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CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Point of view and psychic distance

Point of view: psychic distance is a dial

Writers whose prose is described as flat are very often writing every paragraph at the same middle distance, so the moment that matters gets no more intimacy than the walk to the car.

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Scrivener migration

Moving a novel out of Scrivener, safely

The reason matters much less than the thought that turns up about ninety seconds later, usually at eleven at night: is the book actually stuck in there?

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › First pages

First pages: what makes an agent stop reading

There is a running event at the Boston Book Festival called Writer Idol that makes this brutally literal. An actress picks manuscripts at random and reads the first 250 words aloud; a panel of agents listens, and the moment any…

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Novel writing software

How to Choose Novel Writing Software

53 in August 2025, and with caveats about which blocks work, which is a reasonable illustration of how far down the list it usually sits.

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

The story bible you'll actually use

The writer stuck at chapter twenty-two does not need more world. They need to know one small, boring, load-bearing fact, and they need to know it in eight seconds rather than nineteen minutes, because the nineteen minutes is…

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Local first writing software

Local-First and Offline Writing Software

01Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg & Mark McGranaghan, Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud (Ink & Switch, April 2019): the canonical definition and the seven ideals used throughout…

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

Exposition without the infodump

The material arrives because the writer is keen to deliver it, at a moment chosen by the writer's convenience, and the reader (who has not asked anything yet) is handed a set of facts and asked to hold them.

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Track character arcs

Character arcs: want, need, and the lie

It is also, by now, more or less the only thing anyone teaches about character, so most writers reach their second draft with a completed chart and no way of checking whether what's on it made it into the book.