A pause on the journey. Breaking up the narrative.

Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.

Don’t forget to click the purple button to see what everyone else has to say on this week’s subject. It’s at the end of my post.

How do you determine where to end a chapter?

Let me explain, it’s a bit left-field but bear with me.

My creative process involves nothing more than viewing a film, on a screen in my head. I have no real input or control. I think of myself as one of the audience who merely watches as the story unfolds.

All that’s required of me is that I put down in words what the characters say and do. I also have to describe the scenery and background to the action as it plays out. And that’s it.

The great thing about working in this way is the complete lack of responsibility I have for deciding anything about the narrative arc.

I never know what will happen next. Which means that I don’t need to plot or worry about making it all work.

I leave it all to the characters.

They seem to know what they are doing.

Because it all plays out like a film, there are cuts and fades while I’m watching. The setting changes in each separate scene, the action will shift or timeslip and the P.O.V. might alter.

These break-points become the chapter markers in the finished manuscript.

I know that it all sounds a bit weird. Perhaps you can imagine how it felt for me when it started happening, with a dream that wouldn’t go away. It kept repeating, night after night. Until I gave up and wrote it all down.

That dream became a chapter in my first novel. Several nights later, I had another dream. I realised that it was another chapter of the same story. So, I wrote that down, too.

The rest, as they say…, is history.

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Until next time.

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