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As a fiction author, perhaps you’ve never given much thought to chapter division in your novel. After all, there doesn’t seem to be anything too complex about it – dividing chapters (and parts) is just a matter of organization, right? Well, no. Learn how to divide chapters creatively, and you’ve just acquired another tool of expression.

Remember that literature is more than a sum of its parts. Chapters can be so much more than just a way of grouping scenes together. And that’s precisely what I’ll show you in this post.

We’ll first take a look at ways you can divide your novel – chapters and parts are two basic ways, but there’s more to it than just that. Then, we’ll see how dividing a novel into chapters can be used creatively.

Ways to Divide: Chapters, Parts, and more

It’s theoretically possible for a novel not to contain any kind of division; no chapters, no parts. I can’t recall any such work off the top of my head, and I’d generally advise against it.

Chapters function as scene separators. In a theatrical context, consider them breaks in the action, allowing for the setting to change.

In a novel there aren’t any practical limitations. That is, it’s entirely possible to finish a paragraph with “…and then I saw the port of New York” and start the next one with “As the sun went down in Tokyo…”)

This doesn’t mean you should do it.

Chapters allow the reader to understand that a scene (or at least a set of interrelated paragraphs) is now complete, and the action focuses elsewhere.

There’s more to a Novel than Chapters and Parts

The interesting thing is, however, that chapters and parts aren’t the only way to divide your novel into groups.

A fairly usual way of subdividing a chapter is the use of sections. These are often signaled with some symbol, or sometimes with an extra blank line:

This excerpt, from my novel The Other Side of Dreams, is a typical example. The chapter remains the same – because it still refers to happenings that are interconnected – and yet, because of a spatio-temporal break (the action moved elsewhere), a short change is required.

But all these are, still, mostly about practical matters. Why stop there when we could be more creative with our divisions?

How to Divide Chapters (and more) Creatively

There are several ways that you can use to divide your chapters (and other structures) creatively. Broadly, I’d… divide these methods into three categories:

• Length
• Naming
• Organizational aspects

Length is the most basic way to creatively deploy chapters, parts, etc. Clearly, if you write horror fiction and you try to make your readers feel a sense of urgency, you need to control the narrative pace. Chapter length is important in such a case.

But length can also be a matter of creating imbalance. Imagine a chapter featuring three long-ish scenes (say, 5 pages each), but then concluding with a short section merely a paragraph long. Inevitably, creating such a structure forces the reader to pay attention to it. Which means, you can pack a lot of affective power to this paragraph.

Abstractness and Symbolism

Nonetheless, length is a relatively straightforward, simple way of being creative with chapter division. Things become more interesting with the possibilities offered by intelligent naming.

Let’s go back to The Other Side of Dreams for a moment. The book is divided into parts, chapters, and sections – in order of structural hierarchy. However, there’s something unusual about the “parts”… part.

They are called “Movements”.

Moreover, there are 10 such Movements – each containing four chapters, except the first and the last Movement, containing seven. A 75,000-word novel is usually divided into two, perhaps three parts.

Clearly, there’s something else going on here.

I don’t want to go too much into details – it would spoil it for you, if you haven’t read the book – but my decision to name these something-like-parts “Movements” was entirely conscious, that alludes to specific concepts in the novelThe concept of Movements is also relevant in music, defined as:

a self-contained part of a musical composition or musical form. While individual or selected movements from a composition are sometimes performed separately, a performance of the complete work requires all the movements to be performed in succession.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader (of this post but, even better, of The Other Side of Dreams!) to ponder on what that might mean in a literary context..

Organization: or when Numbers are “Wrong”

Using “Movements” in the way I described above, I effectively created an in-between category between chapters and parts. In The Other Side of Dreams, these structures are clearly larger than chapters, yet shorter than parts. This, in itself is an organizational strategy.

However, there are ways to be creative with your chapter division in even more unorthodox ways.

Let’s go back to my post on finding your authorial voice. I then said that, to a great extent, finding your authorial voice is a matter of breaking the rules. One of those rules says “use consecutive chapter numbers”. And that’s precisely a rule I broke in To Cross an Ocean: Apognosis:

Beginning with a zero chapter is unusual alright, but what the excerpt doesn’t reveal is the fact that there are three zero chapters in the book. Moreover, they are the only chapters written in first person. If these are the only first-person chapters in the book, who’s talking? And what does the number zero indicate, in terms of time?

Other examples of creative numbering or organization include novels such as Seiobo There Below, by László Krasznahorkai, which numbers its chapters according to the Fibonacci sequence, or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, which only uses prime numbers.

It’s All about Packing as much as Possible

If your book contains, say, 80,000 words, then ideally each and every one of them should convey some meaning or inspire some reaction. Obviously enough, it’s hard to do that with words like “we”, “I’ll”, or “maybe” – though consider this:

“Just you and me now, honey,” Mary said.
“Yes, maybe,” John replied with a smirk. “We think so, but I’ll ask.”

In any case, some of those 80,000 words are chapter and parts headings (or even descriptions and other text). Their placement, neatly separated from the rest of the text, means they’re really great points to draw your readers’ attention.

What a pity, then, to ignore their creative potential!