Pace Yourself

As we were finishing up the read through of Music Novel (Verdict: Awesome!), we suddenly realized that the second book in the series, Sibling of Music Novel, hadn’t been broken up into chapter-sized bites yet. It wouldn’t be strictly necessary, since it’s just the two of us reading it, but we wanted to take a crack at it to make it a little more like reading a real book.

It’s still a first draft, so it’s bloatier than it needs to be. It won’t read just like a real book, even with the chapter breaks, but it helps us assess the pacing.

Other writers that we talk to say they write their novels in chapter-long chunks. The concept seems foreign to us. We plan our novels scene by scene, and then later combine the scenes into chapters. Each scene could technically be its own chapter, but that would give us a crazy high number of chapters, and their lengths would vary wildly. We (especially Jen) don’t like that.

Jen took a stab at breaking this bad boy down into reasonable chunks. At this early stage she worked mainly by word count, with an eye toward ending each chapter with a hook. It mostly worked pretty smoothly. There were a few places where a two scenes in a row ended with particularly juicy, propulsive events, and she had a hard time choosing where the breaks would go.

That’s the point of the read through, though. We’ll see how the pacing feels. Where things are awkward, we’ll make a note of it. Perhaps on the second draft, certain scenes will need to be presented in a different order. Some might get cut altogether. Right now it seems impossible to think we’ll need to add anything, but never say never.

Writing with a partner, working in scenes rather than chapters makes more sense (at least to us). How do you approach things?