Writing Help: Chapters
I was asked, a while back, about novel-length plots and how to structure them into chapters. You can read the first part here, and now, I finally had time to sit down and focus on the second part: structuring them into chapters.
So.
There are endless ways to structure a novel. The most common is a linear, chronological narrative, but there are many that don’t. Terry Pratchett is known for not using chapters at all, but we’ll remove that option from discussion since A) no one else is Pratchett and B) that doesn’t really answer the question my friend asked.
But regardless of your overall structure, what a chapter is meant to do is help a reader organize what they are reading and process and remember it best. You know how a sentence is supposed to be one idea, no more, no less? A paragraph is meant to be a topic. A chapter is an extension of that thought process, it is one cohesive whole, no more than that, and no less.
Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Series has an entire series of books, all of which have titles chapter like “The One in Which there is a Dinner Party.”
Think of chapters like that: Each has one important piece to the chapter that pulls it together that focuses the chapter. If it’s non-linear, it could be “The Chapter in Which We Go Back to 1920 to Discover a Mafia Boss” or “The One In Which Jeff Explains Himself.”
In the book I’m querying right now, the first chapter could be titled “The One in Which Ambrose Does Some Magic.” It’s a fantasy book, and he’s the main character; he does magic on other occasions peppered throughout the book, but there is a specific spell he’s working with specific consequences, and once he is interrupted, the chapter ends and a new one starts, which could be titled “The One in Which Ciara Delivers News.”
People have a lot of issues with the Twilight series, but Meyer using blank chapters titled “October”, “November,” etc in New Moon was an extremely effective idea: it underscored that there was absolutely nothing of note to say about the entirety of October.
Common ways to break chapters are by focusing them around one singular event, or if you have multiple character viewpoints, shifts in character viewpoints. If your story has long time skips, flashbacks, or flash forwards, those are generally separated as their own chapters. These create such sharp shifts in the reader’s experience that compartmentalizing them helps a reader focus on what is happening and prepare them for something different to happen next.
Because that’s how a chapter ends: with the hook into what’s next. Even many strong final chapters do this: what comes now that the book is over, after the chapter is over, after whatever discussion that chapter had is over and accomplished?
The end of a chapter should ask What’s next?
