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Kevin Wilson's avatar

What is your view, or the general consensus, on serialising scenes as opposed to chapters?

I've written two unpublished novels, one of 110,000 words and the second ending up at 300,000 words.

A quarter way through my second novel, I thought it a good idea to have the protagonist and her story run through every alternative chapter, while the intervening chapters are told from the perspective from someone else, and in most cases loosely linked to the main plot, but mainly running their own sub-plots.

Using Scrivener, I allocated 4 scenes per chapter. Now that I want to serialise the novels, my opening question comes to mind. Will this work, or will the stories lose momentum, if the main plot is dealt with for 4 weeks with a 4 week break while something else is delved into for another 4 weeks and so on?

It all comes together towards the end, and I've created sufficient curiosity at the end of each scene. The thing is a sub-plot might be paced over 4 parts of the 300k book.

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Gareth Southwell's avatar

OK, so my book is already written, and the average length of my chapters is much higher than 1200. The shortest is 1800, most fall somewhere between 2k and 4k, and the longest is just under 6k. Now the issue I have with this is that I've created the chapters to help structure the story. It's quite complicated, with different settings/timelines and character narratives, so grouping scenes together in chapters and parts helps with reader comprehension. If I were to break down chapters into separate scenes, then I would risk losing the reader. What do you think?

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