What’s the deal with chapters?

This blog has looked at several questions facing the fantasy author, ranging from how to create fictional names, the value of a prologue, and even how to create your own fantasy map. By comparison, this next topic may seem non-controversial or perhaps trivial, but for me it was anything but – Chapters. Do you even need chapters? What constitutes a chapter? How long should chapters be? Should you number chapters, name them, or neither?

Okay, that’s a lot of questions (and I’m leaving out more) about something that many people with more experience than me have answered numerous times. With that in mind, here are my short-hand answers to the first three questions:

Yes, properly used chapters help authors control the pace of the story allowing for breaks in action and can even be used to create cliff-hanging suspense – especially with multi-threaded point of view stories. Can you get by without them? Of course, but why take the hammer out of your toolbox?

Whether it’s to switch points-of-view, create suspense, change scenes, or to just give the reader a break-point, it doesn’t really matter where you break for a chapter as long as it improves the telling of the story. Scenes can flow across multiple chapters and chapters can contain more than one scene or point of view – although if you go with the latter two it’s important to alert the reader to the change. You can use a break symbol (I use * * * *) or in some cases you may want to even label the change – ‘Present Day, Piper Falls’ or something similar unless you’re actively trying to confuse or mislead your reader (something I rarely do – at least not on purpose).

As for the length, many “sources” often quote 3,000 to 5,000 words as the ideal chapter length. I’ve heard several different theories for this length – it’s the number of words on a typical scroll which when converted to books became chapters or it’s the number of words that magazines and newspapers allotted to serialized stories they used to run. While I’ve included that info ‘cause I think it’s neat, it’s not important (my book editor would cut it, which is why she doesn’t preview my blog – that and I couldn’t afford to pay her for the service). My view is that chapter length shouldn’t be a primary concern.

That’s not to say you can’t use length to help your story. In the Misaligned series, my chapters range from 523 words to 4,788 with a lot of variance.  In the Warders books they’re generally around 2,000 words. In Misaligned I’m more focused on revealing elements of the story in a precise order.  In the Warders I want a faster-paced story. In both cases the length and content of the chapters serves the story.

The last question gets very little discussion, but it’s the one that caused me the most grief. I really liked the idea of naming my chapters.  It seems like a great way to pique the reader’s curiosity and engage them in the story. I searched through many of my favorite fantasy and science fiction books and found quite a few titled their chapters. To be fair many were written long ago, but even some of my newer favorites by Clancy and McDevitt included chapter titles. A similar search of the YA/tween books my children devour (mostly fantasy) found them even more prevalent.

With that in mind, I started naming the chapters in the first books of both the Misaligned and Warders series.  I quickly abandoned the idea after only a few chapters. Tolkien’s probably not a fair bar to measure against.  However my titles fell far short ‘Riddles in the Dark’ or ‘Barrels Out of Bond.’  Maybe I lack the necessary skill (which didn’t stop me from map-making), or perhaps I gave up too quickly. In the end, I settled for numbers.  The only decision being to spell them out or go with Roman numerals. Roman numerals struck me as a bit pretentious for a YA fantasy story, so I spelled them out. Perhaps my next series will include chapter titles.

As always thanks for reading.

Armen

For more information about my books, please visit my website

Misaligned Series

Warders Series