Want some #verisimilitude for your post-apocalyptic story? Four years after the pandemic started, 7 out of 7 examined #battery-powered candles had burst batteries. 3 out of 7 had destroyed circuitry and were irreparable. I restored four of the candles to working order with a lot of cleaning and scrubbing, but of course they required fresh #batteries.
Takeaway: Nothing battery-powered left for four years will work when found. Much of it will be destroyed.
Bonus: Gasoline has a shelf life and may be useless in 6-12 months. Sorry, no verisimilitude in Mad Max.
So I try and give writing advice because I enjoy it, however, I don’t know everything and I would like to ask for your advice on this topic. I received some feedback from a beta reader, not to end my chapters with dialogues and when I tried to look up what other people's opinions were, I couldn't get a clear reason.
Before I begin, I want to state that I don’t hate my beta reader, I think they did a fine job. I just want to understand the no dialogue endings as maybe it’s a rule within the writing community which I missed.
Some of the points that my beta reader gave me are that it feels like the chapters end mid-conversation, it’s annoying, and repetitive (to be fair I did it a lot).
In my beta reader's opinion, a chapter should end with one of the following: a surprise, a promise, a question (that’s not huh?), humour or themes. I don’t disagree with these statements, I’m just curious why can’t a chapter ending with a dialogue still address one of those points?
To answer your question, eleven out of 15 chapters ended with dialogues. Yeah I can tone it back a little but my beta reader said they could only handle one or two chapters ending with dialogue so I asked the question, does this come down to reader preference or am I missing something in the writing community? I tried looking this up but couldn’t find anyone giving me a good reason to not end chapters with a dialogue. What are your thoughts?
Huh? Never in 50 years I've been writing have I heard that.
What the beta reader is correct about is that the dialogue or whatever at the end of the chapter needs to end with something to make the reader breathlessly turn the page. My opinion.
I write first person, so my narration is practically dialogue, but ending a chapter with...
She spun around. "Oh, shit? Was that a cannon blast?"