Good day everyone. I have something to ask you all, and I would appreciate your opinions. Recently, I expanded the story within my novel, now this means that the overall outlook has risen dramatically.
For those of you who do not know – I have two storylines running alongside one another a thousand years apart, now – when I write the main story, originally I had parts of the other storyline extracted in, in the forms of dreams (and so were short in length) But I felt this added inconsistency to the story (especially considering the dreams appeared at infrequent times throughout the chapters (in other words – they didn’t all happen at the beginning or end to make it easier to follow, but some appeared half way though whilst others were a third the way through etc. )
What I did was extract the entire smaller storyline (the dreams) and put it into its own section of the book, and each chapter has a dream to it, so when I mention the character having a dream, the reader knows that if they flick to the same chapter number in the added section, they can find the dream. This also stops the breaking up of the main story line, and adds a bit of extra mystery to the world, but at the same time it will dramatically increase the word count when I expand the shorter dreams into chapters.
The two separate storylines are also in separate countries, and so the reader may be confused from going here and there so many years apart, so each country/time period has a section each. I know this is similar to what Tolkien did, as a friend of mine reminded me, but I want to know if it’s doable (or whether I should just add the dreams back into the chapters. Any feedback is appreciated, just say whether you think this change is too drastic, and also feel free to say which way round would be easier to read, as that is what i strive for.
Thanks
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