Quote:
Originally Posted by FizzyWater
I used to belong to an author's Yahoo Group and she mentioned once that she'd been taught never to end a chapter on the end of a scene. The idea was that anytime a reader might close your book - and not be at the end - you risk losing them. I find this rather silly. Like I can't close a book at a scene end, just because it's not a chapter end? I'm not that anal retentive.
One of the authors I read must have been trained by the same person (or read their book/blog/whatever). She ends chapters in places it makes no sense. The middle of a conversation, the middle of an action, it doesn't matter.
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Those are also annoying. I've tried to read James Patterson's
King Tut and he (or whoever actually wrote the story) indeed treated chapter breaks as scene breaks. I stopped reading the book quite quickly because those inappropriate chapter breaks kept throwing my out of the story.
I mean books that actually have a cliffhanger, often life-or-death at the end of almost every chapter. It's exhausting when every chapter quickly builds up to an action scene. I also find that these type of books lack character development, the characters are often charicatures (the action hero, the beautiful AND smart woman or the beautiful AND dangerous woman, the nerd, the evil genius, etc) and there is no real story, just a bunch of action scenes driving the story.