Because he’s apparently on a winning streak, Chris Butcher continues his must-read blog posts by taking Queenie Chan’s breakdown of structure for The Dreaming to task:

I’ve re-read her essay a number of times and I can only assume that she’s serious, and that she firmly believes that adhering to a three-act structure actually means that each physical book needs to be an ‘act’ of the story. I can only call this a spectacular failure of imagination on the part of her or her editor… Where’s the rule that says the acts have to rigidly adhere to your publisher’s formatting decisions? Because in any sort of creative writing class I’ve taken, I have to admit to never encountering that rule. The fact that Queenie-chan, and seemingly other OEL creators have accepted this as gospel truth of pacing is a little upsetting.

As always with links to Chris’s stuff, much more in the link. Outside of his objections, though, Queenie’s essay is well worth a read by itself, and not least because of her complaints about her own work:

To be true, nobody complained about that aspect of “The Dreaming” vol1 to my knowledge (except me), but I thought vol1 was too long, and it’s a flaw that I couldn’t fix as long as I used the three-act structure. I could have slashed 1-2 chapters off book 1, but that would require the story flow to change, meaning people reading book 2 for the first time is going to be thrown for a loop since the story structure would be slightly different to book 1. Obviously, conformity across all three volumes is more important, and besides, I had to hand in at least 150 pages for a book to be complete.

Johanna Draper Carlson has already commented on Chan’s admission as part of her Essential Reading for Young Creators:

I found her analysis fascinating, because I thought her story was damaged by the publication strategy. I liked The Dreaming, but I thought the second book was just more of the same, filling out the middle section until we were allowed to start seeing some of the answers and conclusions in next year’s book three. It wasn’t a bad read, but it wasn’t, in my opinion, filling enough to justify the wait of a year and the $10 price. Atmosphere and mood will only get you so far; given that this is a mystery, I thought the reader should have been given one or two answers in this volume instead of saving them all up to the end… It’s also interesting to see other Tokyopop creators complain in the comments about needing four books to wrap up their stories. I see that Marvel (with their six-issue-no-we’re-going-to-need-seven miniseries) isn’t the only publisher who doesn’t know how long the series will be when they start.

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