A client has me thinking about chapters.
Chapters can feel essayistic (coving a topic) or episodic (covering an event). Some writers care most about their length.
I consider their shape & how they make patterns & how the breaks influence a reader's experience.
They're kind of arbitrary like paragraphs--which is fun.
How do you think about chapters?
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Ok. So.
A word is a flavor. A sentence is a bite. A paragraph is like a dish--an entre or a side dish or a salad or whatever. (The meal may or may not be coursed through section breaks, but if so, a section is a course.) A chapter is a meal. And the novel is, what, your life?
(This doesn't really hold up, but it's fun to think about.)
@allisonwyss hehehe As a child did you do the town-state/province-country-continent-hemisphere-Earth-SolarSystem-galaxy ...?
Maybe a novel is a restaurant full of people.
Oh I love the idea of "running out of a viewpoint"! I'm picture something like a tube of toothpaste and it's delightful.
But also yes yes yes to thinking about what you've left the reader thinking or feeling. What you're giving them to sink in.
@allisonwyss I've been thinking about this lately, because it really depends on the book for me.
I have some books where one chapter = one scene, which can be anywhere from 2500-6500 words.
I have some books where one chapter is multiple scenes, all focusing in around one event/thing that needs to be covered.
And I have one series of books with very few chapters where each scene within is ~2500-4500 words, so the chapters are long. (cont next)
@allisonwyss But for those, they were written serially, and what is now chapters for publication used to be arcs, covering a specific set of events. In the one I'm editing now, each arc corresponds to a position in the Celtic cross tarot layout.
I feel like, in the end, as long as there are pause points within chapters, long ones are okay.
But short chapters are like popcorn and really make a book kind of drag you through it as you read. JUST ONE MORE.
Short chapters are like popcorn! Yes!
And sometimes with short chapters, I actually get frustrated because I want a break, but keep feeling like I can't take one yet. It's almost like with too many breaks, the breaks disappear or turn into something more like paragraph breaks.
I don't read in Spanish, but I've certainly read translations that do that. I find it kind of wonderful and breathless and exhausting.
@allisonwyss @AJSWritesthings my brain just freaked out slightly I think!!
Also I feel way less guilty about 40 page chapters now!
I fully admit, my brain can't do long paragraphs (I blame the ADHD--my eyes start skipping around instead of taking in information).
I'm trying to remember the Spanish books I read long, long ago (back in high school, in the 80s--we did a lot of lit in my final years of Spanish), but my swiss cheese brain can't remember. :( But this makes me curious to check out a couple of translations buried in the larger to-read pile, I think...
@tryslora @AJSWritesthings @allisonwyss
The question of how to use chapters is a version of "how to use white space." Roland Barthes talked about this in his *Preparation of the Novel*. The reader is daunted (put off, repulsed) by a large block of dense text, but if you put three or four words on a page by themselves, the reader can't resist reading those words. What we don't put on the page is an invitation for the reader to slip in.
Love that you're bringing up scenes within chapters. Some seem to think a scene break necessarily means a chapter should break, but of course they are separate units. Then it comes down to thinking of how to group them inside chapters.
So this is making me think about how I sometimes change the order of scenes to make the chapters feel more shapely. The trouble is--or I guess it's actually a blessing--realizing I CAN move the chapters around so inconsequentially often teaches me that some of those scenes ought to be cut.
@allisonwyss Yep. For me it's mostly shifting one or two scenes earlier or later to ensure that cliffhanger*. Only rarely to even out the chapter lengths. I don't really give that any attention, beyond the visible effect overlong chapters have on my progress tracking chart.
*I know this works. More than half my reviews are of the "couldn't put it down" variety.
Ah! But sometimes I WANT to find a good moment to put a book down!
I tend to think of them as little vignettes. In my current WIP, I'm doing POV chapters, switching from character to character, so each chapter is one character's perspective on whatever the chapter is about. Sometimes it's something completely new and sometimes it's another perspective on something that's already been covered. It just depends on where I need to get the story across. I also like to use them to pace the story. So if I write something particularly intense, I might follow it up with a different part of the story that's more relaxed to give the reader a breather. Sometimes they're a flashback and sometimes they're just introspection, and sometimes they're full-on exposition and storytelling. It just depends on what I need at that point in the writing.
So maybe a new chapter is occasioned by a shift in storytelling style? I like this way of thinking. It reminds me of how I sometimes think about paragraphs as different angles.
yes, exactly! A chapter featuring Danny will have a different tone and cadence than a chapter featuring Vickie or another character.
I also do something I call "Sally Simpson chapters" which is a reference to the song Sally Simpson on the Who album Tommy, which is a narrative rock opera. In the album, the story perspective suddenly changes from Tommy's story to the story of a teenage girl who is a fan of the main character, and is on her way to one of Tommy's "sermons." It takes you out of the story while also giving you an outsider's perspective on the events of the story. So it moves the story forward but from a different angle.
I do this in my stories by focusing a few one-off chapters here and there focusing on the "victims" that run into the vampires and how they experience the story and characters without the broader context. I think it grounds the story in the world and gives a break from the main narrative while still adding to it.
So a chapter break is an unsettle point--it necessarily is--and sometimes you want that reset so you can do something very different in the next one.
So many people think of how to bridge chapters--to make a reader dive right back in--but sometimes you want them to the a minute to shake the last thing off before doing so.
yep! In this particular book that I'm writing now especially. It's a little chaotic, because my MC is pretty unwell psychologically, and her perception of time and reality is a bit broken.
I also use subchapters, which help me pace and move time along. A chapter typically covers a small segment of time for me, but a subchapter is more like mini-scenes that require a break here and there just to move time along or to create tension. I might end a subchapter on a particularly dramatic thing happening and then the next subchapter could be how the characters react to that dramatic thing.
But the actual full chapters? I definitely use those for pacing and keeping the reader on their toes. Sometimes it's a more relaxed chapter or a particularly exciting chapter, but it's usually designed to keep the story interesting and drive the narrative.
Sorry to unload all of this chapter perspective. I just hadn't really put that much thought into why i write the way I do, and once I got started talking about it, the floodgates opened!
I want people to unload all of this! That's the point! I just want to find new and interesting ways to think about everything writing related.
Also so much of this intuitive--but then you start thinking about what you're doing intuitively--and it can all break open is such productive ways.
One of my favorite things to happen in classes and in these conversations is when we can all sort of externalize the process to find out new things about how different people's brains work.
I focus on chapter level in my writing sessions. They are like mini-stories with connected beginnings & endings, often with a cliffhanger. Sometimes they are one act, sometimes more that share the same overall 'theme.' I consider length as a curtesy to the reader. If they're like me, they prefer the end of a chapter as a stopping point. Overly long chapters can be annoying & lose my attention.
@allisonwyss I like this: "... to make the chapters feel more shapely."
It's the same for me. All those shapes that fit together like tiling.
For chapters, I have a couple of practical criteria. They need to be short enough that they're comfortable to record. I record my stories one chapter at a time. And I like to end my week's writing at the end of a chapter, so it can be typed up whole. I write the first draft by hand.
It all has to obey the requirements of the story above all, of course.
Ah! I love this.
So the unit is determined by your breath. Sort of.
And also by your working habits.
Are you saying you instinctively know how many syllables each sentence needs to have by sort of feeling out the rhythm of it?
Or are you saying you have found the magical number of syllables that a perfect sentence has and every single sentence now has to have that?
@allisonwyss When I'm writing it I don't necessarily know, but when I read it I can tell if it's got the wrong number. As if someone played a scale on the piano and stopped on the seventh or ninth note. So, yeah, instinctively feeling the rhythm.
I know you're verging into humor here, but every sentence doesn't have to have the same number of syllables, just the right number for that sentence.-)
Oh yeah, it was mostly a joke, but part of me hoped you would shout back "27! the magic number of syllables is 27!" or something because it's fun to think there might actually be a magic number. But also it would be really awkward to have to make every sentence the same length.
But I DO know what you mean about the rhythm and how it can just feel right. Or wrong.
Also is "verging toward humor" a way of saying "I could tell that was a joke; I just didn't think it was funny"? (I am also, here, again, attempting a verge toward humor.)
@allisonwyss Not that it wasn't funny, just that you hadn't committed completely to humor yet. You wanted to go that way but you waited until your next post before letting it out.
27? Is something telling you that it's an odd number?
Nah. It was more like a set up. I was creating a space for you to say the funny thing.
@allisonwyss And yet when you read a book without chapters, like "Mrs. Dalloway" you notice their absence. Though it's not to the book's detriment — it'd be really weird with chapters.
I feel in most novels though they're a service to the reader and a convenience to the writer. How often do I organize my reading time around a chapter break? And how often does an author use it to make time/location jumps?
My god, how would you chapter Mrs. Dalloway? It would be like slicing into a brain.
They're kind of like violence when you get to one, aren't they?
It's been a while since I've read it too.
@allisonwyss I organized the chapters in my book by the dream sequences. There are 12 such sequences, coinciding with the hour marks on a watch. But I haven't decided how to handle the dream within the dream or when my MC describes his dream to another character, which is basic 19th century narrative exposition.
Do I give it them chapter breaks even though it's in mid conversation or mid dream? I haven't decided. I like the artifice of introducing a chapter break.
I tend to like the strangeness of breaking up things like conversations with chapter breaks. Not that I've ever done it. But I like it.
Oh, be as clever as you want, I say. At least as many people will love it as hate it.
@allisonwyss currently, I aim for about 1500 words in a chapter. I know it's not a lot, but I'm posting fanfic on AO3, and 1500 seems to be about the right amount for weekly installments to a story for that site.
as for what goes into that approximately 1500 words, I usually try to go for a singular scene, with maybe a paragraph or two of introduction or postscript. if a scene is particularly long or complex I'll try to break it up into chapters, but no more than two or three total for a single scene. I sometimes will use a chapter to get through a bunch of exposition/timeskip stuff that isn't being shown on-page, though I try to include a short scene with those so they aren't too dry.
the current WIP is a fanfic of a video game expansion which follows the storyline in a series of "quests," which helps define the framework a bit too; a chapter can be either an entire quest, or a cutscene within a quest, or summing up a quest that I don't want to include with a single paragraph.
Ok this is really interesting to me. So do your episodes naturally come in at that length?
I think about shape. Many writers think about length. What I want to know is how it works for you when you think about both length and shape.
If it doesn't naturally fit, do you just go with it, or do you wrangle it until it does?
@allisonwyss So they tend to come in naturally at around that length - if they don't, I tend to just let it happen (hence the shorter ones in more action-heavy bits of the story) unless a chapter's starting to get very very long, at which point I start looking for where I can put a break/if one of the scenes needs to move to the next chapter.
Worth noting I'm writing multiple-POV, so 'okay, X's scene can be in the next chapter' or 'let's check in with Y next time' is relatively easy sometimes.
I used to agonize over chapters.
Break on the end of this scene so the reader understands the action ends?
Time passed so I need to tell the reader with a chapter heading?
After having written a few hundred of them, I break them when I feel like it.
I still look for time breaks which usually means a different activity happens.
I also try to balance them a bit just so the narrators get finished audio with breaks every 20-30 minutes.
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