Chapters, scenes, and the spaces in between
The difference between chapters and scenes, how to deal with the spaces in between, and more fiction-writing savoir faire from the depths of my curation bucket.
Hey, y’all—
Scenes are a unit of narrative structure. There are different types of scenes, but they’re all designed to advance the story (not the plot) in some way. There are also specific techniques to structuring, writing, and connecting scenes together.
Chapters are altogether different. Chapters are an organizational tool that exist to give pacing and form to the reading experience. Many books chug along with one scene per chapter; others slip multiple scenes of varying sizes into each chapter. Less common but still possible is stretching a single, sprawling scene across multiple chapters. It’s about pacing.
Once you’ve decided how to divide the story into chapters that create a well-paced, multi-course experience, it’s time to handle the technical details. Should you use a blank line at the end of a scene? A chapter? Does the next part begin on a new page? How should the numbering go? What about titles?
Join me in exploring the mathematics and magic of chapter breaks, as we practice The Writes of Fiction.
Three things about chapter breaks
“I know writers who work in chapters right from their first thinking; I know writers who write their way forwards and just intuit when it's time for a break; I know writers who write (in order, or out of sequence) several drafts before they decide where the breaks go at all; I even know one writer who finds the decisions so impossible they get their editor to make them.”—Read the rest from Emma Darwin at This Itch of Writing.
Should your novel have chapter numbers or chapter titles?
“While there are no ironclad rules for choosing between chapter numbers and chapter titles, fans of a given genre might intuit that there are trends. A writer then can decide whether the trend works for them. Every aspiring author will naturally read deeply in the genre they’re writing so as to get a feel for its traditions, whether to honor or flout them. Agents and editors can also be helpful in nudging writers one way or another toward choices that meet reader expectations.”—Read the rest from Carol Saller at The Subversive Copy Editor Blog.
More on chapters: Chapter length is more a matter of rhythm and consistency than it is hard numbers. Chapters that are exceptionally long or short in relation to the rest of your chapters change the flow of your book in undesirable ways.
Super-short chapters act like flags to readers. It’s like the tight, gathered stance and deep breath of a gymnast preparing to mount the apparatus—everyone can see that the big moment is coming up. If you don’t want to send that kind of signal, graft short chapters to another chapter. On the other hand, if you really do want readers to consciously process the foreshadowing—”Houston, there’s something weird going on here, I can just feel it”—then a remarkably short chapter may be just the right clue.—Read the rest at How long should your chapters be?
Mastery is not only about getting better at your craft, but also about finding ways to eliminate the obstacles, distractions, and other annoyances that prevent you from working on your craft.
Top performers find ways to spend as much time as possible on what matters and as little time as possible on what doesn't. It is not someone else's responsibility to create the conditions for success.
You have to actively work to eliminate the things that don't matter from your workload. If you haven't figured out how to do that, you haven't mastered your craft.—James Clear
Why the bestseller list should not be your goal
“No one knows how the Times populates the list. It’s not based purely on sales, ordered from biggest to smallest, every week. People are always shocked when I tell them this. Whole teams of people at publishers try to reverse engineer how the list worked out every week, according to sales data they have in-house or through BookScan (or whatever it’s called now), but the Times uses a proprietary algorithm and they’re not telling anyone how they do it. I imagine it’s roughly based on sales, but not always, and not all sales because if it was the list would never change and the top books would be The Bible, Oh the Places You’ll Go, and like some test prep books or something. But broadly speaking, the list is made up of the previous week’s sales, as reported by specific stores and retailers (including bulk-buys from ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ organizations and which the Times notes with a little dagger symbol, usually for books by politicians and “thought leaders” or whatever. Funny this never happens in fiction…) and weighted according to whatever their algorithm does.”—Read the rest from Kate McKean at Agents and Books.
More on publishing goals:
A career-launcher that allows you to quit your day job
A contender for Reese’s book club list
The gateway to a movie deal
A blockbuster bestseller
A bucket-list achievement
A literary novel that will be published by a prestigious small press
Something else that lets you measure yourself against other authors
The problem with goals like these is their sheer scope. Most would make worthy goals for a literary superstar at the peak of their career.
Start where you are. Completing your first manuscript is a huge creative milestone for many aspiring authors, but the book itself is unlikely to be a publishable success without the experience you’ll gain writing your next manuscripts. If you’ve pinned all your hopes on your freshman effort, what next? Do you abandon your dream because you couldn’t accelerate from 0 to 60 in five seconds or less your first time out of the garage?—Read the rest at The fiction writer’s guide to publishing and editing goals.
58 gems of writing advice and inspiration from self-published authors
“It’s not a race. I wish someone would’ve told me that sooner. There are actually a lot of people saying the opposite—that to make a livable income, authors should be cranking out four to five books per year. This just isn’t true. Hammering out books leads to saturation in the market overall, and more importantly, it leads to poor storytelling. If you want to write something you’re proud of, or even just “hit it big,” slow down. Have your book beta read. Find a critique partner or two, and hire an editor after that. Doing things fast usually means doing them sloppy.—Ryan Galloway, Biome”—Read more with at Writer’s Digest.
More on publishing matters: Today’s publishing options have changed since you first dreamed about getting your book into print. Most authors arrive on my editorial doorstep declaring their intentions of finding literary representation, with the caveat that “I’m open to self-publishing, I guess, if nothing else comes along.”
Please don’t handicap yourself with such an indecisive start. Waffling over publishing options is a disservice to your book. The way you approach editing should be driven by where your book is headed next.
The single most important thing you can do to ensure your success as an author is knowing what that success means to you. If writing or publishing means nothing to you unless there’s a New York City publishing house logo on the book cover, get ready to embrace the long, hard road of querying a manuscript. Likewise, if you’ve spent years pouring out this story and you want full control over the way it’s written, edited, designed, and marketed, the time to stake your claim on that is also now.—Read more at Publishing options: Which one is right for you?
Community coaching call on Thursday
Office Hours may be one of the best-kept secrets for new writers on the internet. This community coaching call for Writes of Fiction paid subscribers is your chance to spend a whole hour with me talking shop—and right now, our little group is small, which means more time for you and your writing concerns!
Office Hours is an open Q&A format, with discussion geared toward new writers just beginning to develop their craft.
This week, I’ll be hosting my editorial colleague and partner in crime Beth Hill, author of The Magic of Fiction and the heroically detailed archives at The Editor’s Blog. Beth and I see eye to eye on all the major principles of commercial story form and narrative technique, but we disagree on plenty of details—and oh, do we love to debate those points. Come to Office Hours and get two editorial viewpoints for the price of one!
The next Office Hours community coaching call is just around the corner, slated for 9:00 a.m. US Central (GMT -5) on Thursday, April 18. I hope you’ll consider joining us—we’d love to have you. Paid subscribers, call details are pinned on the home page of The Writes of Fiction.
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Onward,
Lisa
This is The Writes of Fiction, a curated trove of old and new thinking about writing designed to help you get better at writing fiction.