Breathing Life into the Printed Page

Book #3 in the series is in progress. In it, one of the characters says something like:

“Living, breathing life doesn’t happen like it does in books.  It’s not linear and it’s not divided into neat chapters. Life is chaotic, weird, tangled, full of paths of rocketing exhilaration, and dead ends full of nothing but boredom. There are multi-planed realities, misconceptions, and fantasies lived as though they were fact. . .”

How to get those very chaotic, undivided, weird, and tangled aspects into a story line is not easy. But, it is enriching. One of the techniques in the series has been not to use chapter designations. Instead, the books are broken into “parts.” The parts usually designate places or locations instead of abrupt stops to fit a critics view of what content layout should look like.

Within each part, there are minimally obtrusive breaks. They are indicted by an extra blank line or two and a single “~” in the middle.  These tend to fall in times and places where a scene changes.

Beyond ditching chapters, there are other ways to keep the story lines complex and more in keeping with the way people live their “real” lives. Multiple sub-stories bounce off a number of characters at once like so many balls in a pinball machine. Topics and character personalities, and events vary wildly and can be disconcerting. Relationships change and evolve along with points of view. People portrayed can have both “good” and “bad” aspects while some situations simply are with no obvious judgment.

Life can be messy. So can stories. That is when the two-dimensional paper page serves not as a limitation, but as an organizing map.