Monday, October 26, 2020

Novel Writing - Chapter Two

After I finished my manuscript I decided to edit it. To start off with I began to read through it, chapter by chapter, correcting spelling and grammatical errors as I went. Needles to say, in no time at all I was bored out of my skull and my eyes would just slide off one page to another without really looking at either the spelling or the sense of what I was reading.

 Changed my tactics and started reading the last chapter first, then the one before it and so on. Got a bit tired of that, so skipped around popping into any chapter and reading it through. After a while felt as though I’ve been reading the same thing over and over again far too long. Everything seemed way too familiar.

Then a brilliant idea. Made easy of course because we have our computers to do these things for us. What if I selected a word and looked at it throughout the whole manuscript, reading either just the sentence in which the word was found, or possibly the whole paragraph.

Having decided this was the way to go, the next thing was to decide on how to make the selection. 55,000 means a lot of words. I could start with the names of my leading men and women, or some other important words or..........

So many choices. Another idea. I would start with the very first sentence and go from there. Obviously I would leave out the word ‘the’ – for starters, anyway, (I mean it will be fun when the computer tells me there’s thousands of ‘the’s) but for the time being I’ll forego ‘the’ and ‘but’ and ‘and’. Their time will come.

I began my manuscript with the sentence, ‘Marry you?’ she exclaimed. I dithered around with the word ‘marry’ but in the end found only a small number of them. So on to the next one. Obviously there would be thousands of ‘she’s’ so I went on to ‘exclaimed’. Would you believe about 25+ ‘exclaimed’, and God only knows how many exclamation marks.

Now I’m beginning to remember. As a member of the Australian Romance club I did forward my manuscript to have it edited by some lady in New Zealand. And I now remember that she advised me to tone down the exclamation marks.

I did as she suggested and removed the exclamation mark itself, from many of the burst out comments that my manuscript is littered with, but have retained who was exclaiming. Somehow comments like

‘Oh, no,’ she exclaimed

'That will do,’ she exclaimed

‘Why, it’s beautiful,’ she exclaimed.

look a bit sick without the exclamation mark. And the emotion I want to convey somehow doesn’t work with ‘she said,’ ‘she replied,’ ‘she commented’.

Believe it or not, as far as I’m concerned, there is no word that says exactly what exclaims conveys. I mean, check out the thesaurus.

exclaim - cry, shout, call, yell, scream, bellow.

Not the same, is it?

However, what must be, must be. You won't believe this, I hardly believe it myself, but I've decreased 'exclamation' to only 5 words. Way to go. Now I have to look at 'said'. Only about 400 of those.

Compliments of webstockreview.net

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Well, I’ll leave you to ponder my problem, and drop a line if you have any suggestions.


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Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Novel Writing - Chapter One

 Novel Writing – Chapter One

In another lifetime I used to be a member of the Australian Romance Writers. Since then I’ve had two nonfiction books published by a traditional publisher and seven non-fiction books self published on Smashwords and Amazon. While I love reading fiction, it’s non-fiction that I’m comfortable with when I’m writing. 

Recently, while doing some spring-cleaning – as one does – I discovered a manuscript packed away at the bottom of a box and long forgotten. I realise now that as a member of a Romance Club, somewhere along the way I must have decided to at least givewriting a romance a try. The result was a romance that I must have written and then packed away never to see the light of day until now. 

Rereading it 20+ years on, it doesn’t seem all that bad. And the other interesting thing is that now that I can barely remember writing it, I’m beginning to look at details that make up the manuscript rather than the story itself. 

For example, the manuscript is approximately 55,000 words long, and has twenty-two chapters. This makes the average chapter 2,000+ words long. According to writing gurus the 2,000 to 4,000 words is a standard chapter. 

Believe it or not, over the many years of fiction writing, people have worked out the length a chapter should be for an adult novel. I’m not sure whether it’s for the benefit of the writer or the reader. 

Anyway, here is what one writing guru says. 

A chapter consisting of 1,000 words or less is too short. I have read books that have had short chapters, and which ended with 60+ chapters. After a while you do tend to recognise that this is the author’s technique – for better or worse. 

One that runs between 1000-1500 words is very short. Very likely, if the book is short to start off with, your chapters would be inclined to be short also. 

Between 2000 to 4000 words is the standard. 

A chapter that that runs over 5000 words is getting too long. 

What I found about my romance novel is that while my first two chapters were around 4,000 words, the rest were 2,000+ words. 

Reading through my manuscript I realise that the first two chapters were more or less setting the scene - the rest were the story tellers. In the end, a chapter stops when you’ve made your point, and you begin the next chapter when you are ready to make your next point. 

And so, as far as number of chapters are concerned, I think I’m doing all right with my romance. 


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What about you? Trying your hand at novel-writing. Tell us your story.

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