On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [64]
With rare exceptions, each scene should have one—and only one—well-defined point of view (we'll discuss point of view in greater detail in chapter eleven).
Every scene must have at least one major purpose or goal, and preferably several minor purposes as well. If you can't state what the purpose of the scene is, it may be merely occupying space instead of advancing the plot. Each scene should be an essential part of the story, furthering the relationship between the main characters. If cutting a scene wouldn't seriously wound the book, then it shouldn't be there in the first place.
Scenes differ in length according to their relative importance in the story. A scene may be no more than a single page long; a chapter may contain several such short scenes. But a scene may also be so important that it fills an entire chapter. It might even carry over from one chapter to the next, breaking for tin-chapter end at an exciting or dramatic point and then picking up at the start of the next chapter, perhaps from a different point of view.
The break from one scene to another within a chapter is marked typographically by an extra blank line—a white space that alerts readers to expect a change in time, place, or point of view. (Adding a few crosshatches or asterisks to the blank line ensures that it will not be overlooked in editing or typesetting.)
Chapters
In many kinds of fiction, each scene is simply assigned a number, and no matter how long or short, the scene functions as a chapter. The book might have dozens of chapters, some a page or two long and some running to fifteen or twenty pages.
In category romance, the rules tend to be a little more rigid, with the book divided into roughly equal chapters, each of which contains one or more scenes. The average length of a chapter in category romance is 5,000 words, though that's not a rule.
The number of chapters varies according to the romance category, and some are more definite in their guidelines than others. Typically, a short romance will have ten to twelve chapters, while long contemporaries might have seventeen to twenty, and historicals might have twenty-five or more. Single-title and mainstream romance novels, like general fiction, vary widely in the number and length of their chapters.
While each scene is a well-defined unit of time, location, and point of view, a chapter can be much more expansive. A single chapter that includes several scenes might cover a span of days or even months.
The chapter is a convenient, if somewhat artificial, unit of storytelling. Each chapter is another step in the characters' upward climb, another section of the story. Unlike nonfiction, in which chapters are neatly constructed packages and each is independent of the others, in fiction each chapter ends with another twist in the plot, leading into the next chapter and making it difficult for readers to put the book down. In romance, that chapter-ending twist usually relates to both main characters.
Important Action
All of the important action in a story should be shown directly to the readers through scenes, either as it occurs or through the characters' later discussion or reflection. Crucial events should not happen in the white space—the time that passes between the book's scenes (so called because of the literally blank or white line that indicates the scene change).
Important action should not be summarized. Many writers come up to a moment of high drama and then dodge it, writing something like, "Later, when things had settled down. ..." It's usually far better to show crucial action as it happens, moment by moment.
Conflict is uncomfortable for most people to observe and to write, but the hard-to-write, action-filled, uncomfortable moments are the memorable ones that make the readers feel they're really there.
Structure
Though scenes and chapters aren't equivalent, they have certain things in common, like the need for an attention-catching beginning and an intriguing end.
The start of each