Stuck on a Difficult Chapter
Welcome back to the blog! For this post, I’ll be writing about a particularly difficult chapter. It’s not gory. It’s not emotional. It’s not sexual. What makes this chapter difficult is because it just has a whole lot going on.
When writing, I generally follow a pretty normal format. I’ll write out chapter summaries one by one and then go through them that way. For example, my outline for Iris looked like this:
Chapter 1
Who is Iris? Establish character.
Childhood
Chapter 2
Establish character
– Learns that his younger brother, Damien was killed – grieves his brother
Elude to field trip
Elude to alcohol, rich v poor, government is bad
– Religion, follows Christian religion – Lord Beyond Both Seas
Chapter 3
Who are other characters? Establish supporting cast.
Heavy academic – Plato/Socrates stuff
Real Chapter 4
– Greyson
– Do Greyson’s memory of his wife and him meeting
Chapter 5
First day of school. Establish history of Atlantic Federation
Obviously it goes on and on with each new chapter. What you see there is unedited. Those are the real chapter outlines I used. They’re very basic, but I mention everything I want to get across.
At the start, these simple outlines were helpful and they gave me a lot of flexibility to play around with the story details as I went along. As my story has gone on, my chapter summaries have gotten longer and more complex. I have more plot threads to balance and more things I want to make sure I mention in the chapter.
That being said, this current chapter I’m working on is a doozy. There are just too many things I want to fit into one chapter. I’m worried it may turn into a double-length chapter, potentially over 20 pages! (Most of my chapters are around 10)
Iris certainly had some chapters that were longer than others. In fact, there were definitely some chapters MORE than double the length of others. But this chapter I’m working on now is on course to easily be my longest chapter yet from either book.
I’ve made a graph below, illustrating just how long my hypothetical 20 page chapter would look when stacked up to the others before it:
In any case, I’m sure I will figure it out. And if you haven’t been able to figure it out yet from the graph, the chapter I’m working on is Chapter 15. Keep in mind, that means I have between seven and eight chapters to go! I’m nearly there (for the rough draft, at least).
In other news, Broken Tomorrow is out now and has already made a decent number of sales! There are a few reviews up on Amazon already, though none of them mention Iris. If you haven’t heard about Broken Tomorrow yet, check out my previous post about it by clicking: HERE
Before I leave you one final time, I would just like to remind you that Christmas is soon approaching. What’s a better gift than a beautiful paperback book? Iris makes a great gift! Tell your friends!
Bye bye!
