Did some initial editing of the chapter mentioned in my last few posts. I caught some grammar mistakes and got rid of unnecessary filler words and cliches. I reduced the usage of generic descriptions and switched most to more specific ones. Pacing & momentum are about 3 times better than my pre-Autocrit average score. It's still pretty rough and raw, it definitely needs more polishing. But it's coming together.
Had a friend read the chapter today and give me some feedback. I have some concerns about the overall structure of the chapter. There's a lot going on. In some ways, I can see it should be a split into 2 to 4 chapters, possibly based on POV (point-of-view) telling the story in the chapter. In other ways of looking at it, it's one journey and one transformative process for the main character in the chapter. To quote them, "I don't know whether it needs to be separate chapters or all better integrated together. Right now, it seems somewhere between the two." Couldn't have said it better myself.
Book 1 is a collection of letters, entries in historical annals of a family or
realm, official government documents, diaries, interviews,
tales and songs. Different parts of the story are told (I hope) appropriately to the chosen form that story portion was historically recorded in. Diaries tend to be more 1st person with interior thoughts. Tales tend to be more 3rd person omniscient but also with a more poetic form of expression and word choice than a letter, and certainly more so than an annal entry or government document. It's my hope that the different characters who provided written portions of the story have a different enough "voice" when all is said and done. I.e., their sentence structure, word choice, the type of things they focus on, etc., would vary based on the person who recorded that portion of the story. I know I've done a good job on some of Book 1; I expect I haven't on other parts. That's what editing is for!
Some of the chapters are translations of long, epic tales. Because the tales are long, I need to subdivide them into chapters. But I want it completely clear they are all one tale. I've done this using several mechanisms. Heading level One is reserved for Chapter headings. The Tale's title is a Heading 1. Heading level 2, i.e., the heading nested underneath a Heading 1, is reserved for Canto sub-titles. In the page header, I always include the chapter name. If it's a canto, I have the chapter name followed by a colon, then followed by the canto name.
A typical chapter heading and page header for it.
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A typical chapter containing cantos, this is a chapter heading and first canto heading on the same page:
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Typical canto heading and page header:
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Cantos are not appropriate for this chapter as it's not a tale. It's composed of two letters and two interviews. Initially, I used an asterism and a simple From (Character Name): on the next line. Well, technically, an asterism should have three asterisks in a triangular form. I'm not happy with this transition, it's not visual enough. One option would be to make the
From (Character Name): element in bold and a bit bigger font:
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This is from a different chapter where I'm experimenting with a dinkus (a horizontal graphical element used as a separator) when the POV changes. The intent (if I stick with this motif) is to devise a different dinkus for each POV. Right now, I'm just using the same one each time:
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So, you can see I've put a lot of thought into the visual layout.
Would love some good ideas on how to improve the visual cues to a change of POV.
I still have more editing to do on this chapter, but I need to let the current work and my thoughts about it percolate for a bit. I'm ready to write new material for the next chapter, so that's what I'm doing now.
I have a page & a half written in the follow-up chapter and another half-page of things to include and the order to include them.
