July 30, 2020
How to Divide Chapters Creatively
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:
Ahmed took the cell out of his pocket and thought to call her or send her a message. But then he remembered she’d told him she didn’t want to talk, so he changed his mind. He waited until seven p.m. and then he sighed, got up, and went back home.
***
His living room was bathed in a brilliant blue luminescence as the TV came to life, at least an hour before the lottery results would be announced.
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:
0
People know me by many names, a bit like a god or a demon. But unlike them, I am not imaginary. I am real – I can be touched, seen, heard, smelled, and even tasted. I was born and, inevitably, one day I will die. Most of my names are cute and charming. But I have also been called a whore, I have been spat on, and worse.
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!
4 Comments
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The creation of parts to a novel is as important to the reading experience as every other structural detail. It is all levels of meaning. Everything matters – epigraphs and titles are not decorations, but intrinsically necessary to the whole.
In the same way, the beginning and ending of scenes, beats, chapters, parts contribute to the experience.
I prefer my readers to feel supported and attended to because the information they will need to understand these characters and this story is delivered deliberately.
Part of the fun is making it so.
Other people may think I’m a little squirrelly.
I use Dramatica for plotting, and carry on part of the plot in the chapter epigraphs: two group characters are the media pro and con the three main characters and their careers – it’s a place where I can show how the outside world chooses and emphasizes the entertainment world it reports on and observes.
You can skip the epigraphs – but then you miss that layer completely. It isn’t critical, but it is enriching. And it allows a different expression to my creativity (among other things, I get to write haiku). My beta reader loves those bits – because she often doesn’t realize why they’re there until late in a chapter, or even until she re-reads. And then she gets it. If you ever read PC, I’d be curious to know what you think.
Regarding the “she often doesn’t realize why they’re there until late in a chapter, or even until she re-reads” part, it’s something I’ve referred to as “the ping pong of meaning”. It’s an integral part of reading:
Of course, there are readers who, sadly, don’t bother with such an approach. Their loss, I suppose.
Re-reading is one of the great pleasures of life – and applies to so few books. A certain melancholy temperament helps, an attitude of reflection. Because that’s where living a life differs from reading one. In real life things go by so fast.
Ah. I don’t have the literary background you have – but that sounds like it.
Not all novels lend themselves to layers of meaning – and not all those which have them are designed that way, but I built them in deliberately, and it is fun to see someone do the archaeology – and enjoy it.