Four scenes or a chapter?

Four scenes or a chapter？

It’s a little hard to do a word count this week as I finished one chapter and then the next one but I think it comes to around 6000 words.

I’ve been doing things a little differently the last couple chapters. Up till now I have just been going off my scene list and writing scene by scene which was an effective way to do it. The last two chapters however I have been writing in chapter format. The new chapter follows the scene list of course but also includes the transitions which I will not have really done for the first chapters until I go over them again, put all the scenes together and then smooth them out.

 

I don’t know that one method is better than the other. Writing scene by scene allows you to focus on each scene as it comes. The downside is that you don’t always see the big picture and occasionally might not see where an extra scene is needed to move the story from point A to point B. The chapter method is a bit bigger in the sense that by the end you have 11-12 pages down in front of you and can scroll up and down to see that it all joins together and makes sense.

 

I presume some writers just bang out the story without thinking first about scenes and plot and they’ll look for that later when they are rewriting but I’ve found I can’t really work that way. I prefer to know where I am going with something ahead of time. This also allows me to work in clues or references to later things without having to go back to inorganically insert those mentions into the story.

 

But the short version is the story is going on. I think there are another 3-4 chapters at most before the first draft is done and version 1.1 rewrite begins.

 

For my research this week, I read Timothy Zahn’s latest Thrawn novel, Starwars: Thrawn. Timothy Zahn is an excellent writer with over forty books published but he is most remembered for his Thrawn trilogy. Back in 1991, Thrawn wrote the first book of the “Heirs to the Empire” trilogy that surprised everyone by getting to 2^nd place on the New York Times bestseller list. This basically restarted interest in Star wars and laid the foundation for the expanded universe of books, games, prequel movies and even the new movies. Apparently the character of Thrawn became official again when they used him in Star wars Rebels so they asked Timothy Zahn to write a new official “canon” story about him.

 

The book itself is quite good. My e-reader lists it at 363 pages and I finished it in 3-4 days so it definitely was a page-turner. Seeing how Thrawn orchestrates events and gets out of his jams is always fun and the other main character has an interesting enough story of rising to political power in the Empire. Mr. Zahn is careful to make Thrawn not overtly evil and only doing his job as he sees it under the Empire.

 

The problem is that there is not really anyone to root for. Only Thrawn’s sidekick is really the only innocent character but he doesn’t really do anything other than tag along with Thrawn so you can’t really root for him. The book is really full of anti-heros with anything resembling a rebel eventually getting arrested or killed. So the book is enjoyable reading but the story puts the reader in a quandary? Are we supposed to be cheering on Emperor Palpatine and his underlings?

 

My other issue to the story is that it is obviously a tie-in to the Star Wars Rebels TV series. There are a lot of characters and plotlines who make an appearance but don’t really get an ending. I presume that they appear in the TV series.

 

Spoiler alert: The main story itself doesn’t really have an ending either other than Thrawn goes to see the emperor again and is introduced to Darth Vader which apparently is supposed to be a thing since Thrawn knew Anakin Skywalker during the clone wars. However, the book doesn’t give us the back story between them so this meeting doesn’t really seem to be that big a deal to the reader other than the author saying “AHA look Darth Vader is here but he doesn’t know it’s Anakin Skywalker.”

 

The plot of the story itself kind of meanders around as it pretty much follows Thrawn on his way up through the Imperial Navy from lieutenant to Admiral and the other main story is following someone from a nobody to a Governor.

 

In all it was an enjoyable read and a throwback to the old expanded universe books. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys the Star Wars universe or the character of Thrawn.