{"id":180,"date":"2013-07-23T16:03:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T16:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/blog\/2013\/07\/23\/tactical-tuesday-advice-for-self-editing_23\/"},"modified":"2015-11-25T12:22:17","modified_gmt":"2015-11-25T19:22:17","slug":"tactical-tuesday-advice-for-self-editing_23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/tactical-tuesday-advice-for-self-editing_23\/","title":{"rendered":"Tactical Tuesday: Advice for Self-Editing"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\nI\u2019ve had a lot of<br \/>\nquestions lately regarding scenes and chapter breaks. While there is no<br \/>\nsteadfast rule with regard to where a scene break should occur or when the<br \/>\nstory should advance to another chapter, here is a little food for thought.<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\nIn a contemporary<br \/>\nromance, if the events in two scenes occur during the same day, giving each<br \/>\npoint-of-view (POV) character a scene is fun to do. This does not mean that the<br \/>\nevents have to occur at the same time or in the same place. Actually, if the<br \/>\nevent is one and the same, and the POV character is switched, a good<br \/>\nself-editor will review the scenes to determine if there actually needs to be<br \/>\nany break at all.<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\nWhen reviewing<br \/>\nsuch scenes, and for all scenes, the first question to ask is, \u201cWhich character<br \/>\nhas the most to win or to lose in the scene?\u201d That character should be the POV<br \/>\ncharacter.<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\nIf the story is<br \/>\nromantic suspense and the villain requires a POV on that same day, an author<br \/>\nmay do one of two things: if the villain\u2019s POV doesn\u2019t require a specific<br \/>\nemphasis, allow it to be the third scene for that chapter. If the villain is<br \/>\nparticularly devious or the author wants to let him standout a bit, the villain<br \/>\nmay actually be given his own scene.<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\nIf a scene occurs<br \/>\nin the same day, but the actions of the hero or heroine are removed a bit from<br \/>\nthe last scene or if that scene requires emphasis, this might be a good place<br \/>\nfor a chapter break.&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\nAs you can see,<br \/>\nscene and chapter breaks are decisions that can work to build an author\u2019s<br \/>\nvoice.&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\nThe one mistake an author wants to check against is a tendency to be<br \/>\nepisodic and to include smaller scenes of a paragraph or so. When an author finds a number of short scenes like this, he should look for areas where that information can easily be integrated to scenes<br \/>\nthat come before or after.<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\n<\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-indent: 0in;\">\nHappy editing.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve had a lot of questions lately regarding scenes and chapter breaks. While there is no steadfast rule with regard to where a scene break should occur or when the story should advance to another chapter, here is a little food for thought. In a contemporary romance, if the events in two scenes occur during [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[504],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editing-writing-advice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pelicanbookgroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}