Chapters: Numbers or Names?

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Paul Whybrow

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Jun 20, 2015
Cornwall, UK
Brian Clegg's recent thread about cliffhanger teasers at the end of a novel, to publicise the next book, set me to thinking about how a fictional story is organised.

I'm just finishing my fourth novel and I've applied the same format to all of my books, a template that makes it easy for me to navigate around where I've been and where I'm going.

Aiming for the recommended 80,000 words of my crime genre, I produce 38 chapters that vary in length from 1,800 to 4,000 words. The longer chapters have two or three section breaks—I love section breaks—a great way of suggesting connections in a plot.

I number and name my chapter headings, (Chapter 37—Under the Skin), which may be a bit belt & braces of me, but there's a method in my eccentricity. The main reason is, to help the reader remember where they are, and also a named chapter acts as a hook to pull them in.

From my experience as a librarian, I know that readers use odd reasons to reject a book...too many pages, too many chapters and chapters that are too long. I'm kind of playing the odds here, for polls of readers show that it's mainly women who read anyway, and most readers of crime fiction are female, and there are more older readers than young. Hopefully, my anticipated demographic of readers will appreciate me keeping things neat!

I've observed from the novels I've been reading, that most use numbered chapters, with only a few having titles. Some dispense with chapters completely, and the text is laid out in paragraphs and section breaks. A few separate the story into parts, to describe things from a different point of view or when there's a chronological gap.

There's been a trend recently, to have chapters alternate their POV. Gone Girl and Girl On A Train did this with each chapter bearing the name of which character was speaking.

I don't think that it's always the author who chooses how to lay out their chapters, as there may be editorial decisions made by the publisher to have the layout conform to a house style.

How do you organise your story?
 
I usually use a number and a title, though in one book I used only numbers, but then broke the book into two sections based on a major change of scene. I'm not wedded to one way or another. I do appreciate books that do chapter titles well (I don't think I'm quite there yet--gotta work on that). Like @Marc Joan, I'm also fond of the Dickensonian sort of chapter headers.
 
So far just chapters with numbers and within them the occasional scene break, but the book I'm shopping around now is titled Two Weeks in Geary and organized by days - 14 of them - with numbered sub chapters as needed within the days. I've gotten mixed feedback on this.
 
So far just chapters with numbers and within them the occasional scene break, but the book I'm shopping around now is titled Two Weeks in Geary and organized by days - 14 of them - with numbered sub chapters as needed within the days. I've gotten mixed feedback on this.
I like that idea.
 
I usually use a number and a title, though in one book I used only numbers, but then broke the book into two sections based on a major change of scene. I'm not wedded to one way or another. I do appreciate books that do chapter titles well (I don't think I'm quite there yet--gotta work on that). Like @Marc Joan, I'm also fond of the Dickensonian sort of chapter headers.
But then, I also like sentences that; go on for whole paragraphs; decorated with; random semicolons.
 
Ah, yes; the fun is, when reading Dickens, or any of the other Victorian writers, to see; how long a sentence one can find; it's sure to be longer than you can read in one breath and; likely to contain an overabundance of punctuation; making my own overuse of commas look positively sparse.
 
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