Chapters
Just what are they for?
It's something that has been bothering me of late, particularly with the endless rewrites of Benfro book two (now safely in the hands of my nice agent). Chapters most obviously mark a point in the narrative where the reader can take a break, where time can be allowed to pass without it being recorded, or where the focus of attention can switch from one character to another, one situation to another. They can be arranged in all sorts of different and clever ways to structure the story.
But so can section breaks.
Terry Pratchett, at least in his Discworld® novels, famously uses no chapters at all. The story is one mad rush from start to finish, with only short pauses for breath being allowed in the section breaks where a point of view changes or a tedious period of inaction needs to be glossed over. It can be quite exhausting reading one of these books, if, like me, you favour reading in bed before going to sleep. With a lack of chapters marking places to stop, I can find myself still reading into the wee small hours. Much the best way to read a Pratchett is on a winter's day when it's stormy outside, there's a roaring fire in the grate and you can curl up on the sofa with a dachshund.
Perhaps one of the most useful tools in the arsenal of any writer is the cliff-hanger chapter ending. As long as the reader is engaged enough with the character, they will feel almost obliged to turn the page, begin the next chapter, wade through the sections not relevant, just to find out what happened. But this then begs the question why have a chapter ending at all?
Perhaps chapters are useful staging-posts, markers along the route of writing the novel that the author leaves in simply for convenience. I don't plan my novels to a chapter structure, in fact it tends to be something that I add in at the end, a sort of sectioning of the novel as much for the sake of convention as anything else. This may, of course. be one reason why my novels remain unpublished to date, but I wonder how many of you out there have really stopped to consider why the conclusion of any particular arc of your story needs to be a chapter ending.
And how long should a chapter be? I'm told that Dan Brown's chapters are very short*, making reading one of his novels a bit like a high-speed car chase. This again ties into the page-turner idea. If you know that each chapter will only take a few minutes to read, then the temptation is there to read 'just one more', especially if the story is engaging. But then if the story were engaging, wouldn't we read on regardless?
In writing my first novel, I wrote the stories of all the main characters** separately, then printed the whole thing out, cut out the sections and spread the over the living room floor. After the DevilDog (then only a DevilPup) had rearranged them into the order he thought appropriate, I did the shuffling properly and came up with the right sequence of events. This isn't the best way to go about writing a novel, I'm sure, but I'd never done it before and it seemed to work. When I cut and pasted and massaged the whole thing together, I introduced chapters. I think this was mainly because Books have Chapters, and I was Writing a Book (the capitals are very important). I looked through the story to see where there were natural breaks at reasonably similar intervals and there it was.
I got it wrong, of course. The chapters were way too long and the story wasn't engaging enough. It became a slog to get to the end of each one and it was all too easy to put the whole thing down. Publishers and agents all agreed.
Would it have been better without chapters? Or would that have put readers off? How many books have you read lately where the chapter structure was an essential component of the story? And how many could have worked just as well as a continuous arc of sections?
Chapters. Do we really need them?
*I've been unnecessarily rude about DB on blogs before. I don't mean to be rude with this observation - it's just an example of a writing technique. I stumbled on the first word of The DaVinci Code and just couldn't get past the first sentence. I doubt that Dan will lose any sleep over it.
**too many of them, too. It's a litany of disasters, Running Away, but somewhere in the depths of all that dreadful lack of planning is a damn good story trying to break free.
It's something that has been bothering me of late, particularly with the endless rewrites of Benfro book two (now safely in the hands of my nice agent). Chapters most obviously mark a point in the narrative where the reader can take a break, where time can be allowed to pass without it being recorded, or where the focus of attention can switch from one character to another, one situation to another. They can be arranged in all sorts of different and clever ways to structure the story.
But so can section breaks.
Terry Pratchett, at least in his Discworld® novels, famously uses no chapters at all. The story is one mad rush from start to finish, with only short pauses for breath being allowed in the section breaks where a point of view changes or a tedious period of inaction needs to be glossed over. It can be quite exhausting reading one of these books, if, like me, you favour reading in bed before going to sleep. With a lack of chapters marking places to stop, I can find myself still reading into the wee small hours. Much the best way to read a Pratchett is on a winter's day when it's stormy outside, there's a roaring fire in the grate and you can curl up on the sofa with a dachshund.
Perhaps one of the most useful tools in the arsenal of any writer is the cliff-hanger chapter ending. As long as the reader is engaged enough with the character, they will feel almost obliged to turn the page, begin the next chapter, wade through the sections not relevant, just to find out what happened. But this then begs the question why have a chapter ending at all?
Perhaps chapters are useful staging-posts, markers along the route of writing the novel that the author leaves in simply for convenience. I don't plan my novels to a chapter structure, in fact it tends to be something that I add in at the end, a sort of sectioning of the novel as much for the sake of convention as anything else. This may, of course. be one reason why my novels remain unpublished to date, but I wonder how many of you out there have really stopped to consider why the conclusion of any particular arc of your story needs to be a chapter ending.
And how long should a chapter be? I'm told that Dan Brown's chapters are very short*, making reading one of his novels a bit like a high-speed car chase. This again ties into the page-turner idea. If you know that each chapter will only take a few minutes to read, then the temptation is there to read 'just one more', especially if the story is engaging. But then if the story were engaging, wouldn't we read on regardless?
In writing my first novel, I wrote the stories of all the main characters** separately, then printed the whole thing out, cut out the sections and spread the over the living room floor. After the DevilDog (then only a DevilPup) had rearranged them into the order he thought appropriate, I did the shuffling properly and came up with the right sequence of events. This isn't the best way to go about writing a novel, I'm sure, but I'd never done it before and it seemed to work. When I cut and pasted and massaged the whole thing together, I introduced chapters. I think this was mainly because Books have Chapters, and I was Writing a Book (the capitals are very important). I looked through the story to see where there were natural breaks at reasonably similar intervals and there it was.
I got it wrong, of course. The chapters were way too long and the story wasn't engaging enough. It became a slog to get to the end of each one and it was all too easy to put the whole thing down. Publishers and agents all agreed.
Would it have been better without chapters? Or would that have put readers off? How many books have you read lately where the chapter structure was an essential component of the story? And how many could have worked just as well as a continuous arc of sections?
Chapters. Do we really need them?
*I've been unnecessarily rude about DB on blogs before. I don't mean to be rude with this observation - it's just an example of a writing technique. I stumbled on the first word of The DaVinci Code and just couldn't get past the first sentence. I doubt that Dan will lose any sleep over it.
**too many of them, too. It's a litany of disasters, Running Away, but somewhere in the depths of all that dreadful lack of planning is a damn good story trying to break free.
Comments
I think chapters are irrelevant. Well, if you're doing multiple POV and changing scenes often anyway, then what's the point?
I know my chapters are too long... But isn't one of the reasons for multiple short chapters also to fill the book and make it seem longer? As a book buyer, that just pisses me off.
Oops, sorry, back to urination. I'll go now.
And I’m growing disillusioned with the cliff-hanger chapter ending too. It often seems too forced and unnatural. I’d prefer for someone to just tell the story and not fart about trying to be clever the whole time.
Or something.
Now, on the whole cliffhanger ending issue, I come at it from a slightly different angle these days. I'll be writing along, come to a Big Shock (TM) and mark a chapter ending right there. Then I'll carry on writing just as I was before until I come to the next one.
So rather than forcing cliffhangers at the end of each chapter, I force a chapter at each cliffhanger. Which means my chapters are all of wildly variable length (ranging, if I remember TDI rightly, from one and a half pages to something like 20, and with more and more shorter ones towards the end as the pace picks up).
Which is still a cynical ploy to get people thinking "just one more before I go to bed", but at least it's not cynically tweaked writing to do it.
Now I'm playing with them as mini-cliffhangers, momentum for the tension build, POV mirrors, etc. I've also successfully escaped my obsessive schoolgirl compulsion to make every chapter exactly thirty ms. pages long.