Sorry, me again.

I wonder, how do you develop a sense of a chapter? Where it begins and ends. I have a very clear sense of scenes, but they can be short, or long, or fragments. They don't warrant a new chapter each time. I find I'm not putting chapter breaks in because I can't work out where they go. And when my husband suggested writing each chapter in a new file so Word didn't run so slow every time I make a change, I hadn't a clue how to evaluate chunks of the story and divvy them up in that way.

How do you decide?

Have you decided how long the chapters are going to be, roughly? Could you try putting markers, say, every 5,000 words (or whatever) and looking around those points to see if there is a place where a break would seem natural?

It's about the bigger architecture, isn't it - the ten or twelve or twenty moments when something major has changed: a series of causally-linked scenes have led to a point where the landscape is definitely different.

I plan in chapters from the beginning so I don't know how you think about it from the other end, I'm afraid: each chapter has an end-point towards which I'm working, where we are definitely in a different place.

You could try calling each scene a chapter, and then think about whether a series of them actually forms a group.

You could impose a tidy structure into which you slot the scenes - like days of the week, or places or times.

Does my analogy of the piers of the bridge help at all?

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2009/01/building-the-bridge.html

The beginning of a chapter is from the point of one arch, down into the main bulk of the pier, and then arches upwards towards the next chapter?

Emma

My chapters are mostly pretty short - about 1,500 words - 2,000 words. I think 2,000 words is a good chunk for a reader to read, say, at bedtime. I try to write each chapter as a mini story which is (hopefully) satisfying in itself to read as a chunk, but which also leads the reader to want to continue. Some end very hookily, like a starter for a main meal. Others are more like the meal itself, and end 'roundly' IYSWIM, with a sense of (temporary) completion. I'm also very aware of alternating action/drama/dialogue with internal/thoughtful chapters. But you know all this. I think it's a matter of a) following your intuition and b) continually thinking of what your readers need.
Susiex

In The Somnambulist - where it's a single narrator, my chapters all knew where they were going and seemed to work out fairly evenly in length.

But with the WIP, I have two narrators who tell their parts of the story quite differently - so one, with a more conventional style has the longer chapters through which the plot's structure runs coherently. The other has a more haphazard, inward looking view of events, and for that I either need very short chapters or, as I've taken to writing them - simple extra line breaks where her story veers off into different short scenes.

It seems to be working as I'm writing. It seems quite logical and clear, though goodness knows how I'll feel when I come to read again in 'the whole'.

Thank you.

Emma, not taken a look at your bridge piers yet - will in a second. Enticing. From what you've said in the past about your chapters, I know they are far longer than mine. What you call a chapter is just a tiny bit shorter than what I'd called a Book, or Part 1. I.e. it's the end of Act 1 in the drama. That's how I build the story - in three parts, I suppose. They are fairly manageable, but the chunks inside them, less so. However, I could start thinking about the build, scene by scene, and see what peaks when and whether certain peaks can be grouped together more elegantly.

Susie, my instincts are much like yours. I round off scenes like short stories - appetiser or full meal, as it were, I just have problems in grouping the short ones. To carry through your analogy - how do you pull off a starter of parma ham and melon when you have just a tiny scrap of smoked salmon that absolutely must get used up before its sell by date, but doesn't quite fit on the same plate?

Catkin, I'll try that. I've always thought that chapters shouldn't be uniform in length but it would be interesting as an exercise to see where natural breaks occur around the 2k, 5k marks. That could just work.

One other thought, cherys: do you need chapters at all? They were always something I assumed I 'had' to have (and in the last three books, formed themselves relatively naturally)... but in the WIP I'm finding it most natural to write in scenes, with only two major breaks (diving Books I, II and III) besides. Perhaps if chapters aren't suggesting themselves to you in the writing, you could consider shaping the novel differently?..

SB, I think I was so hung up on plot when I got this novel off the ground that I overlooked structure. Just reading you say that, and how clear and elegant it sounds, makes me wonder why I didn't streamline the narrative from the outset. There's a reason first novelists rarely publish third person multiple viewpoint, isn't there?

Emma D, I've just read your bridge piers. Love it. Love it, love it, love it. Golly, you're good!

how do you pull off a starter of parma ham and melon when you have just a tiny scrap of smoked salmon that absolutely must get used up before its sell by date, but doesn't quite fit on the same plate?

Erm, see what you mean! You could bring in the little scrap of salmon with trumpets and fanfares to announce that This Is The Tiny Smoked Salmon Scrap course - ie if they are similar scraps, perhaps treat them as tiny separate chapters with a heading? But I think Trilby makes a good point...

Susiex

Glad you approve of the bridge piers, Cherys. And I love the smoked salmon analogy (I'm hungry, now...)

I take the point that my chapters are huge (I think my record was 15,500 words), but they have larger divisions within them which STILL are bigger than scenes, IYSWIM. I make a lot of use of the double-line-space for a jump in time or space, and the asterisk for what many others would do to start a new chapter.

So if you wanted to regard the section between the *s as a chapter, that'd be fine by me. And it would still be a linked chain of scenes which have some reason for being linked up together. e.g. that section might be on the plan or in my head as something like "Series of linked scenes through the autumn as they work out how to mend the car and start falling in love". And the next section would be there as "start planning wedding but MIL-to-be starts interfering, ends when HMRC doubles tax demand (so no money for wedding)."

Does that makes sense?

Emma

You could bring in the little scrap of salmon with trumpets and fanfares to announce that This Is The Tiny Smoked Salmon Scrap course

Tee hee Susie. I have so done that. (Here comes a Tiny Section, Folks! Enjoy the White Space!!!) and am trying not to.

I cross posted with Trilby. That's interesting. I really don't feel the need for chapters, it's true. the scenes are breaks in themselves, so chapter breaks in addition to that seem arbitrary. Perhaps I can get away with white space plus Parts 1,2 & 3. It is just convention, not need that I am trying to appease.

Emma, your example is beautifully clear, but disarmingly so. In reality, do you not have sections which read:

Series of linked autumn scenes as they work out how to mend the car and fall in love, while his father's dementia plays out his terror during the war and his mother takes on a second job as night receptionist at A & E, as she's terrified of being unable to cover his impending care. And Laurel, who she befriends there is being taken to court because her dog bit a woman who turns out to be the new MIL from hell. And the double tax bill isn't wrong because adorable husband to be hasn't paid for three years because of plot complication no 4739 involving flashback to his financial predicament involving a medic with a dog.

Or not?

do you not have sections which read: Series of linked autumn scenes as they work out how to mend the car and fall in love, while his father's dementia plays out his terror during the war and his mother takes on a second job as night receptionist at A & E, as she's terrified of being unable to cover his impending care. And Laurel, who she befriends there is being taken to court because her dog bit a woman who turns out to be the new MIL from hell. And the double tax bill isn't wrong because adorable husband to be hasn't paid for three years because of plot complication no 4739 involving flashback to his financial predicament involving a medic with a dog.

No - that all comes along as I write the first draft... I don't know any of that till it gets onto the page

Honest to God, on the grid, a 14,000 word chapter is probably pinned down in perhaps 30-50 words. In TMOL, for example, perhaps ten or twenty for Stephen ("Brussels. Goes to theatre, sees Katrijn, become lovers, letter: Lucy's coming") five for the bits of Stephen's past we discover, and ten-fifteen for Anna, and one for where his nightmare comes from. Perhaps a note about weather if it matters. That's a 13k chapter in the novel, as I recall.

Which is why I hestitate when people ask whether I plan, because that's a chapter-plan for me, but people assume that 'planning' means working out all the stages.

But my plots are basically pretty simple. One reason for stuffing more than one story into a novel - you can get away with it.

Emma

So then, once the first draft is done (and yes, true, all that stuff comes out in the writing not the preplanning) how then do you order the material into chapters. Although, I suppose with longer chapters that's not the issue, as they build to the end of the act. that much I understand.

Think I'll go for three unchaptered sections for now and see what the agent says.

Well, that block IS the chapter - the ordering's there from when I first feel that I've got enough of a view of the arc of the novel to pin down the structure into... chapters. So think in chapters as other people think in scenes, I suppose: exactly what scenes will be needed to make up that chapter is what I don't always know.

I write Chapter Three at the top of the new page, and off I go.

It might well turn out that some scene or bit of a scene really needs to go somewhere else (Oh - it would be better if he sees Katrijn at the theatre before they meet in the print shop, in which case he needs to go past the theatre on his first night in Brussels, and see a poster and think, "well, that'd be something to do".)

I might find that getting him to that chapter-end point takes much more, or less action, than I was expecting. But it's very unusual for a chapter to end at a radically different point of the story from what I expected. I don't do that on purpose, if you see what I mean - if something different does happen, I let it. It just doesn't, very often.

<Added>

So it's in chapters right from the first, long-hand draft. I track the wordcount in chapters too, not to make sure they're all the same, but so I have a rough feel for the proportions of the beast - that all the pillars of my bridge, if you like, have the same weight and dimensions.

I know, it sounds horribly anal, but I'm in better company than I thought. McEwan says that one of the first things he knows about a novel when it comes to him is 'the maths' - that it'll be three parts of 20k each, or 5 parts of 10k, or whatever, and he plans from there.

<Added>

Which is really a deplorably long-winded way of explaining why the way I do it is absolutely no use to you. It's like talking about swimming to someone who's only ever swum off a boat in the middle of the sea, when I've only ever swum in a pool of exactly 50 metres...

But yes, I'd leave it as you have it and see what the agent says. If it's good enough for McEwan...

Actually, no, it is of use. I think with the next book I might try something like that. This one I really didn't have the story properly carved out. I found an early draft under my bed the other day. It was unrecognisable - 90% changed in storyline.

The next book is mapped out in my head, but not into chapters, so I might give more thought to what builds to when, when I get around to it. The story is far clearer next time round. But then, it would be, wouldn't it, because it isn't written yet .

I did map it into 3 acts, but smaller, more frequent mapping, which actually contains longer chunks (i.e. mapping chunks of 10k rather than mapping chunks of 25k but then wading into them with lots of 2k scenes, might be really useful.)