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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Writing with a partner, working in scenes rather than chapters makes more sense (at least to us). How do you approach things?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[527,322],"tags":[289,484],"class_list":["post-7077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-composition-progress","category-editing-revision","tag-music-novel","tag-sibling-of-music-novel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7077"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7080,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7077\/revisions\/7080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}