was serious. Llew swallowed, as fascinated by the ravings of a madman as she might be to watch a poisonous spider crawl across a sleeping body.

“It's in the way our parents dote on us. Not just us, each other. In those early years when they show us there is no safer place to fall than their arms.” Braph turned to the forest, his eyes seeing something only he could see. “I knew love because my parents loved each other, and my mother loved me. I can barely remember her.” He looked at Llew again. “She died when I was little over three years, but I remember how I felt in those arms, the miracle of those kisses. I don't blame my sister for killing her.” He returned to his reverie. “A babe can't help the circumstances of its birth, but I'll never forget the change in that house the day Aris brought Jonas's mother to meet our father. It was a match made for a purpose, and they served their purpose. And that woman was proud of their creation. She talked of what a great hero he would be, how strong, how fast, how powerful. Sometimes, as she told Jonas how great he would one day be, she would look up at our father and see before her the man she wanted her son to be, and for a moment, she felt something for him. I remembered my mother looking at him like that. But my mother had never needed to talk herself into it.” He peered at her again, his eyes boring into her. “Jonas has never known love for simply being, only for being Syakaran. What do you think—” He leaned his elbow on the cart. “—would happen if that were taken away? What would Quaver think of him then?”

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@joehumphrey @orionkidder @allisonwyss

[difference between] storytelling and story time?

CW: tM;dr? (Too Meta, Didn't Read?) 😋​

I really want to make story time one word, but that would be overloading another word used in the context of reading to children.

Both words are a meta concept.

Storytelling is how you communicate the events and ideas of the story. Story time is how you communicate how time passes in the story.

Story time can be:

• Textual, as in, "After dragging the all the stupid bricks up the hill," or "I kept on looking up from the book at the clock, my muscles twitching, as the second hand barely ticked toward noon."

• A description that requires more attention by the reader, slowing them down, or so concisely powerful it thrills and speeds them up.

• Some dialogue of multiple characters breathlessly interrupting each other, or droning on and on.

• Or... it could be a blank centered line with a # or a ##, a chapter break, or a novel composed of multiple books. I'll quote Allison responding to Orion:

Pause and consider--that's perfect. I think sometimes metafictional moments inside text do the same thing. As do other sorts of breaks.

• Others (definitely).

I recently wrote a novel that consisted of four books (180K total). Each book started with a cliffhanger chapter about the situation where the next book begins and the current ends. The rest of each "book" that followed all leading up to that cliffhanger/resolution book transition. Such things messes with how the reader perceives time passing in the story. FYI, one book starts with a fertilizer bomb about to explode. How the MC got herself into that one drives you to the end of that book!

Before you cry foul, I've recently watched a number of dramas that use this same 1-2-3 format: cliffhanger hook, story to the cliffhanger, then cliffhanger resolution transition to next episode. It works well for #mystery and #thriller genres. The last was a Korean gothic romance titled, "It's Okay to Not Be Okay." Excellent, by the way. I highly recommend it.

This is why I call story time perceptual manipulation, though, of course, storytelling does make you hallucinate being somewhere you are not, so it qualifies as perceptual manipulation, also.

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@orionkidder @joehumphrey @allisonwyss Very interesting topics in this thread. I realize I am late to it, but a few things:

Workshops actually can be great! There's just a lot that can also go wrong.

This is very true. When I saw a person reduced to tears, I started prefacing critiques with: A critique is what one person wanted to say having read your story and thinking about your words. Some or none of it may be applicable or make sense, or they have missed the point entirely. It's only what they understood. You are under no obligation to accept any of it.

How do you think about chapters?

• Cliffhangers.
• A breaking point that a reader could choose to ignore.
• A way of organizing a story into comprehensible chunks.

Mine are usually at least 750 words long, but some are 10K.

Sometimes, with novelettes or short novellas, I have no chapter breaks and let the story run breathlessly to the end. I'm thinking of one that took place over about a week, and even dreams played a part. This is the experience of the character in a ticking clock situation of a corrupting curse who needs to win over a hostile individual that could beat her and take over as ruler.

The examples I’ve seen of anarchist texts that allegedly don’t tell you what conclusions to draw from the text are either incoherent or deeply manipulative.

It sounds like it would be either incoherent or steam of consciousness slice of life stories. You can learn something from wandering, if directed I suppose. I did like My Dinner with Andre. That I learned something is the highest praise I can give a story.

That said, I do have one novel that in the end I've carefully crafted the main character to be either mentally ill (hearing voices) or to be a actual shaman who speaks to spirits. I make sure nothing she learns couldn't have been deduced, though you'd have to be a careful reader. It's up to the reader to sit back with the book and decide which they're more comfortable with... in a hard science fiction book to boot.

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@allisonwyss

I see chapters as another tool in the writing chest. They can slow down or speed up the action by the why and when they cut the action. I've read a 400 page book where each chapter came in at 100 pages and books where a chapter could be small as a paragraph.

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A client has me thinking about chapters.

Chapters can feel essayistic (coving a topic) or episodic (covering an event). Some writers care most about their length.

I consider their shape & how they make patterns & how the breaks influence a reader's experience.

They're kind of arbitrary like paragraphs--which is fun.

How do you think about chapters?

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Getting there… #PhD #Dissertation #Pages #Words #Characters #Paragraphs #Lines

We have #markdown #paragraphs!

https://github.com/marmota-app/marmdown/commit/7b6d1b562d9a5b39534710564eaba5994d40533c

@scifijack

In 9th Grade English, we had to write weekly one page descriptions - different topic each week. By year end, my writing sang!!!

Fabulous exercise!

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A shout out to #writers everywhere - today I realized that I’m 8000 words away from finishing the #book I’m writing, the one that got slowed down by #covid and the #pandemic & I just want to say it feels good to remember that it’s all really just a grind, one word that becomes two words, that turn into #sentences, that become #paragraphs and #pages. Also if you ever feel called to write about a weird book about hygiene and federal bureaucracy and the department of agriculture? Don’t. #histodons