Tag Archives: Mike Romeo series

Writing for Short Attention Spans

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by James Scott Bell

My new Romeo thriller, Romeo’s World, is live today. Like all the others, it does not have chapters. It has scenes, as long or short as they need to be. Each scene is set off with a drop cap, like this (click to enlarge):

I find this freeing and cinematic (as in “jump cuts” to move to another scene).

In the thriller market, short, numbered chapters roared into fashion with Mr. James Patterson, who I predict will break out soon. I wrote my Try series this way, each book with well over one hundred chapters. I now find it a bit absurd to have a TOC with 191 chapters listed, like one would expect a reader to think, “Gosh, I want to read Chapter 148 again. It was so good!”

So I don’t do the number thing, though in a future stand-alone I might. Either way, we’re all dealing with shorter attention spans these days.

A recent PW article reported on the move in Middle Grade fiction toward shorter books:

In recent years, educational surveys, sales data, and anecdotal evidence from teachers and librarians have all pointed to the same discouraging fact: that the share of kids ages nine and up reading for pleasure is at a record low.

***

Conversations in middle grade have increasingly gravitated toward length. Page counts under 200 are cropping up more frequently on fall and spring lists.

“We have a new type of kid now,” says author and agent Jackie Garcia-Morales at Storm Literary Agency. “They’re reading, but they’re reading in different ways—the simplest form being memes and GIFs. In that in-between age of middle grade, they’re moving away not only from longer books but also from longer-form videos and entertainment.”

***

[Krista Vitola, executive editor at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers] echoes that sentiment. “Kids have so many time constraints and competing interests, including sports and other activities. They don’t have those long windows to get lost in books like previous generations had.” Creating books that can be read in shorter stretches is a strategy for helping them fit reading in.

All that applies to adults, too, does it not? We’re all on our phones 17/7, more if we have insomnia. Who has time and attention to just sit and “get lost in a book” anymore?

A commercial novel can be long, of course (looking at you JK “Robert Galbraith” Rowling), so long as the author knows how to make readers want/need to turn the page (a subject for another time). Like The Martian by Andy Weir, which started as an indie project and comes in at a hefty 105k words.

I write in the pulp tradition, which means crisp, fast-moving stories, rarely over 80k.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Now over to you. Do your books have an average length? Do you think “shorter,” or just let the words fall as they may?

How’s your reading time these days? When was the last time you got lost in a book for over an hour?

How Long Should a Chapter Be?

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Some years ago I was at the dentist for a cleaning, and along the way the hygienist asked, “So what do you do?”

“I’m a writer,” I said.

“Oh? What do you write?”

“Thrillers.”

“I love thrillers…”

I knew what was coming next, and was powerless to stop it.

“…Have I heard of you?”

The answer to that is always No. So I changed things up a bit.

“Have you heard of James Patterson?” I asked.

“Yes!”

“Well, I’m not him.” 

At least she chuckled. Then I told her my name. Shocker: she hadn’t heard of me. So I gave her my author card. She leaned me back in the chair.

In a low voice, she said, “I know the secret of why James Patterson’s books are bestsellers.”

“Do tell,” I said, hungry to find out what a reader deems the magic elixir. 

“He writes really short chapters,” she said. 

By gum (pun intended), she got it. At least part of it. For Mr. Patterson is the writer who has unapologetically used the short chapter to help create a sense of propulsion, of page-turning momentum. 

Indeed, in a Patterson it’s not uncommon to read what would usually be a 1500 word chapter broken up into three or four numbered units. So a book with 30 chapters might actually come out to be 120 when published. Which raises the question, How long should a chapter be?

Of course, the answer is it all depends on your strategy. For thrillers, short chapters control pace. A more literary approach might go the other direction. 

My first Ty Buchanan legal thriller, Try Dying, has 127 numbered chapters. They are of varying lengths, but the gist is that I wanted it to move fast. Still, I was slightly embarrassed by this, as looking at a TOC with numbers 1 – 127 is almost comical. 

Andrew Vachss

Then I read a thriller by Andrew Vachss, who had one of the cooler thriller-author pics around. And I was pleasantly surprised to find he didn’t use chapters at all. Just a series of scenes set off by a drop cap. It looks like this (from Footsteps of the Hawk):

I liked it so much that all of my Mike Romeo thrillers are done in this fashion. Indeed, I was pleased to read an Amazon review the other day that said this: I particularly like the format of simply starting the next scene with a little space and a large initial cap. I write in scenes, and this allows me to be cinematic and use a “smash cut” or “jump cut” between them.

I note, however, that this only works in First Person POV. Otherwise, the reader would become confused as to who the viewpoint character is in a given scene.

A helpful article on chapters says:

Short chapters are good for plot-centered novels with fast pacing and suspense. They are also used in novels with longer chapters to interject action that takes place away from the main plot, perhaps to let readers in on something the main character doesn’t know.

The dangers in writing a lot of short chapters include underdeveloped characters and a plot that twists and turns too quickly for readers to absorb and enjoy it.

Long chapters are good for epic drama, for world-building with background, and for developing characters at a leisurely pace. The danger lies in bogging down the reader with excessive description, tedious monologues, and inadvertent repetition.

Chapters of any length are most effective when they form a satisfying unit in themselves and end at a natural break in the action or story in a way that invites the reader to continue.

So, writing friends, I ask, do you have a strategy for your chapters? Do you like a standard length? Does genre play a part in this? Have at it in the comments!

A Risk Worth Taking

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I was reading in the back yard when Mrs. B came out to let me know that L.A. was in for two days of rain.

Without missing a beat I said, “Spahn and Sain and two days of rain.”

Cindy said, “What?”

“Spahn and Sain and two days of rain.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

I told her.

Back in my Little League days, when I was in love with baseball, the Dodgers, and Sandy Koufax in particular, I did a lot of reading in baseball history. In 1948, the Boston Braves were in a tight pennant race. They had two ace pitchers that year, Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain. In those days, ball clubs used four starting pitchers on a rotating basis. If only, fans mused, we could play the remaining games with our two stars doing all the pitching.

The sports editor of the Boston Post, Gerald V. Hern, set this hope in verse:

First, we’ll use Spahn,
Then we’ll use Sain,
Then an off day,
Followed by rain.

Back will come Spahn
Followed by Sain
And followed,
We Hope,
By two days of rain.

Johnny Sain and Warren Spahn

Now, who but a baseball nut from the past would know this? Bob Costas would know it. Vin Scully knew it. Yea, verily, most die-hard fans of the era would. Warren Spahn is a Hall of Famer, one of the greatest pitchers of all time. He won 363 games (winning 300 is an automatic ticket to the Hall of Fame) even though, incredibly, he missed three full seasons serving in World War II. In that capacity he won a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for action at the Battle of the Bulge.

Johnny Sain had a fine career, with 1948 as the highlight, when he was runner-up as the league’s MVP (Stan “The Man” Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals won it). He also served three years in the Navy during the war. After his retirement he became one of the best pitching coaches in the game.

So why did I want my lovely wife to know this bit of trivia? Well, because it’s part of me and my experience, my interests, my memories of love (baseball). I wanted to share it with her, have her experience the joy with me.

And that’s why I drop historical or philosophical references in my Romeo books. Those interest Mike, they’re part of him. No surprise they interest me, too, and I want to share them with my readers.

But to do so, there must be a story reason for it, and it must flow seamlessly into the narrative. Most often Mike will do this in dialogue, as with his young charge at the beach, Carter “C Dog” Weeks.

Almost always Mike explains the reference. But sometimes he’ll drop a reference and move on. It’s a risk, for the reader may be stopped short (this is not a Seinfeld reference) and wonder what it means.

And that might induce the reader to take a moment to look it up. In the “old days” to do that would be a cumbersome process of finding a dictionary or encyclopedia to seek it out. But now a couple of clicks will get you there in nothing flat.

I’m okay with that. Indeed, I get the occasional email telling me something like, “I didn’t know about ___, but looked it up. That’s pretty cool!” Indeed, Dick Francis once remarked, “If you can teach people something, you’ve won half the battle. They want to keep on reading.”

Now, I’m always mindful of doing too much of this. It can easily be overdone. In fact, editing my next Romeo, I read one of these excursions that I found entirely fascinating. But it just felt like too much. So I cut it. This was killing a darling, but we all know sometimes we must.

John D. MacDonald’s famous series character, Travis McGee, would occasionally offer personal musings about something, like what land speculators were doing in Florida or what the city of San Francisco used to be like (one wonders what ol’ Trav would think now). A few readers and critics made a minor complaint about this, but I think the larger majority—which includes yours truly—enjoyed them. They gave a deeper insight into the character.

That’s why I think it’s worth the risk.

So what risks have you taken in your writing? How’d it work out?

NOTE: I’m traveling today but will check in as I can. Cheers!