There are a lot of checklists for building a first chapter, and sometimes they can get overwhelming. MBT has an advanced checklist we use to help people build their Frasier Contest Scene (it’s the same checklist I use when building my first chapters!). However, I admit, it can get overwhelming. So, let’s start building that chapter one with 5 essential elements. In fact, this is step two in your process. As Sally and I talked about yesterday in Conversations, sometimes it just helps the writing process to let your characters walk on the page and wander around a bit. We can hear them, talk to them, discover if we have profiled them correctly. No, these wanderings probably won’t be the final first chapter, but it gives you a chance to […]
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Conversations: Walking your Hero onto the page
“Today, you write,” I said to Sally as she plunked down her bag. She appeared frazzled today, her blonde hair pulled back into a frizzy ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing makeup. “Good, because I need some writing therapy,” she said as she sat down on the chair. “After week with the kids home from school, it’s time to escape. In fact, I might have already started.” She handed me four pages of her manuscript. “It’s the first scene.” I scanned it. “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a smattering if the first scene and a lot of backstory,” I handed it back to her. “But it’s a great start. And you’ve done what I would have suggested you do – sit down and start writing that first scene. I expected […]
Read the RestPutting it all together: Adding the Romance beats to your first chapter
For the last two weeks on the blog, I’ve been going through the 10 beats of a romance that we discussed last February so as to refresh our minds before we start putting the elements together. This week, we’re going to dive into taking those beats and combining them with our story structure so that we can actually build our novel. Just to sum up, we’re going to be working with the first three beats as we start putting together Act 1. Beat 1: Boy Meets Girl: In this component, there is an event, goal or circumstance that occurs to bring our hero and heroine together—Usually this happens in the first chapter, but it definitely needs to happen by Chapter 3. Some examples that you thought up […]
Read the RestFinal rough draft of Chapter 1.2 + Thoughts to prep Chapter 2!
Here it is – the final rough draft of chapter 1.2. (I am sure you are tired of reading it by now!) Note, I’ve made a few more changes (especially after reading more of the VOICES comments and reviewing SKD’s edit notes again!) Now comes the hard work. We have to write chapter 2! So, what considerations go into writing chapter 2? First – we’ll probably open back in Mackenzie’s pov. We want to catch up with her and figure what happens next. How do we do that? First, we know it is a REACTION scene – because she had a strong ACTION scene in the first chapter. Which means we have to figure out her current DILEMMA, as raised in the last chapter. Then, we determine […]
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