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You can do almost anything if you make it a story. Want to foreshadow something that will happen in chapter 5. That's fine, as long as you do it in the context of a story in chapter 1. A novel is a...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-03T20:41:57Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35637 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T08:38:50Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35637 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T08:38:50Z (over 4 years ago)
You can do almost anything if you make it a story. Want to foreshadow something that will happen in chapter 5. That's fine, as long as you do it in the context of a story in chapter 1. A novel is a long story made up of many smaller stories. Each turn, each event, each incident, is a story in its own right. People will follow what they perceive to be a story. Once you start dumping facts on them that they will need to know for the story you are going to start telling later, you will lose them. That does not mean you can't give them all this information, it just means that you have to do it in the form of a story. If you make it a story, they will follow that story for its own sake. Later they will realize that that earlier story was part of a much larger story, which is want you want. But it has to be a story in its own right at they time they are reading it. Reader's patience is zero. Reader's appetite for story is endless.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-04-27T15:25:42Z (about 6 years ago)
Original score: 11