(Don't) Explain yourself!

So, there's this TV show here in Britain that Big Chimp and I like to watch. It's called Springwatch, and it's a live nature show broadcast over three weeks every spring. These people put cameras everywhere: bird nests, badger setts, fox dens, bat caves, and anywhere else you can think of out in nature. It's a fun, informative program. But a couple of years back, Big Chimp noticed one of the presenters, Chris Packham, doing something funny. As Packham talked about the animals, he would drop in titles of songs by The Smiths. He never acknowledged or made reference to what he was doing, and I probably wouldn't have even noticed it if Big Chimp (who is a huge music freak) had not called it to my attention. Shortly after that, we noticed something else—the note cards Packham was holding had artwork on the back of them—album artwork.

As the show went on, we began to appreciate it on two levels; we were still learning all about Britain's amazing wildlife, but we were also playing the game of seeing how many of Packham's popular culture references we could spot. Last year, Packham was at it again, but with song titles by The Cure. This year, it was all about sly references to Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers. And the allusions didn't stop there. At one point, while examining a nest of writhing grass snakes in a compost heap, Packham took a small model airplane from his pocket and placed it on top of the pile. Then he walked away, moving on to the next segment without any further explanation.

Springwatch presenters Chris Packham, Kate Humble, and Martin Hughes-Games*

Birthday resolutions

I like to make birthday resolutions. They make more sense to me than New Year's resolutions because after your birthday you're starting a whole new year of your life. And a new age requires new dreams and goals. Last week I turned twenty-six. Here are a few of the resolutions I made:

1. Read more poetry—Whitman, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Larkin, Eliot, Lowell...I read a lot of poetry in college, but I've spent a lot of the past couple of years reading novels, novels, novels. Which is great, because of course I love novels, but I think it would be a mistake to neglect reading poetry. This weekend I retrieved my copy of Leaves of Grass from its dusty shelf and I've been happily reading my way through "Inscriptions," "Starting from Paumanok," and "Song of Myself." My Kindle will be arriving next week, and I'm already planning all of the poetry volumes I want to put on it.
2. Read more nonfiction—history, biography, popular science, social science, memoir...nonfiction books provide immeasurable opportunity for learning. As they say, knowledge is power.
3. Draw more—I have a modest collection of art supplies that has been too often neglected over the past couple of years. Vincent van Gogh decided he wanted to be an artist at the age of twenty-six. Why not me too?
4. Finish drafting my novel—Of course. I want to finish my second draft, get some feedback from my beta readers, and edit some more before sending it out to betas again. I want to have had at least one round of feedback by this time next year.
5. Learn Spanish—just because I've always wanted to.

So, what about you, blog reader? Do you like to make plans and set goals—literary or otherwise—around your birthday, or am I the only one?

What I've been doing (not writing, for once!)

 Exploring Scheveningen, the Hague, Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Hanging out in Amsterdam.

 Learning about art.

 And history.

 Meeting this man and his dog.

 Watching the Foo Fighters perform at the Pinkpop Festival in Landgraaf.

Feeling infinite.

 Riding retro bikes around the Hague.

And visiting the Peace Palace, home of the International Court of Justice.

How long should my chapters be?

As I'm revising and rewriting away on my manuscript, I've been thinking a bit about chapter length. What is a good chapter length, and what makes it so? In my WIP, I've noticed that my chapters are getting longer in my second draft. I'm taking what were previously two or more chapters and combining them, so where in my rough draft I had chapters averaging around 2,000 words, I'm now averaging about 3,000 to 4,000 words.

So what are the determiners that decide how long your chapters should be?

Genre

You may have noticed that different genres tend to have different chapter lengths. Literary fiction, with its generally slower pace, its emphasis on character rather than plot, tends to have longer chapters, and sometimes no chapters at all.  The benefit of having longer chapters is that the author can get deep into a character's mind, immersing the reader in that character's world and viewpoint without interruption.

Young adult, which I've been reading a lot of lately, by and large has shorter chapters  (in the YA novel I'm currently reading, Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, the chapters are sometimes only half a page long), as do crime fiction, thrillers, and other fast-paced novels. To have longer chapters in fast-paced books could be exhausting for the reader, and could cause the action to drag. Short, episodic, choppy chapters can add to the sense of excitement in the story, moving the reader through the novel at speed.

(That's not to say that literary fiction doesn't ever have short chapters or action, or that all YA books are fast-paced or have more emphasis on plot than characters. Of course there is plenty of overlap between different genres, and YA alone has lots and lots of subsections—contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, romance, historical, etc.—and authors obviously have their own individual ways of dealing with pace and plot.)

Tension

So much of deciding when to end a chapter depends on finding a great stopping point in a scene—what will make the reader want to continue on to the next chapter? What questions does the ending of the chapter answer, and more importantly, what new questions does it raise? This isn't to say that every single chapter should have a crazy twist at the end or a breath-stopping cliff-hanger—save those for the really important points in the plot—but there have to be enough unanswered questions, enough curiosity evoked in the reader to keep him or her engaged in the story and wanting to continue.

So, writers, do you ever have trouble, as I sometimes do, deciding where to end a chapter? Do you prefer to write short, episodic chapters, or longer, more continuous ones, or does this change depending on what you are writing?

Readers, what sort of chapter length do you like in a novel? What about in a nonfiction book?

Plot versus premise

I'm taking a little break from my World Lit reading, mainly because about eight of my reservations came in at the library at once, and most of them are YA paranormal/fantasy or contemporary novels. So today, I'd like to talk a little about plot and premise.

I've read a lot of work by my fellow aspiring authors over the past few years. Some of this has been for friends or creative writing classmates, and some for my freelance editing work. One problem I see fairly often in beginning writers (it was a problem for me too) is confusion over plot and premise. I think this is because, generally, when you ask someone what a book is about, you are actually asking about the premise, not the plot. Not what happens in the book, but the situation the main character finds himself or herself in.

Example: Katniss, who lives in the dystopian future, is forced to take part in the Hunger Games, a brutal fight to the death with twenty-three other kids as opponents. (Premise.)

Quit your whining

Work is hard. Writing is hard. But cheer up! The sun is shining and the grass is green.

Why alpha readers rock

If you're part of the online writer-blogger community, you've probably heard a lot about beta readers—those friendly, helpful people who read finished drafts of your manuscript and give you feedback. This feedback can range from general impressions to an in-depth picking apart of grammar, mood, pace, character, description, etc.

But there's another kind of reader who can be just as important, and for some just as indispensable: the alpha reader. Alpha readers are slightly different than beta readers in that they don't read the entire manuscript at once, but work with you as you write it, reading scenes or chapters at a time.

Over spring break a couple of weeks back, Big Chimp and I decided to be each other's alpha readers for our current works-in-progress. I have to say, it's been really helpful so far. Though Big Chimp and I first met in a creative writing program and have been working on various creative projects ever since, we've never regularly exchanged work, often finding excuses like "it's not done yet," or "it needs another round of editing."

In our new system, we each write (or edit) a chapter of our novel during the week and submit it to the other person on the weekend. It's only been three weeks, but this system has helped me so much with my WIP that I'm kind of kicking myself that I've never had an alpha reader before. In our first round of exchanges, Big Chimp identified the major flaw in my writing: I've been using too much description—too much showing and not enough telling. This has helped me to see my writing process and how it's evolved over time. In the first draft of my WIP, I concentrated on just getting the story out, flaws and all. As such, I knew there was probably too much telling, too much exposition—something I could fix in the second draft. But when the time came, I went too far in the other direction, ending up with a lot of surface description, but not explaining a lot of the things that needed clarification. Now I'm back to a more natural balance, and my writing is flowing better because of that. But imagine if I hadn't had an alpha reader to keep me on track: it probably would have taken me much longer to realize what was wrong, and I would have had to do even more revision and rewriting.

Reading Big Chimp's work has also benefited me a lot. He's the best writer I know, and I can learn a lot from studying his sentence structure, pacing, and character development. I can only hope that he finds my work as helpful as I find his.

So what about you, writer friends? Do you find alpha and beta readers useful? Do you have a set system or, like me, are you still figuring out what works best for you?