THE ANATOMY OF A CHAPTER

By El Ochiis

Chapters tend to get little, if any, respect, yet, for most writers, they are a non-negotiable part of the novel-reading experience.  Unless you have a very good reason to not have chapters, you need them.  For me, as a writer, chapters and their titles are a necessity for creating structure within my novels and/or short stories. 

Your story may be fascinating and bewitching, but humans aren’t meant to consume an entire 200-plus page novel in one sitting. It’s just too much to process. Chapters give the reader a chance to think about what’s happened in the story thus far and anticipate what happens next - helping you tighten your storytelling so that the readers stay on the edge of their seats. Thematically relevant titles connect to the story and give cohesion to your novels and stories:

“He disagreed with something that ate him,” chapter 14, Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming. 

“I Begin Life on My Own Account, And Don’t Like It,” chapter 11, David Copperfield, Charles Dickens. 

Writers tend to get confused between a chapter and a scene.  A scene happens when your characters interact with each other. The scene does not mean scenery. In other words, a scene is not the same thing as the setting or the location where the action takes place. The scene is the action. Each scene has a beginning, middle, and end.

A chapter, on the other hand, may contain one scene, or, it may contain multiple scenes. A chapter is not a scene. Rather, a chapter is a division in your book. It’s where you, the writer, decide to give the reader a chance to process what they’ve read while you rearrange stuff in the background: 

 “Nikki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name and I – perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past – insisted on an English one.” - A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro.  In only two sentences the narrator has hinted at tensions between past and present, mother and father, England and Japan.

“Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his 14th birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.” - Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin.  Deliciously clear language, yet, the content is about how brutal and controlling an inherited story can be, how the repeated words of others can predetermine the life of another. 

Here are some tips you can use when building out book chapters:

Start with action - try opening a chapter in the middle of a scene.  Shape around plot development – an unresolved conflict between characters, a new crucial piece of information, or an actual cliff, keep the reader engaged. Approach each chapter with a specific goal - One chapter might be focused on a chase scene; The goal of another might be introducing the hero; Use chapter titling to distill your focus - Chapter titles can be a summary not only of where the story has come from, but where it plans to go next.  Consider pacing – the chance for your main character to recap all that’s happened and plan what he/she will do next.; show a different point of view - Each new chapter can allow different characters to take over as the main POV and chime in with their view of an unfolding event; seek balance - mark the passages that are scenes, leaving the passages that are dramatic narration unmarked. Is there an imbalance between the two types of narration? If so, add some dramatic narration into scenes or vice versa.

Above all, be sure to give each chapter a purpose that ties into the bigger story.