Why authors break for new chapters, new scenes

Kym-n-Mark are excited to be guest contributors this month to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers' new blog. We're in the middle of a  three-part article with tips for writers on the subject of...

"The Blank Spaces in our Stories"
– The messages writers send readers between the words 

Here's the intro to the series:

As writers, we all spend lots of time thinking about narrative craft – plot, character, setting, dialog – but what about the blank spaces between all those words?

Readers don’t give much thought to those spaces – unless they’re missing. So it’s up to writers to fill the blanks with implied meaning. And it’s part of the unwritten “contract” we create every time we ask a reader to invest storytime with us.

Over the next three posts, we’ll remind fellow writers of the messages they intuitively (and, we hope, intentionally) include in the blank spaces of any good story. It starts at the sentence and paragraph levels, but it builds as we accumulate the sections and chapters of a good tale, and it even plays a role if we decide to expand our universe into multi-book series.

* * *

RMFW's blog will post the second installment on Thursday, Oct. 24, called

Part 2 – Why we break to new scenes or new chapters: The blank spaces between narrative sections
Visit their fab site and our second installment at

at https://www.rmfw.org/blog/