Week 27: Goodbye July

It’s week twenty-seven of 2026—we are officially over halfway through the year! How’s the writing going these days? And how do you feel about what you’ve gotten done? I’ve had a very productive first half of the year, and I’m about to slow down in the second half. If you haven’t yet accomplished what you’d hoped, you should first gently ask yourself if those goals were realistic or if they were derailed by unexpected life events. If you still feel that you could have hit your writing goals, try reframing the first part of the year as a fallow or warm-up period—and now you’ve stored up energy for a good chunk of work in the coming months.

Today’s newsletter will be short (though I do have a very meaty new Novel Study post for you below) because I am in the final painful stages of my last in-depth revision of my next Novel Study book. And I’m heading out on vacation this coming week, a vacation I have earned at least three times over in the past few weeks!

As much as I love living in San Francisco, I’m not a fan of our summers, when a blanket of chilly gray fog descends over the city most days. Planning an outdoor activity in the summer here involves checking a specialized weather app that tracks microclimates, surveying the western horizon for the status of the fog bank, and packing both a warm knit beanie and a ball cap. Locals rename the summer months “June Gloom” and “Fogust”; our family has added “Goodbye July” because we usually plan our fog escapes for this month. Scroll down to the Thing of Joy for a little taste of SF fog—maybe it will help those of you suffering under a heat dome feel cooler!

Thank you for all of the compliments on the Intruder Deep Dive. And apologies to those of you who wrestled with the interface for actually getting to the copy. I’ve changed the way it downloads, so if you gave up last time, please try again. It’s free!

How Layne Fargo uses chapter endings to control a novel's intensity

The Favorites is a long novel—over four hundred pages, stretching across five parts—and it is packed with drama: ten different competitions over fifteen years, plus breakups, betrayals, reconciliations, and life-threatening injuries. Layne Fargo orchestrates the intensity and pacing quite carefully across this long, complex plot, which follows the romantic and ice-dancing partnership of Kat and Heath. She uses her chapter endings to telegraph that intensity to her readers, and that's what I'll be examining here.

Fargo's endings are rarely quiet or neutral. Across the novel's chapters and documentary interludes, only twelve have a neutral ending, while forty-five chapters end with cliff-hangers, and the remaining eighty-seven chapters end with what I call "resonators."

To start, let's look briefly at the overall structure of the novel. The novel has five parts—1: The Hopefuls, 2: The Rivals, 3: The Champions, 4: The Game, and 5: The Last Time. A different novel with simpler themes and goals might have followed the classic three-act structure we think we see named in The Hopefuls (rising action), The Rivals (complication), and The Champions (the triumphant climax), but Fargo offers up a more complex, nuanced plot in which all of the major characters must reconcile what they think they want with what they really need—and do so under relentless scrutiny from one another, as well as from the press and the public. This is especially true of the protagonist Kat, and Fargo uses part breaks to name and mark important shifts in Kat's character arc as well as her shifting goals and alliances.

Keep reading…

I love speaking to writers and editors—check out my Speaking page or reply to this email if you are interested in having me speak to your group.

Our Thing of Joy this week: As promised, a video of San Francisco’s fog in action (Instagram). Did you know the fog has a name? Well, it does, and it happens to be Karl (Bluesky). We named our shyest cat after him.

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.

Kristen