On 'actual' Chapters

[TheRedChamber]

"Complete amateur...doesn't even write in chapters." - the literary critic Tom Paulin on Terry Pratchett, subsequently used as a quote on the back of his books.

Don't worry, this isn't another thread about how many individual Literotica submissions to break a work into (be they called chapters, parts or whatever). I'm in the middle of rewriting a novel-length story that has sat for some considerable time and was adding some scenes to the beginning. As this was an experimental change, I started with a new file and added 'chapter one', 'chapter two' for each scene before remembering I hadn't used chapters for the original draft (although, as above, it is neatly divided into four parts or acts 10k-20k that will be the eventual Lit submissions). That got me thinking that I don't really have a conscious policy for when to use and when not to use actual chapters, and I started to think about it. I came up with - they're largely unnecessary for anything under 10k words, are more important when you have PoV shifts but I'm not sure if a clean scene break accomplishes the same thing (~ ~ ~ ~ ~).

I'm sure there's a bit more to it than that. How does everyone approach this?

 

[IWroteThis]

Well, first, I don't use chapters for scenes. I use chapters to group scenes when those groups of scenes have a natural separation. Likewise, the length of chapters is based on the length of the included scenes, not some arbitrary number I set. I have one story I'm writing where each chapter is longer than another story that is three chapters long. Likewise, I have some unchaptered stories that are longer than others with chapters. Again, it's not about length, although I do think longer stories need chapters for easier reading. It's primarily about what best serves the story I'm telling.

 

[ElectricBlue]

they're largely unnecessary for anything under 10k words, are more important when you have PoV shifts but I'm not sure if a clean scene break accomplishes the same thing (~ ~ ~ ~ ~).

Perfectly adequate, within a longer chapter.

I'm sure there's a bit more to it than that. How does everyone approach this?

Do what suits the story, but remember, if you're publishing separate chapter submissions on Lit, number them 01, 02, 03, or the auto-numbering algorithm will go belly up when you get to Ch.10. if, for whatever reason you plan more than 99 chapters (please don't), then 001, 002, 003 etc.

 

[Voboy]

I use chapters sometimes, not often. I do it when it feels right for the story, typically in historical or fantasy settings. I guess I seek an "old-timey" feel when I do it.

I often do the little three-asterisk page break, but I don't really think of those as chapters.

ETA: I'm talking about "chapter" divisions within one submission, not divisions over a string of stories submitted separately.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Do what suits the story, but remember, if you're publishing separate chapter submissions on Lit, number them 01, 02, 03, or the auto-numbering algorithm will go belly up when you get to Ch.10. if, for whatever reason you plan more than 99 chapters (please don't), then 001, 002, 003 etc.

I'm absolutely not talking about seperate chapter submissions because (as per typical AH advice and my own experience) a Lit submission is best at between 10k-20k words and a chapter is typically 2-6k words. They're not the same thing, and, maybe because I focus on breaking stuff up into Lit submissions, I don't focus so much on literary chapters.

 

[old_prof]

I've been mostly publishing on another site this year, one that requires publishing a chapter as one piece. Chapters are concatenated in books and books can be part of a series, just to be clear. Their vision of chapters has definitely been impacting my writing. I had not used chapters at all until my first novel late last summer. I originally wrote it without chapters, then decided to break it into chapters. After that, everything longer than about 20K was split into chapters as I wrote it.

The other site pushes short-ish chapter (they think 1600-1800 words is the sweet spot). I somewhat ignore that guidance and write the length chapters that the story demands, but it has been gently pushing my chapters to be shorter. (The chapters in my original novel ranged from 5K-12K words.)

I keep saying this, but listen to the story. There is not an absolute correct chapter size. Go look at some of your favorite novels. The chapters in there probably vary in length pretty substantially.

One last question is chapter titles or not? I like chapter titles, but I kind of like coming up with titles. I know many stories, here and on the sites and in "serious" literature don't use titles.

 

[ronde]

"Complete amateur...doesn't even write in chapters." - the literary critic Tom Paulin on Terry Pratchett, subsequently used as a quote on the back of his books.

Don't worry, this isn't another thread about how many individual Literotica submissions to break a work into (be they called chapters, parts or whatever). I'm in the middle of rewriting a novel-length story that has sat for some considerable time and was adding some scenes to the beginning. As this was an experimental change, I started with a new file and added 'chapter one', 'chapter two' for each scene before remembering I hadn't used chapters for the original draft (although, as above, it is neatly divided into four parts or acts 10k-20k that will be the eventual Lit submissions). That got me thinking that I don't really have a conscious policy for when to use and when not to use actual chapters, and I started to think about it. I came up with - they're largely unnecessary for anything under 10k words, are more important when you have PoV shifts but I'm not sure if a clean scene break accomplishes the same thing (~ ~ ~ ~ ~).

I'm sure there's a bit more to it than that. How does everyone approach this?

I have written a story with multiple chapters, but I don't anymore. The reason is twofold. Unless you publish the chapters in relatively quick succession, some readers will lose interest while waiting on the next chapter. It has more to do with the time between chapters than how long a chapter is.

The other reason is that to write a story in multiple chapters, you really have to write the whole story anyway. If you try writing one chapter at a time, you'll always come to a place in a new chapter where you realize you should have laid some sort of background in a previous chapter. If you've already published the prior chapters, your only recourse is to abandon what you're writing in the new chapter, or edit the prior chapter(s) so the next chapter makes sense. That just stretches out the time between the publish dates of the chapters.

 

[Britva415]

What would suit the work the best? A chapter can be just a scene. A chapter can be more than one scene. A chapter can be a whole act.

Ideally, one work would use chapters fairly consistently and pick one of these ways of organizing chunks.

Does it improve the work to mark those chunks as separate chapters? How and why?

There is no universal answer. Each work is different.

My attitude is, the work will answer these questions after drafting. Then revisions will improve it.

I'm always on the side of "be willing to revise," because I get a consistent impression that a lot of AH'ers aim to get the first draft right, and never revise it.

Revising isn't the same as editing or proofreading. Some authors won't even do those

 

[StillStunned]

Does it improve the work to mark those chunks as separate chapters? How and why?

Jackie is a fairy tale of 6.7k words, published as one work, but I broke it into six chapters. They're short, but each chapter starts with a heading like "In which we meet Jackie and set out with her on a journey" and "In which Jackie beats off a Troll". This reinforces the fairy tale nature of the story, and creates more of a contrast with the explicit smut.

I think it adds to the overall impact in this specific case, but for most stories I'd advise against such short chapters.

 

[SimonDoom]

Scene breaks are fine for shorter stories.

 

[Britva415]

Jackie is a fairy tale of 6.7k words, published as one work, but I broke it into six chapters. They're short, but each chapter starts with a heading like "In which we meet Jackie and set out with her on a journey" and "In which Jackie beats off a Troll". This reinforces the fairy tale nature of the story, and creates more of a contrast with the explicit smut.

I think it adds to the overall impact in this specific case, but for most stories I'd advise against such short chapters.

Perfect example.

An author should be able to articulate the reason(s) they made the choices they made.

We get a lot of questions that just sort of seem to be from a perception that there's some kind of a way things are supposed to be. And we get a lot of answers that come from the same kind of perception.

 

[deathlynx]

I have written a story with multiple chapters, but I don't anymore. The reason is twofold. Unless you publish the chapters in relatively quick succession, some readers will lose interest while waiting on the next chapter. It has more to do with the time between chapters than how long a chapter is.

The other reason is that to write a story in multiple chapters, you really have to write the whole story anyway. If you try writing one chapter at a time, you'll always come to a place in a new chapter where you realize you should have laid some sort of background in a previous chapter. If you've already published the prior chapters, your only recourse is to abandon what you're writing in the new chapter, or edit the prior chapter(s) so the next chapter makes sense. That just stretches out the time between the publish dates of the chapters.

All quite true, but it still doesn't have to be prohibitive. I write longer pieces still and wouldn't think of publishing them bit by bit until the whole project is complete and edited. At least a novel. There's still room to pull a G.R.R.M. and spend a decade trying to write the next novel, but at least readers have a single cohesive story to start with even if not the grand plot.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I'm absolutely not talking about seperate chapter submissions because (as per typical AH advice and my own experience) a Lit submission is best at between 10k-20k words and a chapter is typically 2-6k words. They're not the same thing, and, maybe because I focus on breaking stuff up into Lit submissions, I don't focus so much on literary chapters.

I seldom write stories exclusively for publication on Lit, so my tendencies are broader in scope.

I also don't publish piecemeal anywhere. It's always all or nothing. Patience pays dividends.

All that being said, I don't worry about chapter breaks until the story is complete. I will insert section breaks as I write to separate scenes or chronological transitions, etc., but the chapter breaks don't come into play until I do developmental editing at the earliest.

While not intentional, I have discovered that the "sweet spot" for my chapter lengths seems to average between 3K and 5K words, but they can vary as needed to maintain the desired pacing of the tale.

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

The way I treat my stuff, 4-6 scenes is one chapter. There can be changes of location within a scene, as long as the scenes are generally compact in time. I do my best to include at least one sexual act in each scene, although that's not always possible in the plot heavy sections, but I find that if a chapter doesn't have at least three fun scenes, people get annoyed.

You can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat, though, so I make sure the sex is there and serves a purpose, but that's just my writing style and probably has nothing to do with what you're asking, lol.

So, yeah. 1 Chapter = 4-6 individual scenes. 1 post = 1 chapter.

 

[THBGato]

My long story Forty (81,000 words) is published as one submission, but is broken up into lots of short chapters. This is kind of a echo of how I wrote it - I jumped around a lot, wrote the main romance, then came back and wrote scenes for sub-plots, then played with the order of scenes, etc. But they also represent time jumps of more than a few hours - sometimes weeks, or a month, might pass between chapters. Yet, I didn't bother with chapters on He's the best husband in the world... even though that also has long time jumps between scenes. However, that was a more lineal write.

So I guess it comes down to how I wrote it. If I wrote it in a fragmented way, I might use chapter headings. Otherwise I'll just use * * * to indicate the passing of time between scenes.

 

[Comshaw]

"Complete amateur...doesn't even write in chapters." - the literary critic Tom Paulin on Terry Pratchett, subsequently used as a quote on the back of his books.

Don't worry, this isn't another thread about how many individual Literotica submissions to break a work into (be they called chapters, parts or whatever). I'm in the middle of rewriting a novel-length story that has sat for some considerable time and was adding some scenes to the beginning. As this was an experimental change, I started with a new file and added 'chapter one', 'chapter two' for each scene before remembering I hadn't used chapters for the original draft (although, as above, it is neatly divided into four parts or acts 10k-20k that will be the eventual Lit submissions). That got me thinking that I don't really have a conscious policy for when to use and when not to use actual chapters, and I started to think about it. I came up with - they're largely unnecessary for anything under 10k words, are more important when you have PoV shifts but I'm not sure if a clean scene break accomplishes the same thing (~ ~ ~ ~ ~).

I'm sure there's a bit more to it than that. How does everyone approach this?

I kind of go with natural breaks in the storyline and try to keep it between 6-10k words per chapter.

That said, I got to thinking on the whole concept. Why do we use them at all? I don't think it would bother me to read a novel without chapters or any kind of breaks. Is it just for reference? You know, like "Yeah, 3 pages into chapter# the protagonist..."? Or is it just because it's always been done that way? I understand the use of sentences and paragraphs. You're not facing a solid wall of text and the breaks give your eyes and mind a rest between things to absorb some of the story details. But chapters? They don't serve the same purpose.

So what is the point of using chapters?

Comshaw

 

[TheLobster]

Chapters provide natural break points for reading sessions. It lets the reader stop and sit with the text, and hopefully look forward to read more the next day.

Of course, these days chapters are mostly used for dropping cliffhangers, so that the novel gets the coveted review as a “page-turner” or, even worse, as being “unputdownable”

 

[NasoNocturne]

I kind of go with natural breaks in the storyline and try to keep it between 6-10k words per chapter.

That said, I got to thinking on the whole concept. Why do we use them at all? I don't think it would bother me to read a novel without chapters or any kind of breaks. Is it just for reference? You know, like "Yeah, 3 pages into chapter# the protagonist..."? Or is it just because it's always been done that way? I understand the use of sentences and paragraphs. You're not facing a solid wall of text and the breaks give your eyes and mind a rest between things to absorb some of the story details. But chapters? They don't serve the same purpose.

So what is the point of using chapters?

Comshaw

I debated this same thing when I was writing my Summer Lovin submission - it's fairly long (~50k words) so my natural instinct was to use them but I actually did a read-through with and without.

I normally try to use 3-5 word Chapter titles that are punchy/funny (or at least attempt to be) and give some signal about what I think the essence of the chapter is while also being obscure enough that they don't give the material away in advance.

I found reading the work with Chapter Titles helped me follow the arc that I was intending to convey (and provided mental references, like "oh back in Chapter 2").

BUT... I wrote the story so I knew the arc which makes it hard to tell how biased I was in my reading. When I'm drafting I will almost always sketch a detailed outline in chapters as well so I'm probably super biased because my mental model of the work is already structured into the Chapters before I even insert them.

If nothing else, in longer works I also think it makes it easier for a person to come back to where they left off which is what I suspect their primary original purpose actually was.

 

[Demiurging]

Once, I read a young adult novel in which there was a new chapter every two to three pages, large typeset. It was so annoying to have my flow broken like that every minute or so, so I only got through about a quarter of it.

Turned out later that the author was one of those that uses ghost writers to pump out what would these days be known as "slop".

I'd rather read an unbroken experience than one broken up into crumbs, at least then I can take a break when it feels natural to me.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Hmm... You know, after reading The Old Man and the Sea, and Quiet Days in Clichy, there's some merit about both using and not using breaks.

I personally prefer to count one scene as a chapter though, because when I'm dealing with a whole bunch of scenes in a single chapter my head gets a bit convoluted. I used to have several scenes in one chapter, but I found out doing this isn't for me. It only makes an entire mess. However I can put scenes in a TTRPG session with ease though, and that's more due to them being a bit more modular and flexible.

But, you know, I don't have a hard and fast rule about this. In writing nanonovels though I always use twenty chapters, and try my best to divide a less than 30K to 40K wordcount budget as equally as possible across all chapters, because that's how they're written: there is an strict ceiling.

I don't like to break short stories into chapters, but I still do it when outlining something because it makes it easy. Normally I break things with the <hr> tag (or the three asterisks), or back when I used to use Word, CTRL + ENTER to begin a new page. Some stories have a number, some stories have the "Chapter Y" title, there's even one I was writing back in the mid-to-late 10s where each chapter had its own title and subtitle.

All I'm saying is putting breaks in a story in any of its units provides stuff like cliffhangers, and it also gives a break, like a place where you can pause the reading. That's how I prefer to read my books anyway; whenever I need to stop reading, I always place the bookmark at the beginning of the next chapter, or scene.

So, about not using breaks. When I challenged myself to write 85K on my phone, I knew I was going to do a hybrid between an anthological novel, and an episodic novel. However, the real challenge I put myself was to write it the same way both The Old Man and the Sea, and Quiet Days in Clichy were written: no breaks whatsoever.

In my draft, even though you can clearly see when one story ends and the other one begins, not having any breaks gives the narrative a seamless fluidity that can be compared to single-take films. It actually made the novel stand out among other episodic and anthological works because there was no place to pause. I was stuck with her from the first word, to the 85000th word.

So, to me the breaks are just utilitarian. Using them or not in the final project is more of a performative choice. But breaking stuff up on the early stages is part of my process. Unless I'm pantsing, which is what happened with said novel I mentioned.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Chapters provide natural break points for reading sessions. It lets the reader stop and sit with the text, and hopefully look forward to read more the next day.

Of course, these days chapters are mostly used for dropping cliffhangers, so that the novel gets the coveted review as a “page-turner” or, even worse, as being “unputdownable”

You aren't far from the truth.

Chapter breaks can be critical to pacing, contributing to the anticipation of the readers by giving them a slight pause in the middle of their reading. That's why chapter breaks should be more deliberate and better planned than section breaks within a chapter. It has nothing to do with the amount of words in a chapter and everything to do with identifying the best spot to provide readers with the anticipation of what is to come.