Kindle Notes & Highlights
What does your character do for a job? What is their everyday work life like? What are their relationships with their co-workers?
workers? What kind of knowledge or skill set do they need to do their job? Is there a specific culture or lifestyle associated with the job? Are there any real-world rules, regulations, or laws you need to know about regarding how your character does t...
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After writing Wrath of Dragons I did a project I called 30 in Thirty, where I wrote thirty short stories in thirty days.
No matter the genre you are writing in, another tool you can use to keep your readers engaged is to include mysteries in your story.
The easiest way to create a mystery is to withhold information.
A character might have a dark past or embarrassing event they don’t want to share. The mystery may be about world building or the past relationships.
“unpoxed.”
What words can I use to create a small mystery?
Consider what information you can hold back in your novel to create a small mystery that you will eventually resolve.
So moving forward it can help to stop thinking about scenes and instead focus on chapters.
Short chapters will often make it feel like a story is moving fast and that the events are quickly happening. It’s why you see so many thrillers with short chapters.
The chapters might be one to three pages and there are no scene breaks in them.
In epic fantasy, you’ll often see long chapters running twenty to forty pages.
It’s because in epic fantasy, the reader wants to feel like they are getting massive chunks of story and really experiencing a different world.
Those breaks in the pace are there for the reader.
Wrap up the cliff hanger from the last chapter. Give the characters (and readers) a moment to breathe and collect themselves. Ramp things up again. End the chapter with a cliff hanger.
Example of how to structure a chapter.
If every chapter ends with a cliff hanger it will tire the reader and they will be more likely to stop reading in the middle of a chapter as opposed to at the end of a chapter.
My scene list for the novel had seventy-eight scenes, the finished novel has around ninety scenes, I think, and those ninety scenes are grouped into forty-seven chapters.
Example of Wrath of Dtagons.
Because writing is so hard, take the time to get your life in order. Adjust and manipulate your schedule in whatever ways you need to be able to make the time to write.
make time to write
