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How to Divide Chapters Creatively

July 30, 2020

chapters, creativity, fiction, literature, writing

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.

divide chapters — Houses have doors and windows for practical purposes, but also for **creative** (i.e. aesthetic) purposes. Dividing a book into chapters is a very similar process

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Review of Life, by Lu Yao

July 24, 2020

Book Review, Criticism

book, China, destiny, fate, fiction, literature, love, review

7 comments

Life, by Lu Yao, is a Chinese novel written – and situated – in the early 1980s. A lot has happened since in China (and globally), though much of the story revolves around timeless issues.

What does it mean to love someone of a different social status? How does one balance between responsibility and personal desire? Should one submit to their fate – here defined not as some ghostly force but as what society prescribed – or not?

Life, by Lu Yao, poses such questions. The problem is that not only does it actually attempt to answer them – there are no real answers to such questions – but that it does so in a narratively naive, uninspiring manner.

review of Life, by Lu Yao — *Life*, by Lu Yao, basically revolves around matters of “fate” or, in any case, what one construes as such

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A JavaScript Poem Shuffler

July 18, 2020

Programming

creativity, defamiliarization, javascript, meaning, poetry, programming

0 comments

As I’ve mentioned many times on the blog, meaning is a very fluid concept in literature. This fact inspired me to see what happens when we completely distort the author’s original intention, while still maintaining some minimal cohesion. This JavaScript poem shuffler was the result.

As the name perhaps implies, my JavaScript poem shuffler takes a poem and randomly reorganizes its lines.

Now, you might have two questions about this:

Doesn’t that render the poem meaningless?
Why should we care?

Amazingly, both these questions have the same answer, as we’ll see in more detail. Briefly, let me just say that this little coding exercise also provides us with excellent teaching material in terms of affective power and, indeed, the creation of meaning in literature.

JavaScript Poem Shuffler — Apparently chaotic patterns can still hold meaning – if they are predicated on **affect**. This JavaScript poem shuffler is a good example of this

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