Tag: Killer

Chapter Chatter: Creating Choice Chapters

Chapter 1: Necessity

On writing chapters, one must account for breaks in a story’s progression.

Chapter 2: Practicality

Chapters ought to flow in tune with the ebb and flow of the narrative.

Chapter 3: Introduction, as Usual

That’s why we’re Writing All Wrong.

Chapter 4: Question

Does my book need chapters?

—Bob Brown, Cleveland, Ohio.

Chapter 5: Reply

Good to hear from you, Mr. Brown of Cleveland. I wish your team the very best next year. I can only hope “the very best” isn’t 2 wins of 16.

As for your question: Uh, maybe? Some do, some don’t. Depends on what you’re writing, who you’re writing to, what sub-genre (sludge-crimefighter-noir) you’re peddling. Take the Bible — in English, chapters. In Greek, no chapters, no chaser.

Chapter 6: Chapter Chatter

(Ok, stop that)

Every element of writing should be purpose driven, including the chapters. You include them with a purpose, or you omit them for a purpose. There’s no in-between, no cream filling for this Oreo. I’ll list the pros and cons.

Pro-Chapters: “A Chapter Away Keeps the Doctor Away. (Because doctors hate fiction, or something)”

1. Marks logical breaks in action, shift in focus, switching of scene. A no brainer. You didn’t write the story in one sitting, and it’s likely not good enough to be read in one sitting. Break it down.

2. Handy for narratives from multiple viewpoints. See: House, Bleak. If you want less of a challenge for your reader, switch views as you switch chapters.

3. Covers gaps of time in a single bound. Know how much time you can reasonably fit in between chapters? Up to 1,086 years tops. Not too shabby.

4. Suspense…

5. Masks the lack of consistency with vignettes, asides, spare parts cobbled to make a tale. Case in point: if you took the chapters out of Moby Dick, you’d be left with a great, weird, hypermodern book instead of a great weird book.

6. Deliberate obfuscation. Considering the previous note, adding more chapters than are necessary makes for an intentionally disorienting ride. And sometimes you want that reader to vomit from disorientation than to perish in the bile of boredom and its constituents.

Anti-Chapters: “No Shirt. No Shoes. No Chapters. No Problem. (Except you’re a homeless writer)”

1. Speed. Ever take a road trip without stopping for anything? Stops are for slops. Get there faster. Chapters do stutter the experience. If you want the whoosh in your writing, drive that straight shot. No potty breaking.

2. Temporal distortion. Life punctuates with day, night, sunset, sunrise, apocalypse, recrudescence. Cutting out the backbone of chapters gives you freedom to move in and out between time and space. There are no hands on this clock, but time moves. Somewhere.

3. Temporal limitation. If you’re telling a long story in a short amount of time, then chapters aren’t going to be your thing. Move along. They’re not the droids you’re looking for.

4. Shorter stories — they don’t need chapters. If this is a NaNoWriMo work, then chapters are surplus to requirements. They didn’t add to the word count, you know.

5. Challenge where there is no challenge. If you write in plain style, not a frill on the wardrobe, then your tale doesn’t need chapters. It’ll thud along happily without them.

6. Deliberate obfuscation. (Yes, this again.) Where there are no breaks where there should be chapter breaks, there lies confusion. And in some cases, that’s just the ticket.

What guidelines or rules do you have for writing chapters?

Writing All Wrong can be reached via email (WritingAllWrong@me.com), followed on Twitter (@WritingAllWrong), and chaptered to the point of chapping.

NaNoWriMo 401 — All Filler, No Killer

November 14th. Thirty days hath Optober, Janruary, and November. You’re halfway there (if you’ve been diligent), or you’re done (if you don’t work full-time) by now.

NaNoWriMo reminds me of making homemade dog food. Uncle Billus and I would toil until the sun ceased to hang. We produced savory barrelsful of scraps, skins, hair, leather, and cage-free organic free-range hand-deboned chicken.

Uncle Billus grabbed a thick handful some of the fresh, just-baked nuggets of doggie goodness. He tasted some of my work, smiling at first, then shaking his head. I asked what was wrong with it.

“Ther too much food in this here batch, not nuff filler. Got ‘nuff fer fo’ [4], reckon, fi’ [5] barrel worth here ‘um. Like writ’n one uh them NaNoWriMo books: can’t jus’ stick all the good stuff in one barrel, mmm-hmm. Gotta give ‘er more filler, stretcher out some.”

That’s why we’re Writing All Wrong.

My novel is DONE! But I’m a few thousand words short, and I refuse to tack on any excess mess with random rabbit trails. Getting a finished work is one thing, but I need a way to flesh it out without stretching it too thin. Any advice?

—John Patrick Moran, Scottsdale, Ariz. 

(Note: NaNoWriMo is short for Narcissistic Nonsense Writing Motivation or something like that. Simple premise: write a “novel” of fifty-thousand words within the month of November. The prize? Fifty-thousand dollars. In the competition’s 196-year history, only three have claimed the prize.)

While you may want to market your next rap/hip-hop/dubstep/crabcore album as “All Killer, No Filler,” you can easily apply the inverse to this November Novelthing. There are just as many ways to pare up your novel as you (naturally, I hope) pare it down.

Instead of:

“Take that sock off your head!” she said.

Go with:

“Take that sock off your head!” she exclaimed wistfully, like a budding, tangible breeze, toying with the senses of the mind and teasing the faculties of intellect; an overwrought sensation of rebuke from a charmer scolding a cobra that strays too far from the sanctuary  of a thatched basket.”

That’s what we call “putting more hay in the dogfeed.”

In addition to expanding the dialogue, you can also:

Use stock phrases.

Homer (Greek poet, inspiration for Homer Simpson) beasted every round of NaNoWriMo by putting that hay in the dogfeed. He coined a boatful of stock phrases like “wine-dark sea,” “rosy-fingered dawn,” “grey-eyed Athena,” and “mud-bustin’ 4-wheeler,” all of which filled the barrel with plenty of meat to spare. Don’t settle for grin when you can make it an “impish” grin, or don’t let that cottage stand without making it a “cozy little cottage” first. Like everyone else.

Plant a descriptive perception.

Maybe that’s too grown-up a term. Simply put, it’s the description you employ when your description is too weak to let the reader think for himself. While you could go with:

“Delectable strawberries, bursting with amaranthine juices,”

Tack on something ungainly:

“Delectable strawberries, bursting with amaranthine juices, like you’d eat on a midsummer’s toasty afternoon in the shade of one’s own home, petitioning mother for sugar and cream to cap off such royal treatment.”

A baby unicorn vomits black sprinkles every time I read this sort of thing. I cannot wait until the end of NaNoWriMo, but alas, we’re in for the count, not the charms.

Remind people of what you already told them. 

When Moses wrote the 24th chapter of Genesis, he employed this same trickery for emphasis. They hadn’t invented italics or boldface type yet, so he needed something to hammer the point home. At 60+ verses, you could tell he was stretching the canvas and putting that hay in the dogfeed.

And since it’s NaNoWriMo, you can do this for every chapter, every sentence:

“Ronnie rode his rusty bike back to the creepy old home, which as we all know, was Ronnie’s least favorite place in the whole entire universe, due to his meaner-than-teachers Stepuncle Frothmouth and Stepaunt Bourtha, both intent on draping the curtains of misery on Ronnie and all his hopes and dreams of un-misery.” 

“He pushed aside that creaky old door that continued to remind him of the wailing spiders that, as you remember, devoured his dad and mum and grandmum; indeed, its pitch and timbre petrified and terrified the lad who, as you recall, feared spiders worse yet than the prospect of his evil Stepuncle Frothmouth and Stepaunt Bourtha, who jointly, as was mentioned afore, would descend from webs…”

You get it.

So what kind of hay do you put in the dogfeed?

Writing All Wrong can be reached via email (WritingAllWrong@me.com), followed on Twitter (@WritingAllWrong), and probed for more NaNoWriMo nectar during the month.