Everything to know about writing a cell phone novel. Learn about the structures and styles of one of the biggest literary movement from Japan. An in-depth guides on how to write your own cell phone novels - with the contribution of some veteran CPN...
For a lot of beginners, it's good to experiment with a lot of different styles and layouts for your story. Try new things! But remember, please try to keep it simple and legible enough for those to read. Because cell phone novels are often written in a way that is very similar to pose poetry, it's good to experiment with the placing of your line breaks. Now it's time to talk about line breaks, white space, and the impact that both of these have on your story.
Let's start with white space! White space is essentially just the surrounding area of your text. If you write on a green background, I suppose it could be called "green space", but people really just call it white space no matter what color background you use. Though white space is typically associated with writing poetry, when it appears in your story it's mainly used to determine the pace and rhythm of your text.
From a poetic point of view, when your text appears to the left, with white space on the right side, it becomes more associated to prose rather than poetry. A lot of cell phone novels are traditionally written this way, and the "stanzas" are very easily viewed as paragraphs.
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If your text is centered, it can create more of an impact than having the text to the right. When the text is in the center of the page, with white space on either side, it subconsciously makes the reader more attentive to the story. Now, if you have your text to the right side, with white space on the left, it can oftentimes be perceived as being very difficult to read. No matter which way you go, white space is good to use as an outline! But it's always good to experiment!
Now let's move onto the importance of line breaks! A line break is when the author chooses to end a line in order to start a new one. You can also break a line in the middle of a word.
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Line breaks can affect the way you read a story and it can be used to affect the emotions, to signal movement, or create rhyme within the text. Line breaks can give the author more freedom in their story because there really isn't a limit to what you can do with it. The only tip I'll offer here is to use this power wisely. Make sure your writing is legible to read!
