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CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Sagging middle
This is Shawn Coyne's insight in The Story Grid, minus the spreadsheet: he has editors log every scene as a row and then read down the columns rather than across the rows, because the story-level faults only show themselves when…
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Daily › Archive
Start a story with someone trying to complete a small job before a visitor arrives. Try this task 2 Nov 2026 · Tension
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Local first writing software
They ask where the app keeps it, and you find you cannot answer: not to the standard of a folder path you could type from memory, or a date for the last copy that left the building.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Scrivener migration
Every horror story about a lost novel has the same shape: there was a backup, and it turned out to be empty, or four months stale, or a folder the application politely declined to recognise.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Revise a novel
It is negative progress: it cost you an hour and it made the chapter feel more finished, which makes you less willing to cut it, which is how a book ends up organised around its best paragraphs rather than around its story.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › First pages
On page one, the model the reader is building is the model of whose story this is, so a slide does not merely confuse them, it withdraws the offer while they are still deciding whether to accept it.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Point of view and psychic distance
John Gardner called it psychic distance, and defined it with unusual plainness for a man who could be quite grand about fiction: the "distance that the reader feels between himself and the events of the story".
