McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Chapter Titles yes or no?
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Lanodantheon on May 25, 2009, 08:37:38 PM ---If you give a chapter a title you tell the reader what is going to happen before it happens.
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Only if you are being direct; good tites may well suit their chapters in ways that aren't obvious until you've read the chapters, no ?
--- Quote ---There's a book, As I Lay Dying, about a family going across country. The narrative jumps from one member of the family to another in first person. Each chapter tells who is narrating at the current moment.
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Which to my way of thinking is a prop for lazy writing; if you're good at distinct voices, you really shouldn't need that.
--- Quote ---I may abandon this idea though because unless I can create a good caveat that allows him to magically write in his journal in real-time, the tension will never be as high as it could because in order to write all this stuff down, the MC has to be alive at the end.
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There's no absolute need for that. It could be unfinished, for example, and you could have someone else find the journal after the main character is dead and complete the story.
thausgt:
--- Quote from: neurovore on May 26, 2009, 04:33:27 PM ---There's no absolute need for that. It could be unfinished, for example, and you could have someone else find the journal after the main character is dead and complete the story.
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True. There was a creepy little story from an all-prose anthology of Batman stories using that technique. The journal had been kept by a couple of street kids who decided to build their street cred by taking out the Joker. The Joker, in turn, wrote the final entry and arranged for Batman to get it... probably along with a few bits of evidence about what happened to the kids.
Brrr...
Anyway, feel free to have the MC die in the course of the story. The "final entry" doesn't even have to be written in the journal itself. Depending on who finds the thing and when, it could also be a police report or even an archeology display. (That one's from Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale".)
Good luck!
NothingWicked:
An interesting twist I've encountered on Chapter Titles is having a quote precede a chapter rather than a title. In books like "This Alien Shore" they add a depth and flavor to the novel's world as well as add a commentary on, rather than spoiler for, the following chapter. They also seem to create a universal undercurrent to the themes of the novel as a whole.
Hoyled:
Having just finished the Warhammer novel Hero of the Imperium, I find that I really like how it was set up. The book is the personal memoir of the hero, being edited for reading by someone he knew. The friend adds in quotes the hero had collected, filled in information gaps, and added in extra sources to fill out the full extent of the situation.
comprex:
--- Quote from: neurovore on May 25, 2009, 04:36:47 PM ---Steven Brust uses them in most of the Vlad books in various sneaky ways - one of them uses lines that altogether make up a laundry list, in each chapter of which you see incidentally how the garment in question acquires the stain or damage that prompts that instruction; and in the Khaavren Romances in a different way, the sort of semi-humorous sentence summarising the next chapter of the Victorian swashbuckler. "In Which Our Heroes Fight Three Duels And Cross A River" sort of thing.
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I was most impressed with his use of them in The Sun, The Moon, And the Stars, different than either of the above.
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