Page 248 of a novel is generally regarded as its most important page.

In James Davies’ seminal work on the novel form, Flow Chart: Building a Novel From the Ground, he argues that 248 is not only an essential “volta” for the book, it is the lynchpin that the entire textual foundation rests upon.

Page 248 is a quirky thing, no doubt. Its dimensions are different, for one thing. The 8 1/2 X 9 format (developed by Marty Cohen of Knopf in the mid-50s) has stumped writers and publishers for years. Cohen’s idea was that 248 should be designed so that it was “advertised” or “stressed,” and this has created situations where a word will sometimes end in mid-syllable and then pick up again on 249. The cut of 248 does indeed make it stand out in the common book, as Cohen hoped, but the difficulty becomes making the page bend into the narrative itself. There are ways around the Cohen Cut: Stuart Crosby came up with the ingenious idea of “wrapping” the text by using arrows from 248 to -49; the critic Rebecca Hahn suggested folding 248 into 249, making what she called an “envelope situation” inside the book, so that the pages unfurled when turned and the narrative almost became a volitional thing during the act of reading. Some writers, such as the essayist Natalia Gilbert, have suggested defacing 248 in protest (with ink, with saliva, with liquid paper). This tack, in this writer’s opinion, is unwise.  

Many writers have thrown out the analogy of 248 being a kind of precipice, a “shelf” that can act as a resting point for the writer or as a jumping-off point for a new idea. The science-fiction writer George Hope never wrote 248 in English, even though he was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Every Hope 248 was written in a peculiar alien venacular that lacked vowels.  

Essentially what one must do, if he wants to use 248 in the correct way, is to leave it blank except for the sentences that are supposed to go there. A quick look around at the famous 248’s (Brett Fields’s I Am the Deliverer; Rebecca Dodd’s Sanderson) show how pivotal the page is. To dismiss it as being “just another page” is a potentially deadly move for the writer.

I suggest skipping right from 247 to 249 in the original draft, and then coming back later to fill in 248. The number itself can be intimidating, especially in crime fiction, when the average villain is unmasked in what Daviess calls the “reveal range,” those pages that fall precariously before 248 but remain carefully outside of its punishing vortex.