Princess Update, “Princess” Edition

Last night I finished something, and I decided something.

Chapters and Parts

In a published book, you’ve got lots of divisions you can make. “Chapters” are fairly obvious and widely used; sometimes a book is divided into “Parts” or “Books”, either numbered (Book One, or Part Two) or named (Random fantasy book off the shelf – The Dragonbone Chair – part one is titled “Simon Mooncalf”) (Or Mistborn is another example). There are also scenes, which are more of a hidden division. Sometimes one scene is a chapter; sometimes a chapter contains several scenes. I’m not going to go into what a scene is, as this post is long and other people have done it better.

So far, I’ve been writing Princess scene by scene. This is good for me – it keeps me focused on what has to happen to move the plot forward, and there’s a defined beginning middle and end so I stay on track. And although many of the scenes I’ve written will be fleshed out with more description in draft 1.5, they’re still on the shortish side to be chapters in their own right (often hovering just over 1k words).

So I’ve been thinking, as I write – not with any seriousness, don’t freak out, not getting ahead of myself – just idly, about where I would break up chapters. What scene endings have that powerful punch that will keep my readers racing on through the next chapter. (Not having a lot of luck, by the way)

And then I sort of thought about my “Act” divisions.

The Four-Act Story Arc