Novel Revisions: Schizophrenic Chapters
The illustrious Mike Shultz is letting me critique his novel.

I don't typically critique novels because it takes so... dang... much... time, but this one had a premise that intrigued me, and Mike's a good writer, so I knew the process wouldn't be painful.

The entire experience has been incredibly educational. I thought I'd share some of the stuff I'm learning. For example:

Schizophrenic Chapters

Some novel chapters have an inherent sense of cohesion while others feel disoriented, like they're jumping around from topic to topic. The funny thing is, the schizophrenic chapters don't have any more scenes, settings, or characters than the cohesive ones. They just seem to be moving in four directions at once.

It took me a long time to realize that the cohesive chapters had a common thread running through all the mini-scenes. Even though they took place at different locations or with different characters, there was something that linked them all: either a chain of causality, or common theme (e.g. each mini-scene added new information regarding an ongoing mystery, or each mini-scene revolved around the same ongoing conflict).

And--here's the thing that amazed me--it turns out that it's not really very hard to create a common theme for the schizophrenic chapters. They're all part of the same novel, after all. The mini-scenes really are all connected. It's just a matter of emphasizing those connections and drawing the reader's attention to them. Voila! Schizophrenia eliminated.