Search results for read my chapter aloud

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › First pages

First pages: what makes an agent stop reading

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 not going to ask.

• Page one answers three questions, and the order matters
• What gets you rejected is confusion, not boredom
• "Start with action" is the worst good advice in publishing
• Wake-ups, weather and mirrors fail for three different reasons

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › What editors mean by pacing

What editors actually mean by pacing

You cannot hear any of this silently, which is the honest argument for reading a chapter aloud, or having something read it to you, which is better, because your own voice will unconsciously perform the rhythm you intended rather…

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Dialogue and subtext

How to fix on-the-nose dialogue

He says the operation is simple, and then he says it again, and by the end of the story he has said some version of perfectly simple five times.

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Plan a scene

How to write a scene that turns

When you've got a whole manuscript and you're going back through it with a revision pass rather than a blank page, unpaid turns are visible in a way they never are while you're writing forwards: a chapter ends on a revelation and…

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Track character arcs

Character arcs: want, need, and the lie

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), chapter 36 Austen makes her name the mechanism rather than the feeling: not "I was wrong about Wickham" but "vanity, not love, has been my folly".

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Sagging middle

How to diagnose a sagging middle

Which is exactly the sensation you get reading chapters twelve to twenty-two of your own draft at eleven at night. The mechanism underneath it is usually simple, and it is not a failure of imagination.

CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Revise a novel

How to revise a novel so the revision ends

There was the one after your friend read it, where you rewrote the opening three chapters, and then the one six months later where you rewrote them again, differently, back towards something closer to the original.

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

How to Write a Novel: The Whole Job, in Order

The failure mode is orbiting (reading from page one, polishing sentences until the will runs out around chapter six, repeat) which improves the first quarter of a manuscript five times and the last quarter never.

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

Local-First and Offline Writing Software

The price triples on renewal and the alternative is a migration you don't have time for. A feature you built a habit on gets retired.

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.