Quick slants for today:
- I need a haircut. Desperately. Thankfully I’ll be getting one tomorrow. Which is about a week and a half later than I usually get one on my typical schedule.
- Chapter 9 of “Echoes” is about 90% done. Of the nine previous parts (“Echoes” has a prologue), this is the longest chapter by far. At last count, Ch9 is a whopping twenty one pages long.
- The danger with anything too long – whether we’re talking about movies, TV shows, books, chapters of books, songs, and even non-fiction – is that there is always a risk that whoever is reading or watching or listening will lose interest due to the sheer demand on their attention span. Once your audience’s attention drops, it’s very difficult to recapture it.
As a writer, you have to be conscious of this danger. Failing to acknowledge this inevitably results in you losing your audience. Obviously, this is the most undesirable condition.
How does one generate, sustain, and keep the audience’s attention? An old college professor of mine who taught creative writing once told us, his class, that conflict and drama are the secret to good fiction. If you are skillful at weaving tension into your plot and are good at describing your characters’ reactions to those tensions, you’re on your way to writing good, interesting fiction.
Joe-Pinions: Scribbles and Sketches 