[This message has been edited by Kickle (edited March 28, 2004).]
However, I have a question of my own. I am writing a story, as readers would it bug you if the story didn't have any chapters whatsoever.
As in the book was broken into several POV (parts) and then into 4 sections. I think the flow of it works but I'm not sure how a reader would take it. Kicke's question made me wonder about the peice I'm working on.
Thanks
Maybe if the chapters were set up horribly weird I would care...maybe.
The length of a chapter depends on what it needs to do. I've read two page chapters that worked without problem, and I've also read chapters that I would bet spanned sixty pages. I would hesitate to eliminate all chapters and just have major parts.
For me chapter breaks serve to give me a breaking point to go to the restroom, or get something to drink...ect.
LDS
Chapters can be used to indicate a change in POV character. (That's how I'm using them in my novel.)
They can be used to indicate a shift in time.
They can be used to indicate the completion of a scene.
They can be used to split a scene for dramatic effect (ending a chapter on with a cliffhanger.)
They can be used to give readers convenient places to pause in their reading in order to get a snack.
Chaptering is not grammar; it is style.
[This message has been edited by EricJamesStone (edited March 28, 2004).]
As a reader, chapters are important for me because they make a convenient stopping point (I read books fast, but not that fast... I do have to take a break at some point).
In my current project, I'm also using chapters to indicate POV. (I'm alternating two viewpoints.) It felt a little awkward at first, but I think it's working reasonably well. Because certain scenes need to be told from one viewpoint or the other, the length of the chapters is somewhat variable, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem.
By the way, have you read some of Terry Pratchet? I don't know if he does this with all of his books, but I read two that had no chapter breaks at all and I hated it. Very inconvenient.
Also, I do frequently read Pratchett books in a single sitting.
By the way, this has nothing to do with anything, but I'm typing this without being able to see my hands or the keyboard because my cat has decided to sit on my wrists. If only my High School typing teacher had known about this technique. She had lost all hope of my ever becoming a touch typist.
Back on topic, I like short chapters. All readers tastes are individual, but my argument for short chapters are . . . .
As a reader, I'm more likely to read one more chapter if I'm laying in bed, needing to go to sleep, and I see the next chapter is only five pages long. Then I get done and see the next chapter is just seven pages. Then the next chapter is just six. Before I know it, it's three hours later and I'm within a hundred pages of the end. No reason to stop now. So, for me, short chapters give a book a can't-put-it-down quality. It's like the information of a book is, say, a pound of potatoes. If the author smashes the potatoes up and creates a great big heaping bowl of mashed potatoes, the thought of sitting down and eating the whole bowl gives me a queasy feeling. But if the potatoes are given to me in potato chip format, well, I start out just eating one or two and by the end of the night the bag is empty.
The potato chip school of writing also works for me as a writer. I do chapters that are 2000 to 3000 words long. This means I write my chapters in one sitting, and they all have a nice cohesion and flow to them. (Or I hope they do, at least.) I also think short chapters lend themselves to cliffhangers. In Nobody Gets the Girl, I end one chapter with the pin of a hand-grenade hitting the ground. If this came at the end of a 90 page chapter, it would have felt melodramatic and forced. At the end of a ten page chapter, it's an enticement to read the next ten page chapter.
Ending the chapter with a cliffhanger means I always know what to start with when I sit back down to write. Rather than structuring my chapters start, middle, end, break, I structure them end, start, middle, break. Of course, I don't write all my chapters this way, since that would be monotonous. But the story will give you its own ebb and flow. There are some chapters that have to end at the end if you want them to have an impact. The first two chapters of Nobody end with strong hooks. The third chapters lets the main character catch his breath as the bizarre situation he's found himself in is explained by someone who knows what's going on. I end with the character digesting the information. Not exactly a page-turner, but the reader also needs a moment to digest what's going on. If you write five cliffhanger chapters in a row, you run to risk of exhausting your reader's patience and making them notice the bag of potato chips.
A final note on chapters: I always give each chapter a title. I'm in a tiny minority of writers who do this, but for me, titles are an essential element of the storytelling process. A good chapter title hints at things to come, can serve as a puzzle that gives the reader a small thrill when it's solved, and can provide a nice ironic counterpoint to your whole chapter. A good title is like sour cream and onion flavoring on the potato chips.
Well, my cat has moved on and for some reason I'm hungry. I'll shut up now.
--James
quote:
By the way, this has nothing to do with anything, but I'm typing this without being able to see my hands or the keyboard because my cat has decided to sit on my wrists. If only my High School typing teacher had known about this technique. She had lost all hope of my ever becoming a touch typist.
Actually, I was going to add a cat comment to the "Non-writers Just Don't Get It" thread, insofar as my non-writing cats bug me about as much as Eljay's toddlers do her -- nudging and walking over the keyboard and in front of the monitor, sitting on my work, sneezing on it. Your comments, James, brought some thoughts together, particularly considering one of my cats once threw up on my work.
Maybe cats are literally (literally literally) prescient, the muses we only fantasize about, but muses without the New Age foo-foo, very down-to-earth. So much so they'll throw up a hairball to make their point or sit on our wrists to make us 'use the force' for our typing skills.
As for the chapter length issue (took me long enough to get there, eh?)...I prefer shorter chapters. I think it's a psychological thing...I feel like I'm making progress when I finish up a chapter in minutes instead of hours (which happens rarely in my case...I was gifted with a 'cram-air' reading system). David Drake and Eric Flint, in their Belisarius novels, always clean up with very short sections. They're not quite paragraph breaks but not new chapters either...sort of in-between, I think. I happen to like this style, though I know a few people that are driven insane by it (not literally, you understand...most of them are already insane).
Inkwell
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"The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp."
-Anonymous
[This message has been edited by Inkwell (edited March 29, 2004).]
Oh, erm... what were we talking about? *grin*
But I don't think chapters are too big an issue - how engaging the text is influences me more. I've read one book, The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing that didn't have a single break the entire book. It literally forced me to read it nonstop - but it only worked because the writing was excellent and the book was short (imagine a 500 page book with no breaks - ick!).
As a writer I'd rather have a chapter long enough that something of substance happens.
quote:
Chapter length can have a big influence on pacing.
I know this doesn't help, but I stillf felt like talking. Besides, of all the issues in writing, I find that how long the chapters are matters the least. I mean, you can use their length for pacing affect, but even if you don't it doesn't really matter. No one has ever criticzed my writing based on chapter length, and I have never made the comment to anyone else. I don't imagine that anyone's losing sleep over this issue, but if you are....forget it and go to bed. When you wake up, that's a new chapter.
As a reader, I tend flip back to the chapter I was reading previously...so it helps if there are chapters and they mark important narrative divisions of some sort.
I think that there is also a strong tendency for most readers to be "alerted" or woken up a bit by a chapter break. I'd guess that most people remember the text on the last page of a chapter and the first page of the next just a bit more vividly than they remember stuff in the middle...the page break and white space act as a visual break that does something or other to the brain.
Okay, I'm making that brain stuff up, but I've noticed that people forget stuff in the middle of the chapter more than they forget stuff at the beginning and end. That might be because most authors put the most memorable material near the chapter breaks...or it could be a combination of both factors.
For myself, I love schematics. If there's a schematic drawing, be it a map or a blueprint or a flowchart, whatever...it makes the accompanying text stand out in my memory. Sadly, they usually only appear in non-fiction works...and I also happen to know that a flawed schematic really irritates me a lot, so it is probably best that they usually only appear in works that are based on actual research.
But I'm guessing that a chapter break does something or other to the reader, if only to mark something the writer thought was worth ending one chapter and beginning another.
quote:
Okay, I'm making that brain stuff up...
And in psychology, it's pretty much still true. People tend to judge experiences by the beginning, the maximum, and the end-- and forget about the rest. In some experiments with painful medical procedures, people were more willing to go through the experience again if they'd had an extra thirty seconds at the end that wasn't as painful as most of the proceedure. If you view chapters as a way of artificially creating smaller structural breaks with their own distinct start, maximum (which could also be a cliffhanger end), and end, I think that's definitely true.