Ditch the chapters--for now

Many of us think and write in chapters. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a common way to think about your story. What's more, if we're in a critique group, our chapters have a habit of being about the same length as the number of pages we read at each crit session.

I'm guessing many of you can't easily imagine writing a book without doing it a chapter at a time. Today, I'd like to present an option that I've found freeing in my own writing:

Ditch the chapters. For now, anyway.

The basic building block of any story is the scene. According to many writing teachers and books about writing, a story is a string of scenes joined by sequels. You most likely know this, and you might use a certain number of scenes in each chapter.

But what if you don't worry about chapters while drafting your masterpiece? What do you gain?

Freedom. Freedom to end your chapters where they make the most sense later. Freedom to skip a difficult scene and move on to the next one. Freedom to concentrate on your scenes and worry about the bigger structural pieces later.

We've all rearranged the order of our chapters at some point in our writing. If you concentrate on chapters, this can give you a plot where the chapters make sense, but some of the scenes seem wrong. It's much easier to move scenes around than chapters. You probably do that anyway, which makes it so you have to redo several chapter endings.

You might insert new chapters, and have to renumber everything.

If you're having trouble with a chapter, you might skip it and move to another chapter. If you think in scenes, you can skip to a new scene.

If you think about scenes rather than chapters, if you keep each scene in a Scrivener file instead of a chapter, you can concentrate more on that basic building block, and you free yourself to reorganize and rearrange in smaller bits. You start to think more about your scenes and sequels and make sure they work, rather than thinking about your chapters.

Writing scenes and ignoring chapters can also help you plow through the story while keeping your inner critic in check. If you tell your story without structuring it like a book, you free yourself to write that crappy first draft without the additional mental pressure that comes with writing a "book." You're just writing. A story or a project or whatever is much easier to grasp than that monumental book concept. Just get it down and structure it later. Let it be messy. It might even be helpful to use a simple editor that discourages you from thinking about your formatting, like some of the distraction-free writing programs that are growing in popularity.

Later, when you revise (I recommend waiting until a draft near the final one), you can put in your chapter breaks. You might discover that you can come up with more effective chapter breaks if you wait. Like cliffhangers? Break your chapter mid-scene, or between the scene and the sequel.

Try this approach, especially if you struggle with structure or plot. Enjoy the freedom it gives you.

"Green Screen" Distraction-free Text Editors

by Deren Hansen

I started playing with computers when green screen, character-mode displays were state-of-the art (I preferred amber over green, but that's another story). Then the original Macintosh (yes, that's what they were before they became hip enough to afford a three-letter name), splashed onto the scene with a full-time graphical user interface (GUI).

A few years later, folks from the English department at the University of Delaware published a study in which they argued that the quality of freshman papers written on a Macintosh was lower than those written on PC-class computers with character-mode displays. Oh, the papers produced on Macs looked better with well-laid-out text and proportional fonts, but (so the authors of the study claimed) the content of those papers was less well-thought-out than the papers composed without graphical blandishments.* They suggested that this was because the students tended to believe that their papers were good (and more importantly finished) because they looked good.

The study and its claims were controversial. But I think there was a kernel of truth in the observation that there's value in a writing system that gets out from between you and your words: that removes even the little distractions like formatting.

Of course, now that we all use graphical interfaces the point may seem moot or at best hopelessly retro. Perhaps, but there are several applications for various platforms that give you a full screen with nothing there but your words in a console font.

I use a package called WriteMonkey on my Windows systems.

Having an editor in which I can focus entirely on my words helps me use my limited writing time well.

You can, of course, achieve a similar effect with the Full Screen mode in your standard word processor. Perhaps it's the retro angle, but I enjoy the Matrix-like way in which the black background fades away and the glowing words float in prose-space.

Of course, life is never as simple as it should be and WriteMonkey has its drawbacks, most of which come back to the fact that it is a text editor, not a word processor. This means that you get plain double quotes instead of the nice opening and closing quotes that Word supplies as you type. Also, Write Monkey doesn't convert a pair of dashes into an em-dash (again, like Word).

I turned this liability into a feature: after writing about a chapter with WriteMonkey, I import the text into Word and use the fact that I need to correct the quotes and em-dashes as an excuse to edit the new material.

For those of you who prefer Macs, I understand that Writeroom provides similar functionality. There's also JDarkRoom, which is written in Java and should run on your platform of choice.


Deren blogs at The Laws of Making.