These Are the Breaks

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.

• Scrivener, in a way, is the major reason I’ve had to think about all this stuff so hard in the first place. Whatever the Scrivener guys say about using it however  you want to, it’s pretty clearly designed for a manuscript to consist of chapter folders with scene text documents within them. When I first realized I needed to be able to put breaks within scenes, it blew my mind for days. After developing the “scene stage” mindset, though, I found that if I kept each scene stage in its own file (which is trivial in Scrivener) instead of each whole scene, I could use Scrivener the way it needed to be used, and still split my scenes cleanly across breaks.The other thing I could have done would be to ignore the natural way Scrivener is meant to be used, and manage my own chapter breaks in the text, like one would in a normal word processor. But this would have been a pain for a few different reasons, related to the way Scrivener deals with formatting, chapter title insertion and the whole “compile” process. (Maybe someday I’ll write an entry about this whole Scrivener template/compile business when I’ve done more of it, but I don’t want to get too sidetracked now.) 
• Aside from the Scrivener-related reason for tracking the breaks between scene stages even when they’ll be invisible in the final book, there’s a second good reason, at least for me. It has to do with working out the right way, or my right way, to write a novel in the first place. I’m just learning this stuff, which is sort of the point of the blog, and it’s really not all that easy for me to tell where a scene stage ends, or even where a whole scene ends. So, I’ve spent the last few days practicing this by going through my entire first draft and figuring out where scene stages begin and end, and splitting up every scene into scene stage chunk files.This has been a huge PITA, but also a tremendously valuable exercise that will yield a lot of flexibility on the upcoming second-draft rewrite. It makes it much easier for me to see where plot events begin and end and how much space is devoted to each. This ought to promote a much more methodical approach to tuning the pacing of the action and balancing the amount of space dedicated to each plot event.

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.