How do you show the passage of time--days, months, even years--between scenes and chapters? I've got a very few tools, but I know they aren't enough.
I don't recall this question being handled in any books or blogs I've read, so suggestions on them would be most welcome. Suggestions on books that do this very well are also welcome, but that's probably 20 percent or more of what's in print, and I haven't picked up enough from reading. What can I say, I'm dense.
You could keep them together, or you could look for memorable breaking points, cliffhangers being the extreme case.
Little there is, that is not better with Bach: https://youtu.be/LJts7bpW2VE . Merry Christmas all!
Maybe sometimes they smoulder? If you substitute, do it with effect, or do it during description. In action or dialogue, keep to the regular, non-distracting form.
But what kind of pause? Shouldn't it be the necessary pause that occurs when a nested structure is complete and the speaker naturally pauses as he restarts above, and that signals the listener that this is happening?
She'll need better advice than that. The one Jane Austen story I tried bored me almost to catatonia before the second chapter. It might have been the inspiration for the definition of a classic as a book everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read?
The antagonist and the protagonist could be good guys, both working for the good, but at odds in how to achieve it. The antagonist might think the protagonist is the villain, only to find out (usually, almost too late) that he or she isn't.
What you've just described is a major part of the Girl Genius story.
My need is for a early 'side trip' obstacle for my protagonist(s), a sort of pons asinorem. I think I've got it now, by reworking and cutting what I've got now, and filling the matter in while a clock ticks somewhere else.
At this point, I need to rework my volume and a half of The Sorcerer's Progress, but you're welcome to earn points and I will read what you wrote, and maybe reply.
Strive to please the reader, or to meet a set of rules? What happened to 'know the rules so you know when to break them'?
You're right that the writer must know his goals.
Some of them are rich hacks. Which matters more: the praise of your professional peers or of your present and future audience? I'm not saying you can't have both, but some of those hacks have created stories that fill C.S.Lewis's definition of myth: a story that can suffer changes in plot, character, place, and era, and still remain recognizable as the same story.
Put The Phantom of the Opera in ancient Greece, replace opera with the plays and choruses, and it would be the same central story. Replace the congenital deformation with acid scarring, and you have the same central story.
Convince me that Gaston Leroux was not a hack writer. He was a newspaperman, and his stories were sold as serials. And he gave us not only Phantom but The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a classic of mystery/detective fiction.
Know the rules, yes. But know when they can be broken to gain something else. Be not afraid to boldly split the infinitive, if it will take you where no story has gone before.
If Gaston Leroux doesn't convince you, what about Damon Runyon?
But does this trouble most readers, or only those looking for trouble?
As though listening to locate a sound ...
Y'all do realize you're being a lot harder than all but the most wantonly particular readers.
If you feel fettered and straitjacketed by the modren highbrau sensibilities, you can show us that the assessment belongs to your PoV character.
I have no problem with example one UNLESS you are trying to limit yourself to the character's actions and sense impressions, denying narrator and reader access to the character's state of mind. That sort of limitation seems to be in fashion now, but I think it's like much of "modern classical" "music"; it's more appealing to composers, musicians and critics (writers, editors, and critics) than to listeners (readers).
Feel free to enjoy Karlheinz Stockhausen and Philip Glass. I'll take Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, and even Ives, Ives who told a restive audience to "sit down and take your dissonance like men."
Multi-volume, multi-section structure. The first two sections get Merran's family reunited, but reveal problems brewing in the wider world(s) that her parents tried to leave behind. Shogran is only a symptom. So the second and third part will take a long time to map out. The first two parts have to be worked out sooner, but I can put books one and two in some kind of order, and map out book 3 and the second section while I do it.
Section 3 has the tentative title Apostles of Ruin, just to give a sense of where I hope to go. (I have possible volume titles.)
So here I am, never fully gone, as the few who have received reviews can attest.
I have, somewhere, a couple of chapters I might add to Book Two, but my main thinking, these last couple of months, has been large-scale structure, Books One, Two, and Beyond. I've spent the last few days wrangling with the over-extended Erevain sequnce, and I think I have a solution, though I want to work out some other Book One things before I start writing and posting.
What do my readers (if any I have left) prefer?
What I'm looking for, as near as I can frame it, is some kind of map linking motive, character, and style of action.
Craig Shaw Gardener wrote send-ups of heroic fantasy. In the last volume of one series (A disagreement with Death, I think) he has the protagonist stride off into the sunset, trailed by all the characters sucked into his adventures. Of course, for a truly epic cast, you can look to the Girl Genius story, now in its nineteenth year. (http://girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php, dramatis personae available here: https://girlgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Characters, about 300 characters listed, from Abbess to Zuli)
There are many books and on-line references on writing, and fiction in particular. Does anyone know of a book or reference on antagonists (bad guys) and aspects of conflict they create?
A sentence can stretch from clause to clause like a long linked chain, and yet remain readable if it pursues a single topic thread throughout. Such can be found in Philip Bobbitt's =The Shield of Achilles= (nonfiction). Bobbitt is supremely erudite, and though he takes no pains to show it it cannot be hidden.
Hinkley's Elusive Idiopathy suggests that nobody else can see the disease. They think he's imagining it ... but wonder why the bit with the handkerchiefs. Either he's got something nobody else can see, or he's on a slightly different salutory plane.
Hinkley deserves a better-named disease than that. Hinkley's Elusive Idiopathy might do. Professor Hinkley insisted that he suffered from it ... but nobody could see anything wrong with him. Though they did wonder why he bought stock in a handkerchief manufacturer.
So it's BillyBully's Idiopathy. Everything should be this easy.
"Idiopathic" means that it's something that's unique as far as anyone knows. In other words, no diagnosis.
In the Girl Genius story, a character is diagnosed with Vericus Pentiliax's Chromatic Death ... which is not usually fatal. But it turns out that he has Hogfarb's Resplendent Immolation. Which is, although he might just melt instead of going off like a Roman Candle. Hard to tell ... and they don't let it happen. They kill him instead ... but only temporarily, so they can clear the disease from his system. But not before everyone who matters comes down with it as well. Which leads to one of the best fifty or sixty lines in the story: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20100113
Take that kid who always bullied you in school and name a disease after him.
I received word a couple weeks ago, but her husband said he wanted to send word to Sol himself. It was an unusual case of the cancer, not detectable by the usual screens, which came up clean.
I met Amy in person a couple of times. She was a force of nature, with clear priorities.
