keep eating the potato chip scenes
10th March 2017 | for Creatives | reading, novel writing, writing, word count, Shawn Coyne |
"Keep your scenes ... around two thousand words. I also recommend that you treat your scenes like chapters. That is, each scene should be a chapter in your novel. Why? Two-thousand-word scenes/chapters are potato chip length. That is, if you are about to go to bed and you're reading a terrific novel and the scenes/chapters come in around two-thousand-word bites, you'll tell yourself that you'll read just one more chapter. But if the narrative is really moving after you finish one of these bites, you won't be able to help yourself reading another. If the Story is extremely well told, you'll just keep eating the potato chip scenes all through the night. Whereas, if you cram five scenes into a chapter that ends up being forty pages, the bedside reader will have a much easier time just setting the book down before beginning the long slog through seventy-five hundred words. People like to stop reading when they've finished a chapter, not in the middle of a chapter."
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