CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Track character arcs
Character arcs: want, need, and the lie
Arcs get drawn as curves, and the drawing is so intuitive that writers end up plotting their protagonist's mood and calling it an arc.
Search results for alternative ending
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CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Novel november
NaNoWriMo 2026 & Novel November Guide
23,334 words by 14 November If each chapter repeats the same obstacle, change what the character risks or what they know.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Dialogue and subtext
How to fix on-the-nose dialogue
One word carrying the entire grievance that the first version spent a sentence and a half on. It is also the only place in the exchange where the temperature is visible, which is why it works: the reader has to supply the anger,…
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › What editors mean by pacing
What editors actually mean by pacing
If it is a travel sequence or a piece of world explanation, you have found a resolution problem without reading a word. Read the two worst chapters aloud, at speed.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Exposition without the infodump
Exposition without the infodump
By Jo Walton, SF reading protocols The generic advice ("scatter it") is a flattened version of this, and it loses the part that matters.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › First pages
First pages: what makes an agent stop reading
Her estimate of how many submissions reached the end of their own 250 words: fewer than a quarter. That is a horrible thing to read at eleven at night with your own first page open.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Create a story bible
The story bible you'll actually use
The same thing happened at the far end of the scale: the continuity apparatus behind The Wheel of Time (eventually four million words of notes and a published companion volume)
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Format a book
Format a novel for submission, print and EPUB
It is also the difference between an automatic ebook conversion that finds your chapters and one that does not. Everything in this guide, in one app.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › How to write a fantasy novel
How to Write a Fantasy Novel
What the draft actually requires is smaller than the folder ever admits: a person with a want, the place where the want goes wrong, and enough of the near world for the first three chapters to stand on.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Point of view and psychic distance
Point of view: psychic distance is a dial
Here is the end of "The Dead", after several pages spent extremely close inside Gabriel Conroy: close enough that his own identity is described as fading out into a grey impalpable world.
