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CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Revise a novel

How to revise a novel so the revision ends

ChapterMuse holds the plan, the world, the draft and the finished book on your own machine. Free for 30 days, nothing to cancel.

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › How to write a fantasy novel

How to Write a Fantasy Novel

It has been growing for a year and it is genuinely good, and the novel it exists to serve is three chapters long, because every time you sit down to write, some part of the world turns out to need finishing first.

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Create a story bible

The story bible you'll actually use

You know your world; you have never once forgotten what it is like in there. It is a bookkeeping failure, and it is the failure every long project runs into eventually, because the thing that actually breaks across four hundred…

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Exposition without the infodump

Exposition without the infodump

Perfectly clear, twenty-two words, and it kills the book's first hook stone dead by answering a question nobody had yet thought to ask.

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.

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 › Sagging middle

How to diagnose a sagging middle

Twenty thousand words is a common answer for a bloated draft, and it usually comes out of six or seven chapters rather than off every page.

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › First pages

First pages: what makes an agent stop reading

You know who the woman on it is, what the box contains, what the word sennight means in your world. A stranger, reading at speed at the end of a day in which they have already read forty other first pages, knows none of it and is…

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Dialogue and subtext

How to fix on-the-nose dialogue

And in that gap (between the confession offered and the fish returned) Chekhov delivers his entire judgement of the world Gurov lives in, without a word of commentary.