What do I know? Quite a few things, evidently. (Not me, her. I can barely count.) This blog features a combination of book reviews, tips on technique, and author interviews.
Your Journey Begins, says this forum for, well, you can see who it’s for. Primarily, anyway - but the numerous tips and discussions here are useful for any working writer. If writing challenge events are your thing, to help you focus or get motivated, well, this community is big on them.
Billed as offering “Insider perspectives from today’s hottest thriller and mystery writers,” this is another multi-contributor blog offering a variety of content, notably including tips by writers for writers in the indicated genres. Of course, a useful tip for one writer is a useful tip for another, regardless of genre.
Celebrating Independent Authors is the tagline of this multi-contributor blog. Less of a blog than a sort of ongoing online newsletter, this active site maintains a heavy flow of information targeted at late-stage writers and early-adopter readers of self-published genre fiction.
Novels written from a third-person perspective these days are written in a different style from novels written 2-3 generations back. The difference is in the amount of information the narrator has about the events of the story and the story world. In the fairly distant past, the third-person narrator was omniscient, meaning the narrator knew everything and could tell the reader about events known to none of the characters. In most modern novels written in third-person, the narrator is non-omniscient, which means that at any given time, one of the characters in the story is really the narrator. Or that the narration is taking place based on the information that character knows.
The value of third-person non-omniscient (a.k.a. third-person limited, or 3PNO, or 3PL) perspective is that it enables the writer to tell a broader story involving multiple perspectives and even multiple groups of characters acting out separate subplots, while still retaining some of the personal feel of a first-person narrative. Of course, some novels are written in multiple first-person perspective, where different parts of the book, e.g., different chapters or groups of chapters, are narrated by different characters, with each of the characters speaking in first person. This approach attempts to preserve the benefits of both first-person (instant, easy sympathy) and third-person (multiple perspectives). I personally don’t usually care for this mixed style, but I’ve seen it done fairly often and it’s not always bad (see example below, toward the bottom of this entry).
Without going into detail on how third-person non-omniscient perspective narration is achieved in the writing, which is yet another topic, I’d like to bring up an issue I’ve seen in some novels. Specifically, I’d like to talk about overloading a story with too many viewpoints.
Like the idea of the unreliable narrator, the point of a non-omniscient narrator is to impose a perspective on the writing. This gives it flavor and limits the reader’s access to information. When a story is told from a handful of perspectives, these limits really add something, which I suppose is ironic. By contrast, a third-person omniscient perspective gives the reader so much more information than the characters have that it really limits the kinds of suspense and personality that can be employed.
When a story features too many perspectives, though, like eight or ten or a dozen, it makes me wonder why. Granted, each chapter or scene remains limited, in terms of what information it can give the reader, by the viewpoint from which it’s told.
But overall, when so many viewpoints are used, the amount of information (and opinion) available in total begins to approach what an omniscient narrator would have. In my opinion, this defeats the purpose of non-omniscient narration and costs the story most of its benefits…and begs the question of why the author doesn’t just go ahead and use an omniscient narrator. That’s still allowed, so to speak, and you see it occasionally, though no examples spring to mind.
It’s true that the reader should still get the feeling of being in the heads of the various narrators (viewpoint characters). So there’s a benefit that remains. And yet, how close can you feel to any of these characters if you’ve been inside a whole pack of them? Like polygamy. Exactly like polygamy. Yeah, I just said that. Bam! That just happened.
Moving on…
As a result of this realization—or belief, if you prefer, or philosophy—I’ve tried to limit the number of viewpoints in my own project to two main ones, one secondary, and one and a half very occasional ones. (The one-half is a non-human narrator, and I’ve used it only three times in interstices.)
I could be totally missing the point here, and I can’t say this issue has ruined my enjoyment of any particular book, but I just don’t like the idea of trying to tell a story from too many viewpoints unless there’s a specific reason to do so. An example of an exception would be one book I read recently called The Atopia Chronicles, by Matthew Mather.
That book—which I found thought-provoking, and quite liked, and even reviewed on Amazon—was written as a series of shorts from a whole slew of different first-person perspectives. As I mentioned above, this is not exactly the same as 3rd-person non-omniscient, but it serves the same purpose of providing a number of different perspectives that the reader can pull together into a big picture. (Frankly, I don’t really see why he didn’t just use 3PNO, but that’s a question of style and not really my business.) Anyway, my point is that in this case, there was a good reason for covering an intersecting set of events from many different perspectives, and I won’t reveal that reason to avoid spoilers. But, I do think this is the exception that evades the rule.
I’d be interested to hear conflicting/supporting opinions regarding this blog entry.
I’m reblogging this useful entry and adding the writing-related blog it came from to the blog roll.
I’m currently working on editing a book that will be released sometime next year and I’ve gotten a few corrections from the editor I’m working with. She told me the corrections she suggested are common for authors, so I figured I’d share them with you. I’m sure if you have these things fixed…
This blog about “juggling work, writing, and life” offers commentary on a variety of writing, ebooks, and related topics.
Guest Post by Wil Forbis
As a writer and musician, I’ve long been interested in the structural similarities between stories and music. And I find that the process of ruminating on these similarities can provide new insights and ideas relevent to both disciplines. Much can be learned by taking a “musical” approach to writing and a “writerly” approach to music.
Let’s first consider the structure of a story. On the most basic level, a story should have a beginning, middle and an end. This corresponds with the classic three-act or three-stage story structure popular in fiction and especially movie screenwriting. (This structure is, of course, not the only option available in constructing a story, but it’s the one we’re going to examine here.) Each of these individual stages are given different names depending on who’s expounding the storytelling theory; here I’ll refer to the names used in this Wikipedia article on the three-act structure.
The three-act structure is a model used in writing and evaluating modern storytelling which divides a screenplay into three parts called the Setup, the Confrontation and the Resolution.
Star Wars is a clear example of the three-act structure. In the setup, we see the droids landing on Tatooine and are introduced to Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi. The death of Luke’s aunt and uncle sets him on the path of confrontation with the forces of the Empire. Ultimately, Luke and the rebel alliance triumph which leads to a resolution of the conflict (at least for that episode).
It’s also often stated that during the course of a three-act story, the main character(s) should grow and change. At the end of the story, they should not be the same people they were at the beginning.
Can we find a parallel of the three-stage narrative structure in music? Certainly we can in the Sonata form that was extremely popular during the Classical period of Western music (occurring, roughly speaking, during the 18th century). Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve doubtless heard many Sonatas during your life, including such popular pieces as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”
The Sonata also has a three stage structure, defined as follows…
As you can see (or better, hear) the three stages of the Sonata are not far removed from the three stages of the three-act story. As in a three-act narrative, the elements of a Sonata are introduced, developed, and then return in a changed form.
Now, you might be saying, “This is all well and good, but what does this really do for me as a writer?” Personally, I find that recognizing these shared elements between writing and music (and even other art forms) helps me conceptualize different ways of affecting a story through pacing, or mood, or story arc. I might intellectually understand that a story I’m working on needs more drama, but it’s not until I hear a certain electrifying piece of music that I understand, “That’s what the story really needs: that intangible flavor expressed in this music.” Music may be —- as some have called it — the most abstract of art forms, but we intuitively understand its flow, and we can learn to apply that intuitive knowledge to other art forms. In essence, by seeing the connections between writing and music, you expand the set of dramatic templates you can draw from. Now it’s not just every story you’ve ever read, but all the music you been exposed to as well.
Structure is, of course, the skeleton holding together a piece of writing or music. It’s the 30,000 feet view. Do music and writing share similarities on more atomic levels? They do, and I’ll be discussing them in the future, here.
I mentioned in the last entry that I’d talk about the different kinds of breaks that can go between what I’ve been calling “scene stages” in the manuscript. Actually, technically a break doesn’t go between scene stages…it goes before any given scene stage of the author’s choice.
Note: I’ve excluded “part” or “book” breaks from this list, since they are largely irrelevant to the overarching topic of splitting scenes into stages/chunks. These types of breaks obviously can’t happen in the middle of a scene.
So…the first type of break is the chapter break, naturally. Typically this consists of a hard page break, maybe some extra vertical whitespace on the next page, a chapter title (maybe just a number), and then the text of the next scene stage in the story (the first scene stage of the next chapter).
Second, there’s what I’ve been thinking of as the triple-asterisk break. There’s probably a better name for this, but what it amounts to is a lesser kind of break when you don’t want to end the chapter yet. I seem to mainly use these between scenes (sometimes, though not even close to always) rather than for splitting up a single scene. This typically consists of a blank line, a centered ***, another blank line, and then the next scene stage of the story begins. I’ve seen many books where the author/publisher/printer has put some sort of cute special symbol that has meaning to the story, like the ankhish crosses in The Keep by F. Paul Wilson (off the top of my head). I’ve also seen books where this is just done with three or so lines of vertical whitespace.
The third type of break is the invisible break, where the author knows the scene split technically belongs, but doesn’t want to break the flow at that point. This has been relevant to me partly because I’m using Scrivener and am, for example, assigning characters and setting as keywords to each file.
Invisible breaks may seem nonsensical to some people, and maybe they kind of are, but I’ve got two reasons for considering them important.
As I’ve split scenes into stages, I’ve also done a first pass as to the placement of the different kinds of breaks (chapter, *** and invisible). The chapter and *** breaks are there as a refinement of the flow of tension throughout the story as written thus far. The type 3 (invisible) breaks are there to help me track where each new scene/scene stage begins. Readers will never see them, but hopefully they’ll benefit from them anyway, as a result of my own improved understanding of the pace and flow of the story through the future draft refinement process.
This all seems pretty technical, but there’s a lot of theory and technique to the novel-writing process anyway. I’m guessing that other writers who use Scrivener and other project-manager-style writing software will understand the problem and the solution I’ve gone with, myself. (Whether they care is a whole ‘nother matter.)
In closing, I’d like to note that if I’d been forced into, or doggedly insisted upon, getting all this figured out before the first draft rather than after it, I’d never have gotten that first draft done and would probably be cold in a tub of red water long before now.
Last time I explained how I got to my definition of a scene, which is, more or less: [Viewpoint] observes [Characters] interacting in [setting] for a given chunk of time, and something changes that moves the plot forward.
Now I’d like to get back to the original topic, which was, what do chapters consist of, if they don’t (always, exactly) consist of scenes?
The answer that certain correspondents and I have come up with is that chapters consist of scene stages.
Now, if someone else is already using this term, maybe we can call them Scene Phases or something, but alliteration is always awesome.
So what are the stages of a scene? I’m sure there are many excellent answers, but ultimately what I’ve been trying to learn is, how to identify where to split scenes between chapters for dramatic effect. So for this purposes, I think it’s enough to say that the stages of a scene are as follows:
The reason for this seemingly rather obvious split (except for #4 if you’ve never heard the term “sequel” used this way) is simple: you can put a break between any two of these stages. Or between all of them, or some of them, or none, though if you don’t at least split 1 from 3 you lose the dramatic tension cliffhanger effect which was the original goal of this series.
By “break,” by the way, I generally mean a chapter break, but there’s that other kind of break you see a lot, what I think of as a triple-asterisk break. And there’s also the invisible break, for the writer’s purposes only. (I think I’ll do another short blog entry on these breaks rather than derail this one here.)
Anyway, let’s look at some examples.
Inferring this breakdown—from other people’s doubtless more thoughtful work on the subject—made it possible for me to go through my own chapters and identify and split scenes across chapters…in some cases very differently from the way I had them split up, or not split, before.
I don’t feel right about blogging on the more detailed view of what scene opening & closure stages ought to consist of, and definitely not on the subject of “sequels,” because I didn’t invent them and don’t feel like any kind of an authority. Maybe someday I’ll feel differently about it. For now, I really recommend that you look up these things, especially the subject of “scenes and sequels.” Maybe I can find a good link to post.
So if chapters don’t consist of scenes, then what do they consist of?
Well, first of all, some chapters do consist of full scenes, or even more than one scene. Maybe. It depends on what your definition of a scene is. So let’s look at that first.
Like the relationship between chapters and scenes, I found it difficult to find a good definition of what a scene is. One definition I found was, to paraphrase it, a piece of a story where something changes. Interesting. Another definition that I found, in various variations, was that a scene consists of a setting, some characters and something happening. That’s not as obvious as it sounds at first.
Together these definitions gave me something to work with.
In my own project, now, I’m defining a scene in terms of the points at where I need to declare one scene to end and another to begin. I’ve decided that this is necessary when any of the following takes place:
A) When the setting changes, e.g. the action moves on to a different place. Now, The exception to this might—might—be a running shot where the “camera” (or the writer’s/reader’s mind’s eye) follows the characters as they move from one place to another in what is otherwise clearly continuous action.
It’s a judgment call in cases like this. Generally, the way I see it, even if the action is continuous, if the mood of the setting changes, that’s a scene break. Like if the characters are walking along in a sunny field having a conversation, and then suddenly they look up and realize they’ve wandered into the dark forest. That seems like a scene break to me.
B) When the characters change. The substance or mood of a scene can change pretty dramatically with the addition or removal of just one character from the dynamic.
There’s also a certain element of judgment to this, of course. You can have a character wander off for a minute to take a phone call or something, and if you don’t follow that character and listen to the phone call (which would clearly be a different scene), maybe the main scene continues.
C) When the viewpoint changes. Personally I prefer to almost always start a new chapter when switching to a different viewpoint character, and at the very least use a triple-asterisk type of break. Regardless, there are good reasons to declare it a new scene when the viewpoint changes. For example, one viewpoint character might be a wide-eyed optimist interpreting the action in one way, whereas another viewpoint character might be older, wiser, cynical, and interpreting the action in a completely contradictory fashion. This affects the mood of the writing at least as much as a change of setting, in my opinion, at least.
D. When enough time passes. This is subjective, like everything to do with fiction, but if you have some characters camping and talking, or walking down the road for days (and you don’t consider it a setting change), it seems to me there’s still a scene change. An exception might be the written version of a montage.
In terms of the breakdown of a book from a reader’s perspective, this stuff doesn’t matter all that much. Books are visibly broken into chapters, not scenes. Still, personally I found it necessary to develop some sort of understanding of what scenes are in order to learn to split them up with any kind of effectiveness.
There’s also the question of what specifically a scene consists of: the things that should be in it, and generally in what order. I’m not going to go into that now, but let’s summarize it as saying that a scene must be necessary, which means that it must move the plot along.
So, we have a working definition of what a scene is: [Viewpoint] observes [Characters] interacting in [setting] for a given chunk of time, and something changes that moves the plot forward.
If that’s what a scene is (and I could certainly be wrong about that, but I don’t think I’m that far off), then what are the pieces of a scene?
Coming up next.
The Free Online Writing Guide is another site that’s not exactly a blog (though it has one) but is updated with useful information for writers, in this case more on the writing side than the publishing side.
I can’t say I really know what the overall purpose of this site is, but I’ve found its section on the “discipline” of “storytelling” to be among the most concise and useful references for things like plot analysis and comparing different variants of “mythic structure.”
So, I spent most of a week trying to figure out how chapters and scenes fit together. The internet is packed with useful advice on the subject. I’d never imagined that there could be so many ways to say “chapters consist of scenes.” Unfortunately, this wasn’t nearly enough for me to work from.
Part of the problem is the idea of the cliffhanger. There’s probably a more technical term for this that I’ve learned and forgotten, but it comes down to the idea that, to oversimplify rather grossly, at least every other chapter needs to end on a high note of tension. This is the essence of the “page-turner,” which is one of the high-priority goals of every genre novelist: inciting in readers the compulsive need to find out what happens next.
The idea is simple: you have some stuff happen in the opening stage of the scene. Say, your sexy-yet-brainy 400-year-old vampiric antiheroine gets attacked by villains with holy water-filled Super Soakers. She fights her way through them, dodging streams of the deadly liquid and clubbing the righteous bastards over the head with her heirloom mandolin. Now, thinking she’s got them all, she turns to check on her plucky werepig sidekick and whoa momma! There’s one left, and he’s aiming his deadly toy right at her pale and youthful face. His finger tightens on the trigger. How will she get out of this one?
Whitespace, chapter break, maybe even cut away to another set of characters working on a different subplot to prolong the tension.
The problem I have with this isn’t the technique. Not only does it demonstrably work, it’s key to managing tension on the mid-level scale. The problem I have with it is that it’s a very common rationale for the placement of chapter breaks—arguably the most common reason for chapter breaks in the first place—and it involves splitting a single scene across chapters. It’s clear evidence that no, chapters do not consist of whole scenes.
The contradiction between these common pearls of advice is something no one seems to talk about, and it’s incredibly frustrating to someone—well, me—trying to understand proper novel structure.
So if chapters don’t consist of scenes, what do they consist of? That’s what I had to figure out. Through messing around with pieces of my own story and several conversations with writing-type friends, I came up with some theory on the subject, and answered the question well enough for myself, at least.
In the interest of shortening these blog entries…tune in next time.
Hey…I’m doing it RIGHT NOW, aren’t I? I didn’t even do that on purpose. How’s that for internalization?
It’s quiet here in the abyss, except for the music blasting in my headphones to keep out the screams of children running wild at Starbucks. I’m going through a particularly tedious iteration of the between-drafts organization process.
I’ll post more on this shortly, but in the broad strokes what I’m doing is going through my Scrivener project and splitting the chapters I’ve written into scenes and sequels and pieces of scenes so I can split scenes across chapters. As I do this, I’m also applying a certain naming standard to all the scene phase/sequel files. So far this has taken me three days, or, technically, three very long afternoons.
Before that I was working on forms for character, setting and faction sheets.
Each of these subprojects, and the learning I had to submit myself to in order to trudge through them, merits an entry of its own. So, more to come.
It’s not the funnest part of writing a novel.
But at least it’s quiet.
Kindle Boards is a forum related to Kindle devices and the technosystem around them. Yes, I made that word up, just now. I can’t exactly call it an ecosystem, right? Anyway, The Tips, Tricks and Troubleshooting subforum has been particularly useful to me in finding solutions to annoying problems with various generations of Kindles (e.g., I’ve really found the Kindle’s indexing/search system problematic, and I’m still not sure about it even on the Paperwhite).
Goodreads is an ebook- and indie writer-friendly forum that’s more for readers than writers. Since writers are readers, though, it’s a logical place for both. Writers like to plug their books there, but the community’s jaded with that, from what I’m told. A good review can get your book onto lots of members’ reading lists, which can be a real leg up. On the other hand, if your book gets panned there, a lot of people will see. But, life is risk.
