Before I move on, I\u2019ve thought of a few more things to say about chapters: Although no editor has ever commented on the length of my chapters, I have gotten many edits on the length of scenes, usually that they\u2019re too long. And sometimes I\u2019ve been asked to cut a chapter entirely.<\/p>\n
About ending a chapter with a crisis, I\u2019ve been asked by editors sometimes to end with the crisis plus my main character\u2019s reaction. Here\u2019s an example:<\/p>\n
Tammo said, \u201cAs he was breaking free, he said he wanted to crisp fairies most of all.\u201d
\nGwendolyn gripped her branch to keep from falling.<\/p>\n
A dragon is the he above who wants to incinerate fairies. I could have ended with “most of all,” but I added Gwendolyn\u2019s reaction. I\u2019m not sure which is better. My editor felt that Gwendolyn wasn\u2019t expressive enough, which is a good reason for the addition.<\/p>\n
Closing with the obvious: A book doesn\u2019t have to be organized into chapters. There are epistolary novels (novels in letters), in which the breaks come at the end of each letter. Monster by Walter Dean Myers is written in the form of a screenplay. Anne Frank\u2019s Diary of a Young Girl is diary entries. Some books are a hodgepodge of letters, notes, newspaper articles, journal pages. So far, I haven\u2019t written such a book, but I think an occasional bang at the end of a letter or journal entry has to be good.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s it for chapters for now.<\/p>\n
After my last post, Dream Creator wrote: Also, I was wondering what you thought about the amount of detail in stories. For example, I can have an awful time describing the scenery and what characters look like, and therefore I use a terribly low amount of detail when I’m writing, but the book I’m writing is in first-person and the heroine is far from eloquent, so would that be okay to get away with? Or should I just insert more detail and practice on getting to the point where using detail is much more of a subconscious act? Or is it up to the author, and either extreme is acceptable as long as it is well written?<\/p>\n
Everything is up to you, the author. Please don\u2019t listen to me if what I say doesn\u2019t ring a bell. I\u2019m speaking in generalities and don\u2019t know your story or your voice.<\/p>\n
But since you\u2019ve tuned to my station, here are some thoughts. They\u2019re just a bit of the huge topic that detail is, so I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll return to the subject in future posts.<\/p>\n
Suppose a main character is in her teacher\u2019s living room for the first time. She says that she feels as if she\u2019s stepped into somebody\u2019s grandmother\u2019s photo album – every bit of cloth has a flower or dozens of flowers on it; chair legs wear skirts, and the bare table legs look disturbingly naked, as if they should at least be wearing socks. As a reader, I don\u2019t need anything more than this. I\u2019m willing to collaborate with the author. I can imagine the wingback chair and the sofa with the cloth coverings over the arms and the embroidered footstool. Another reader will furnish the room in accordance with his idea of cozy or fussy, maybe not a wingback chair and the rest, but a grandfather clock and frilly curtains and a tufted ottoman. Readers don\u2019t need everything, just enough to build on.<\/p>\n
In fact, everything is impossible. Years ago I did a detail exercise with the kids I was teaching at the time. I brought in something, a simple object, I don\u2019t remember what. All of us (I did too) examined the thing and tried to write as much as we could think of about it. We did the exercise for half an hour and didn\u2019t run out of purely physical description. You can try this yourself. Pick one of your shirts. Describe it in full, exhaustive detail, without even going into how it came to belong to you and what adventures you\u2019ve had in it. You can do that later, if you want to, and write a poem or story about your shirt. But for now, just the facts. The plain physical description won\u2019t be particularly interesting. It\u2019s just an exercise.<\/p>\n
If it takes a boring hour to describe a shirt, how arduous and unnecessary to describe a whole room or a landscape! Your reader needs to feel on solid ground, in a real, even if fantastical, place, but you can achieve that in a few strokes. To get to those few, telling strokes, some writers (like me) have to write a lot and then eliminate.<\/p>\n
One purpose of description is to let me see the environment my characters are in. There\u2019s a battle in my not-yet-published Fairies and the Quest for Never Land. I couldn\u2019t write the scene until I could see where the fairies were. It\u2019s a prairie littered with boulders, but that wasn\u2019t enough. I had to establish three landmarks: a pile of rocks, a tree, and a petrified log to be oriented. So first of all, description is for me, to get the movie of the story rolling in my head. After I\u2019ve got it, it\u2019s for the reader, to start the movie in his head.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve got an inarticulate character on your hands, you still need to show the reader what\u2019s going on, but you have to do it through your character\u2019s eyes and voice. Suppose she\u2019s visiting her uncle who isn\u2019t much of a housekeeper. What would gross her out? Show us that–sight, smell, sound, touch. Maybe she\u2019s inarticulate, but she\u2019s tactile. She touches things to get to know them. What does she touch? Or, what would she think her mother, the uncle\u2019s sister, would most disapprove of? What does she have a reason to notice? Suppose she wants to borrow something that belongs to her uncle. What does she see while she\u2019s looking for it? <\/p>\n
Description for its own sake is description dragged in by its left ear. It\u2019s necessary but dull, unless it has a reason to exist. Everything is connected to everything in a story. At its best, description should do double duty and serve character development or plot or voice or humor or feeling or something else I haven\u2019t thought of.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a prompt: Take one of your characters – doesn\u2019t have to be your main – with you today and tomorrow, wherever you go. What does he notice? What does he react to emotionally? What does he miss? What does he studiously ignore? Write about the experience, and save what you wrote. Have fun!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before I move on, I\u2019ve thought of a few more things to say about chapters: Although no editor has ever commented on the length of my chapters, I have gotten many edits on the length of scenes, usually that they\u2019re too long. And sometimes I\u2019ve been asked to cut a chapter entirely. About ending a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[157,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":531,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions\/531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}