Thanks, Larry. You’re a gold mine.

Your simplicity has been worth more to me than gold; your no B.S. approach is just what a guy like me needed.

I can’t thank you enough for sharing your knoweledge.

-Chris

Also, I wanted to let you know I gave you the One Lovely Blog award today. Thanks for all the great writing advice you provide.

Steve Manning (writeabooknow.com) recommends the equivalent of 10 pages. At about 320 words per page, that’s… 3,200 words. Why? A reader reaches the end of a chapter. If he’s interested, he can peek ahead. “How long is the next chapter?” Oh, 10 pages (4-5 page turns). “I’ll do another chapter.” Pretty soon he’s cursing the author for “making” him stay up all night reading his d*n book.

While writing my Sorcerer novels, I was posting a chapter per week. The site admin recommended chapters about 3,000 words long. So, I just wrote a bit of Word code to look from the current postion to the start of the current chapter and show the word count. If was close to 3,000, say +- 200 and the last scene was done, that was it for the chapter. This is a different proposition from writing the entire novel before publication.

Chapters should probably be among the last structure artifacts you do. Get the scenes and everything else done first.

Re templates: Get Larry’s ebook on Story Structure. That gives you the structure you need to work towards.

One of us hardy souls might develop a checklist and save as a template. It would have things you need such as: genre, type (short story, novella, novel, etc.), the high concept, develop story world, develop main characters, develop scenes, etc. This is simply a list of points you need to have in.

As an artist, you can start pretty much anywhere. Could be a character idea. A story world idea. A plot concept. Hopefully you keep those in a journal somewhere.

Larry’s posted elsewhere about generic story deconstruction (The Most Powerful Two Hours You’ll Ever Spend as a Storyteller). You could save that as a template.

Start small, build to large. Maybe start with your elevator speech, build up to a potential back-cover/dust-cover blurb, an agent sysnopsis, and then more from there. Probably should have a pretty detailed synopsis done even before you start looking at scenes. Have Plot Point 1, Pinch Point 1, etc., identified in there. The scenes should fall out from there — could use a mind-mapping program, a Word outline or Excel, index or post-its on a board, etc., to tweak those in.

Do artistic stuff as you do the requirements and design. Especially work out the high concept. Do the design right (which will have the major structure in place), then you can actually start the writing itself with all the artistic license you wish while staying within the design you’ve created. If things take off in a different direction, either re-visit the design or take control.

Note if you have an outline/blueprint of the scenes, you can write in any sequence. You could do a Plot Point, the second Pinch Point or whatever. You have a good idea what they should contain and where they go because you’ve designed it that way.

After a couple copyedits and proofing edits, then you can create the chapters.

Go write something!

Now a psychological question: I have 40 chapters among 4 sections: Congo, Frankfurt, DC, Nassau. Would it be easier on the reader to have 4 sets of 1-10 or 40 chapters?

@Shane i’ve got ywriter, and it isn’t visual. The only visual one that i saw that might work for me was liquidstorybinder. Not that expensive, and they give you a 30 day trial with pretty much the full version iirc. i personally go with Notepad++ (more a code editor than writing tool, but i’m used to it from my job) for all my notes along with photoshop and my cheap graphics tablet (about $50) for any mindmapping or whiteboarding, and Word or openoffice for my drafting. Hope that helps.