Is it a good idea to start each chapter with a snippet from a fictional book?
I am writing a fantasy story in a medieval-like time. There is a lot of information I want to share with my readers, but I feel if I incorporate it all in the main story it will make it to long and tedious to read. So the idea I'm having now is to start each chapter with a few lines to explain things and this will be in the form of pieces of a fictional book that exists in that world. Is this a good thing to do, or will readers get irritated by the snippets? I will make them relevant to the chapters they are in.
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As long as "a few words" is less than 50, sure, go for it. It's additional interstitial information which can be useful to the reader, or can at least add background and flavor.
More than two paragraphs about the Merovingian boll weevil will probably annoy people, so keep it brief. If you need more than that, either make it a prologue or find some way for a cabbagehead character to look up the information.
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Opening extracts or poems give a slightly old-fashioned feel to a book, so if that's the goal, it could work. In Dune, the extracts are a constant reminder that this is a story of an epic struggle in future history. However, if the point is to shoehorn in more information, the beginning of a chapter is not the best place to do it. If the information is vital, demonstrate it in the body of the story somehow.
Authors often add lengthy exposition because "the reader needs to know this." But it's surprising how much the reader can infer without being told, and removing such long, dry passages can greatly improve the pace of your novel.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/20851. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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