McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Chapter Titles yes or no?
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: daylightdreamer on May 24, 2009, 07:38:10 PM ---
I agree that they seem to be more in the realm of young adult literature. I can't remember the last fairly modern adult book that I read that used chapter titles.
--- End quote ---
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.
It's a question of style, really. It also makes a difference, IMO, if you are doing a first person story, to decide whether this is a story written down by the first-person narrator within their own world, and whether it is the kind of thing your narrator would think is cool. (Writing narrators who have totally different ideas of what's cool and what's boring from what you do yourself is a lot of fun.)
gravesbane:
Interesting idea.
Lanodantheon:
The effect of chapter titles is thus:
If you give a chapter a title you tell the reader what is going to happen before it happens. A title may add suspense or take it away. When I first read a new HP book when it came out I read the names of all the chapters in the table of contents so I had a general idea of what would happen before it happened.
This isn't a rule though.
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.
In my Magical School Drama, I myself am currently debating a narrative based around a Journal entry style. Every chapter in that case would be titled after the day it occurs based on when my Main Character got his magic. For example, the first day would be Day 6 or so and by the end of the book he'd be on Day 285 with the day he gained his magic being Day 0(Zero). 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.
In The Dresden Files, the chapters are just numbered for the sake of telling you where you are in the book for easy reference. A friend of yours starts reading a book and you ask, "What part are at?" your friend can respond, "Chapter such and such..."
thausgt:
Chapter titles might be something of a relic from the old days, when most fiction was published serially in magazines. The more elaborate ones: "'The Curse Of The Noble Gasser' or 'Helium for Laughs', in which our heroes discern the nature of the strange scent left by the mysterious house-breaker" might be the 'hook' that drew readers in as they flipped through the periodical. The sub-heading has, to varying degrees, become simply the first sentence in new chapters.
Chapter titles might also be an early form of outlining a longer story, when payment for stories was more pennies per word; authors therefore tried to find new ways to squeeeze more words into each published work.
Suilan:
Well, if I were paid in penny per so many words, I certainly wouldn't waste time on chapter titles! It only takes a moment to add another sentence to a chapter, but to find the perfect title? Well, let's just say that takes a lot longer. :D
As for chapter titles being a relic from the old days when most fiction was published serially in magazines, why, I can imagine they might come back into style one of these days, as we live in times of decreasing attention spans and increasing number of things competing for our attention.
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