As an amateur, I would not dare suggest how to structure novels. My one and only completed novel-length tale naturally fell into titled chapters-- To my considerable surprise...
IMHO, I'm better at 7k~~20k tales: Long enough to tell a simple tale well, not so long as to lose the thalweg...
Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 203 Location: Vancouver, Canada
Structure
Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2008 2:27 am
FYI, dramatists structure plays around the working through of objectives. Once the character either wins, loses, or changes his objective, a 'beat' has been completed. So the basic structural element of a play is a beat. My writing tends to be structured like that, and it messes my chapters seriously, because some are five pages long, and some are twenty.
Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 203 Location: Vancouver, Canada
Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2009 1:09 pm
To continue with my drama experience: a scene in a play covers one place at one time. So I write my chapters the same way. Of course, if it's a long battle scene, from the POV of one character, this could mean 6 000 words or more, so I have to try to break it up somehow.
That's about the only time I use one of those horrible "make them read on" gambits. You know the kind:
Joined: 29 Mar 2006 Posts: 21 Location: Sol-3, USA, CA, Sacramento
Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2010 12:23 pm
Hmm ... I hadn't heard that about the events of a chapter making the events of the following chapter possible, but that is essentially how I operate. Let's see, I haveto admit that when I first start I don't have much structure, but I can't get very far that way. First I have to orient myself to the main character and the setting and really get an idea of the "starting point," even though I may come back and change that later. One I have the starting point I can map out some kind of course; where the story will end up, some major events along the way, and that sort of thing. Then I start to connect the dots; how do I get there from here? Since I know where I will end and I know the next major event, I can move the story forward in the right direction and plant any needed seeds along the way. Of course, there are occasionally detours and nothing is cast in stone. Feints and false clues can be handy too, just don't over do it or you will piss off your readers.
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