Gundampilotspaz

Topic. I just wanted some advice from what has worked, and what hasn't worked for people here.

gabriella

Write chapter summaries that are no more than 10 words. ie,

"Bob meets Jill."
"Bob falls for Jill."
"Jill has husband."
"Bob chases Jill."

This leaves so much room to be creative and to stretch your imagination, whereas something like...

"Bob was at the market looking for food for his mother. Mother is old and sick. The markets are dirty and ugly and packed. He wants the pineapple. He picks it up and drops it, then a woman comes. Jill. Picks it up, they start talking. Nothing in particular. Bob stammers. Talk about how ripe the food is. How they hate food shopping. She has to go now. Bob sighs and then pays for the pineapple. End of chapter."

Where's the imagination? You've got everything already said, what more is there to say, other than be descriptive?

__________________
You write by sitting down and writing - Bernard Malamud.

Gundampilotspaz

For some reason I've never thought of that...... I have always planed on doing my chaper out lines in detail every event, ect. This sounds better.....

gabriella

It really is. The best part of it, though, is that it allows you to use anything that relates to the topic, not just a specific scene.

While in the short example I gave you - Bob meets Jill - you can include more characters, more people, more reasons, and more details that don't stretch. Anything that revolves around him meeting Jill is useful - maybe his mother got pissed that he never does any work, and so he sets off for the market. Then you can also include how blown away she is when he's always going there and getting her groceries. And then maybe he has some older siblings who tease him for being a mama's boy. And then maybe their father doesn't want him doing woman's work.

But in the longer example I gave you, you focus more on stretching the paragraph into about ten pages for a decent chapter, which includes... more talking about fruits, more sighing, and more stammering.

But before you plunge into the chapter, even with your 3-word-summary, close your eyes and think about all the crazy things that can happen to lead to the "Bob meets Jill." Like fourty mini-novels, a chapter has to have a diologue, setting, theme, point of view, characters, tone, climax, everything. You're not going to get that by a scene at a market between two shy people talking about fruit and sighing.

__________________
You write by sitting down and writing - Bernard Malamud.