Chapter thoughts

On twitter I mentioned that Charles Finlay is the writer who’s had the most impact on how I think about chapters. I’m somewhat structure obsessed with novels. I’ve broken down novels by chapter in excel before during the writing, coloring each chapter differently for the point of view character in it, and also denoting how long each chapter is (a cell = 500 words) visually, and writing a haiku like summary of each chapter in that.

When I mentioned Charlie’s influence on twitter, everyone asked me to blog a post about what I know.

Well, here’s an excerpt from Just A Draft, a few chapters ahead of what I’ve posted online:

“Every novel has a structure to it, and thus, each one needs its own critical approach to figure out how best to make it better. But a novel is usually broken down by chapters.

For me a major take-away point was to get away from thinking of chapters as discrete scenes, with beginnings, middles, and ends. In short stories, there is more completeness to a scene, you trust the reader to keep going. But with a novel, the end of a chapter is an excuse for the reader to put the book down.
So wrapping everything up, and treating a chapter like a scene, leaves you giving the reader a chance to set the book down.

No, what you want to do is leave the reader starting the next chapter thinking “˜I have to know what happens next?’

In cruder form, this is a cliffhanger: a literal break in the plot where a physical event has happened and is left unresolved.

But what I began to learn from my fellow workshoppers was the fact that the cliffhanger could take place in any form. Emotional cliffhangers, idea cliffhangers, these were all valid too. What counted was resolving a part of a presented dilemma, giving a reader satisfaction, while also generating a new question that the reader would be left curious to answer by turning the page to the next chapter. Often the new question you formed was of a different type than the one resolved in order to keep variety.

So you could create a literal cliffhanger, a physical threat to a character that presents itself at the end of chapter one. In chapter two you resolve it, but because another physical threat would be repetitive, you end chapter two with an emotional question. So at the end of chapter one our hero’s parachute failed to open when he jumped out of a plane. In chapter two’s beginning he gets it open, and just barely lands. At the end of chapter two, his girlfriend tells him she can’t put up with our hero’s hobby of parachuting anymore. It’s her, or the jumping. Ah, so what happens at the start of three? What does he decide? Chapter one: physical/plot cliffhanger. Two: emotional life decision.

This flow concept was the most important thing I learned, and something I’m always tinkering with.”

When I outline, I may not ‘see’ the chapter structure that is best for the reader for compelling them through a book, however. I might write, in an outline: hero jumps out of plane, lands badly. Breaks up with girlfriend.

That implies a chapter where he makes the jump, and another discrete chapter where he breaks up. But that wouldn’t flow as well as one where the parachuting is part of chapter two as well, and the break up is parts of two and three.

For more on pacing chapters, Scott Westerfeld’s ideas about pace charts were similar enough to my excel cell haikus that I adopted his method of tagging chapters, as they fit into Scrivener’s corkboard feature and I don’t have to duplicate my chapters into excel anymore. Neat hack.

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on August 18th 2010 at 6:27 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.