In yesterday's post , I talked about how good TV shows can help writers develop their story's beginning. Today, I'm concluding with a short talk on how those same TV shows can help writers develop their "commercial breaks" in fiction. What are fiction's commercial breaks? Chapter and scene endings. Just like TV writers need to hook viewers to keep them waiting through commercial breaks to see what happens next, fiction writers need to write riveting chapter and scene endings so that readers will want to flip the page to the next chapter or hurdle their eyes over white space to rush to the next scene. Make those commercial breaks count... In The TV Writer's Workbook: A Creative Approach to Television Scripts , writer Ellen Sandler states that a scene needs a narrative structure and that this structure contains three interconnected elements: the setup (beginning), the power switch or turning point (middle), and the arrow (end). The arrow is wha...

A few weeks ago, I read a wonderful book, Recipe for a Happy Life by Brenda Janowitz, and I realized something. Every time I landed on white space -- between chapters and scenes -- I rushed to get to the next words in the story. Janowitz was obviously doing something right in how she ended her chapters and scenes. Twists, surprises, questions regarding the character's ability to grow, and disasters were some ways in which she chose to end chapters and scenes. Other strategies that writers might incorporate into their stories include revelations, questions left unanswered, and a great piece of dialogue that leaves the reader wondering what the dialogue means. In Aaron Elkins' Writer's Digest article, " Three Ways to Know when to End Your Chapters ," two other ways to consider ending chapters are breaking chapters where shifts in the story occur (change of place, time, or point of view, for example) and breaking "chapters in the heart of the action."...