The Freedom of Writing Without Chapters

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

A first draft doesn’t need to adhere to a chapter format.

I’m not sure when I started writing this way, but sometime in the last four or five years, I stopped using chapters during a first draft. Instead, I write scenes grouped by acts, and decide later how those scenes fit into a chapter structure.

I don’t think I would have done this if I hadn’t started using Scrivener. Its folder and file format makes it easy to organize my manuscript into scenes and group them into chapters as needed. Writing in Word just didn’t have this same flexibility.

I discovered this “no chapter” draft gave me the freedom to write a scene and not worry about length, or even how it might transition to the next scene. I just wrote the scene and moved on to the next after it was drafted.

Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com