December 5, 2005
I'm not sure I actually have anything insightful to say about this topic. More like a plea for feedback.

I like books with short chapters. The Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker are a good example. They're almost always just one scene. I know that Robert Walker argues that a scene is a scene, not a chapter, but I'm not going to get into a pissing contest with him on the subject. Short chapters to me are like potato chips--you can't eat just one. Still, they give a book a different feel.

The Derek Stillwater novels are generally written in very short chapters, which are typically short scenes. I realize there are exceptions to it, the first chapter of The Devil's Pitchfork being one. I wanted something cinematic. I have one of the characters at the scene of the crime, if you will, where the terrorists are going to attack and steal the bioweapon. I wanted to set the scene and show the character and the scene is very important because it's a Level 4 biohazard facility, which is quite unique in the world of laboratories, and I wanted to show how difficult it would be for people to get in and out of these places--card locks, multiple airlocks, alarms, etc., and that's just the internal facility. At the same time, the terrorists are making their assault in three white panel vans, and I wanted to simultaneously show them approaching and build up suspense, so I intercut the interior scenes with a paragraph or two from the pov of the vans, ending with something along the lines of, "They were ten minutes out... they were five minutes out..."

Also, these are multiple pov, and I have some concerns about taking the reader too far from the main character, Derek Stillwater. Derek is the pov character in just about every other scene/chapter--intentionally. But in order to tell the particular story I wanted to tell, I needed to go to other places with other people, but I wanted the readers to know that, yes, Derek is the hero, he's the main character.

I'm working on a thriller now, and I'm carefully and intentionally choosing it to be told entirely from the main character's point of view. It could be told from multiple povs like the Stillwater novels, but I'm intentionally trying to do something different and for specific reasons--that is to say, I want them to be exciting, but I don't really want the reader to know more than Joanna does. Joanne has a very specific job to do--protect her client. But she doesn't know exactly why she's protecting him or from who (or whom?), and part of the story is how she unravels those mysteries and how her client knows more than she does but doesn't trust her and it's how their relationship evolves that partly helps unravel the mysteries.

I want, particularly in the book, the reader to feel like they're in her shoes, so to speak, but without the baggage or restrictions of a first-person narrative. (I could go on at length about that choice, but not today). And for some reason that is not completely understood consciously, I'm writing longer chapters. Now by that, I mean 10 or 15 pages, not some 120 page Tom Clancy chapter--that's madness and I really don't like that kind of structure. It's more of a gut feeling kind of thing, a choice to structure tham a bit different than the Derek Stillwater novels, to have cliffhangers that are internal parts of the chapters as well as at chapter endings.

Any thoughts?

Best,
Mark Terry