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Wherein we address the question: how long should my chapters be?

We’ve all been there.  It’s late, the eyelids are getting heavy, you’re laying there reading and the lights are begging to go out.  But the book is good, it has nothing at all do with your jonesing need to fall asleep.  Like, right now.

And so you flip ahead… if only you can just make it until the end of the chapter.   Or at least a break in the chapter, as indicated by one of those lovely skipped lines that indicate a new scene.

Something in our DNA doesn’t allow us to peacefully just stop in the middle of a page, without a line break or a new chapter to look forward to.  It’s just wrong.

And it absolutely sucks when there’s eleven more pages before that happens.

Which begs the question as writers, if not readers… how long should chapters be?

Chapters vs. Scenes

The answer resides in your understanding of the difference between chapters and the scenes that comprise them.  Because when you do, it no longer matters how long your chapters are. 

What matters is how long your scenes are.

A chapter is a contrivance.  It can consist of one scene, or it can consist of several scenes.  Even many scenes.

A scene is a unit of seamless dramatic narrative. 

Think of a scene as a one-act play.  Or as a singular passage of omniscient narrative that may indeed bridge decades, but holds to together like a contextual introduction or a letter bringing you up to date.

If the narrative changes point of view, from one character’s to another’s, that’s always a new scene.

If your narrative changes time or location, that’s a new scene, too.

If back-to-back scenes have an affinity – such as three important encounters in a single day, for example, and each of them comprises a different scene – you may choose to make those three scenes into a single chapter.

But if you do that, if you include more than one scene in your chapters, I strongly recommend you visually separate them with white space.  Skip a line or two when you transition from one scene to the next.

Just like I’ve done here between paragraphs. 

This gives you permission to have very short scenes, even quick cutaways, which together form a sequence, all the while allowing the reader to understand the shifts of time and location involved.

Transitioning between chapters, that’s a no brainer.  You get a new page and a big bold number to help you.  Transitioning between scenes, especially when two or more are presented within a single chapter… go for the white space.

At least you’ll be giving your reader a chance to finally get some sleep.

The Most Important Element of Scene Writing

When you are planning your story using the four-part structural principles and their attendant plot points, mid-point and pinch points, as well as the unique contexts of each of the four parts (quartiles), you should think in terms of scenes, not chapters.

A story has roughly 40 to 80 scenes.  Not 40 to 80 chapters.  How you divide them into chapters is driven by affinity and need, not by the need to separate your scenes.

For that you just skip a couple of lines and move on.

Chapters are simply a collection scenes with an affinity, either topical or sequential.  If there is no affinity, consider going to the next chapter.

Bestselling novelist James Patterson is a big fan of single-scene chapters, resulting in books that present well over 100 chapters, some as short as one page.  He could just as easily offer 40 chapters, even when the scenes number well over 100.

How many chapters you have doesn’t really matter.  How they are grouped, affinity-wise, does.

How many scenes does matter, though, because each scene must be in context to where it resides in the four part structure.   If you have 60 scenes, then each Part has roughly 15 scenes to work with.  Give or take.

Remember, the scenes in the Part 1 set-up have a completely different contextual mission than the scenes in the Part 4 conclusion. 

If you end up with three scenes in your Part 1 set-up, that’s too few.  There’s  no way you can accomplish what needs, according to accepted storytelling principles, to be presented in Part 1 of any story in just three scenes.

If you believe you have accomplished those things, and it took you only three scenes, then you’ve violated yet another principle: each scene should offer only one salient story point, the optimized dramatic potential of which becomes the mission of that scene.

On the other hand, if you have 33 scenes in Part 1, then chances are you’ve pushed your First Plot Point well beyond its appointed place at roughly the 20th to 25th percentile mark.  You’re asking your reader to hang around far beyond a reasonable level of patience before something actually happens in the story.

That’s another reason altogether your reader my be aching to go to sleep.

All of this becomes intuitively natural when you apply the most important principle of scene writing.  And that is to make sure each scene has a specific narrative mission to accomplish. 

That it has one specific thing, one piece of story exposition, that it seeks to get out there.  When you know that mission, then you are free to apply the most dramatic and cool presentation of it possible.

The opening of Inglorious Basterds is a great example.  That 8-minute scene had one mission: to show the evil Nazi was there to kill the folks hiding under the floor.  The rest of it was just dramatization of that one mission.

If you have two pieces of narrative information to dispense, consider crafting two scenes.

Issues of characterization aren’t at issue here.

This is about plot exposition.  All scenes are charged with the responsibility to demonstrate character… that isn’t the mission in question.

That said, a scene that only exists to demonstrate character is a weak scene.  Each scene needs an expositional mission, and only one, in addition to the work of characterizing its players.

If you’d like to learn more about story structure, please consider my ebook, Story Structure – DemystifiedIt’s part of my two-for-one offer, which lasts until March 15 – buy Story Structure – Demystified and I’ll also send you The Three Dimensions of Character… free.

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In honor of last night’s Oscars, and because I continue to sweat over the impending due-date for my Six Core Competencies manuscript (the first half), here’s a reprise of an early Storyfix post that got a lot of reader feedback. 

Back soon.

Say what?  Best director in a novel?

Last night I was watching some tube (my way to chill, wife by my side, ice cream bar in hand… I should be reading, I know) and I caught back-to-back season premieres on TNT, both with similar set-ups (undercover good guys scamming despicable bad guys).  One sucked, the other didn’t.

It got me to thinking about what makes a story work. 

And since I wasn’t reading and breaking down novels like I should have been, the context of that inquiry kept me in the realm of movies and television.   I thought about how different the worlds of novels and films are from a creative-process point of view, and why that difference is important to both novelists and screenwriters.

With novels it’s all about the writer.  In film making it’s all about the director.  Which is why they have egos the size of Steven Spielberg’s trophy case — their creative meetings are much more well-attended than ours are.

In film the director is the storyteller, the auteur. 

The screenwriter is just a supporting player who may or may not even be allowed on set.  And while screenwriters everywhere decry this travesty (they have to settle for the serious money they make), we have to line up behind the truth of it.  And, learn from it.

As the primary storyteller, the director knows it’s about more than the script.  Way more.

Story is the sum of all the human senses. 

It’s about a melding of those senses that exceeds the sum of the individual parts, including the script.  That’s the art of directing.  You can teach the craft of it, but the art of directing a story remains undefinable and elusive.

Yet, it is accessible if you know what you’re shooting for.

Screenwriters don’t touch the lighting.  They don’t write the score, they barely influence the acting and they claim little credit for the visceral tonality of the work.  They provide a necessary and occasionally appreciated blueprint for it all, and when they’re good, an inspiring vision.  But at the end of the movie-making day it’s the director who makes or breaks a story through an artful and rendering of these creative variables, one that bears their unique stamp as a storyteller.

Novelists would be well served to remember this. 

We need to understand that we create our stories from a similar context.  We sit in the director’s chair from the moment we lay eyes on our manuscripts, and we better understand how to wield the directorial storytelling tools at our disposal.

All of us who write novels do this intuitively to some degree.  It’s when we move from intuition to proactive direction that we unleash our power as storytellers.

It’s about more than plot and character and dialogue. 

It resides beyond our pretty sentences and clever ideas.  It’s about the art of stirring them together into something powerful and evocative, a whole in excess of the sum of its literary parts.

We light our scenes through a keen sense of place.  We command ambiance, we create silhouettes and cast shadows and contrast.  We do it through implication and context, seasoned with the perfect word at the perfect moment.

We score our narrative with the subtle melody of our sentences.  We imbue our stories with background music that defines mood and imparts tonality.  If you don’t think writers can bring music to the page, read Updike or Colin Harrison or Dashiell Hammett, writers whose literary musicality and phrasing defines their work.

We whisper direction into the ears of the actors on our stage.  We urge them to go deeper, to pull back or lash out, to play coy, to leverage the unspoken with their eyes, their body language, their smiles.  We are masters of restraint and excess.  We block scenes, we frame shots, we create pace on the editing floor of our minds.  We define our players as supremely cool or place them on the precipice of madness.

We choreograph our love scenes with a deft touch that embraces readers in a vicarious swoon.  We splash violence on the page, and we can smell the blood and the terror.  Like Hitchcock, we command the darkness of the human mind, and like Speilberg, we resurrect the child in all of us.

Like film direcors, we command tonality. 

We summon a sub-text of humor or fear, of impending doom or the proximity of delight.  It’s more than sentences and scenes, more than plot and character.  At least when it works.

All of it must be smoothed into our narrative with a light and artful touch, lest it come off forced or contrived.  Less is more, yet more is required.  Readers have an infallible sense of this, and we serve at their pleasure as we paint the landscapes of our stories and sculpt the nuances of our characters.

When a writer realizes they must create stories from this directorial perspective, everything changes.  None of it can manifest in an outline, it is all touch, all sensibility, all art.

And that’s why one of those TNT shows sucked and the other didn’t.  One was clunky and pedestrian and without art, despite great actors and a killer concept.   It was poorly directed.   The other just worked… it flowed, it penetrated, even though it had plot holes that would swallow a lesser effort.

Good direction often goes unnoticed by viewers, who simply get lost in the experience it creates.  But bad direction always screams its inadequacies.

So it is with novels, too. 

Even when the story is sound and craft is solidly in place.  Art is the great differentiator.  And art is in the direction.

If you’ve ever wondered why some writers who, in your humble opinion, don’t write as well as you do yet are rich and famous while you struggle onward, this is the reason.  They are great directors.

It is, bottom line, what separates the published from the unpublished.

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Part 2: Why It Took Me 28 Years to Write My “Latest” Novel

March 6, 2010

Click HERE to read Part 1 of this article, wherein I explain why writing this novel scared the hell out of me. Maybe even literally.
The Story Behind Whisper of the Seventh Thunder
Consider this for a moment.  If you don’t believe any of it, then big deal, you keep writing.  But I did believe, and I [...]

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Why It Took Me 28 Years to Write My “Latest” Novel

March 6, 2010

The Story Behind Whisper of the Seventh Thunder
Part 1 of 2.
People ask me all the time where I get my ideas.  I have two answers.  One is for writers, and I usually give it at my writing workshops in context to seizing a teachable moment. 
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I suck. Let me make it up to you.

March 3, 2010

Okay, maybe I don’t exactly suck.  At least I hope not. 
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One of them is directly [...]

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Reprise: The First Two Storyfix Posts. And So It Began.

March 1, 2010

“Find something worth dying for… then live for it.”

Originally published here on Storyfix June 1 and 2, 2009.
Writing at a professional level is much like any other pursuit in which professionals are on public display. They make it look easy.
Ballers glide effortlessly through the air to slam dunk, yet the average gym rat hasn’t touched [...]

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Your Next Deconstruction Challenge

February 28, 2010

If you’ve just arrived here via Copyblogger, welcome!  We’re all about going deep into the infrastructure and principles of effective storytelling, and we’d love to have you join us.
Just saw Shutter Island, the Martin Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio based on the Dennis Lehane novel.  And I’m here to tell you, if you’re a writer [...]

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Writing… All Over the Place

February 25, 2010

Dogs and cats.  Yankee fans and Red Sox fans.  Conservatives and liberals.  Studio projects and independent films.  We live in a divided global culture that thrives on tension and occasionally throws a punch.
Thank God we’re less concerned these days with race and sexual preference than we are with Team Edward versus Team Jacob.
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Storytelling to the Beat of a Different Drummer

February 23, 2010

Introducing My Very Favorite Creative Writing Tool
Whether you’re a plotter or a plodder, a planner or a pantser, organized or organic … at the end of the writing day we are all faced with the very same daunting question: what do we write next?
From that outrageously complex question springs other key questions and issues.  Such [...]

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For Your Consideration – Announcing the Release of “Whisper of the Seventh Thunder”

February 21, 2010

An Edgy, Secular Apocalyptic Thriller from USA Today Bestselling Author Larry Brooks… a.k.a, the Storyfixer.
Any writer who tells you that the release of their latest novel isn’t cause for both excitement and self-doubt is lying through their clenched teeth.  It’s been six years since my last book, and while my storytelling chops are still lubricated, [...]

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