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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: gravesbane on May 24, 2009, 06:04:54 PM
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How do feel about chapter titles? I think they can be a great outlet for additional snark. My wife feels they can give away too much of the upcoming plot. What are your feelings?
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From the reader's perspective:
Chapter titles do seem to be out of fashion, at least in adult fiction. I just took a moment to search my bookshelf for any novels that use chapter titles, coming up with none (though I only searched the fantasy and scifi section) for adults, but two series for YA (Harry Potter and The Spook Series).
A good chapter title can raise the reader's expectations and, after reading the chapter, add to his or her understanding of what was the most important thing that happened in the chapter. If you choose the title well, you won't give away too much of the plot.
From the writer's perspective:
I use them in my own writing. A good chapter title is hard to find, but the search alone (as well as the title once you've found it) helps you, the writer, focus and bring out what you really want to achieve with this chapter. Often enough, as I am struggling to come up with the appropriate title, I realize what the chapter is about, and it affects the plot. (Other writers might achieve the same effect with meticulous outlining, but that doesn't work for me.)
To me, chapter titles are part of the story, not separate from it (like a newspaper heading.) They should add to the story. If you string all your chapter titles together, you should have a near-complete list of all your major plot points.
So my advice would be: if you like them, use them. I wouldn't consider them a waste of time and effort even if, should your novel be published, the editor wants to omit them. They are really a great tool to help you organize your story.
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Thanks. I agree with you and you added some points I had not come to my mind. I am also debating Prologues and Epilogues.
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Please forgive the grammer of my last post. :)
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I personally don't use them, but then again, I have enough trouble coming up with a title for my book, etc, so it just seems like extra work that I'd rather not do if I don't have to.
I think they can be a great way to whet the reader's appetite, so to speak, and make them want to push forward (like when there's a nagging question the reader has and the chapter title hints that it will be answered or at least addressed here), but at the same time, I think they're easy to screw up, too.
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. I really think it's a personal preference, though. I'd really wait and see how it feels once a given piece is done. Does the chapter title add something or not? If you're not sure, have other people read a few samples and ask if they like the titles or if you should drop them.
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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.
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.)
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Interesting idea.
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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..."
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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.
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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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If you give a chapter a title you tell the reader what is going to happen before it happens.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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.
Brandon Sanderson does the same thing in his Mistborn series. So does Steven Erikson frequently in the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I like it. But I don't know if I'd want to do something like that unless I was writing a history-style work.
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Brandon Sanderson does the same thing in his Mistborn series. So does Steven Erikson frequently in the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I like it. But I don't know if I'd want to do something like that unless I was writing a history-style work.
It's pretty common for period fiction. What was I just reading that had it? Oh yes, Boris Akunin's ‘The Winter Queen’.
(Which is a pretty decent read in itself: imagine young, very young 007 set in czarist Russia with a nod to Dumas)
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I recently started reading the Alex Rider series that makes good use of Chapter Titles. The first book is called "Stormbreaker" and written by Anthony Horowitz. Think Jr. James Bond type if he didn't volunteer, but was more or less blackmailed into working for Queen and Country. Good stuff. :)
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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.
Not really. Its mostly a reference, so that the reader can get into the proper frame imediately, rather than having to read even a few sentences to get their bearings, so to speak. A really good example of this is the Wheel of Time, where there was a unique icon at the beginning of each chapter that told you which character/group/subplot that chapter was focused on. It gave nothing away, and it may have been obvious anyway after the first few sentences, but it was still helpful as a reader.
There are several ways Ive seen Chapter information given well. Chapter titles can work if done right (as others have said, they can give too much away if done wrong). Another route I have often enjoyed is when authors start a chapter with a world quote; they can be ballad lyrics, proverbs, philosophical saying etc, but they are from within the story world, and often add depth to the story and world as a whole. Their relevance to the specific chapter can be secondary, though Ive seen a few that do it well, being relevant, but only in hindsight.
One of my favorite chapter devices, used well in Ender's Game, is to give a short bit from a non-standard POV. In Ender's game (written in first person) this was a short bit of dialogue from the antagonists. It was entirely dialouge, and the first half of the book you were just trying to identify the speakers. But it gave you a short glimpse of the Teachers reactions to whatever was going on, and was a very effective outlet to convey little bits of information that the Reader needed, but the MC needed to be ignorant of.
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I didn't realize there were chapter titles in the HP series until the 5th book. So even if you do have them in, some of us are SO focused on the story that we won't see them.
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Not really. Its mostly a reference, so that the reader can get into the proper frame imediately, rather than having to read even a few sentences to get their bearings, so to speak.
That in and of itself is lazy. If the voices are distinct enough, you won;t need more than a sentence or two to know.
A really good example of this is the Wheel of Time, where there was a unique icon at the beginning of each chapter that told you which character/group/subplot that chapter was focused on. It gave nothing away, and it may have been obvious anyway after the first few sentences, but it was still helpful as a reader.
With all due respect to Robert Jordan, all his character voices sound pretty much exactly the same to me, so I don't think this disproves my point.
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That in and of itself is lazy. If the voices are distinct enough, you won;t need more than a sentence or two to know.
Its not about how long it takes to pick it up from the voice, its the fact that the reader will spend a sentence or two not knowing. Now for some styles thats fine, or even beneficial, but for others it take away when a simple thing like a chapter title can give your reader a heads up so that they are thinking in the correct context, or can adjust for a sudden change in poltline/location/character/etc. This can be especially important if the chapters tend to end on cliffhangers, and then switch to another subplot. Without some sort of transition, the change can be jarring to the reader. Its much like the transitions in movies: sometimes a simple fade-to-black is enough, but other times you need that little bit of text in the corner that says "Calcutta, 23:50 hours" And while yes, any such information could be conveyed in text, sometimes it can be better to get it across in a more direct manner and move on. I see where your point is coming from, but I think it may be due in part to a more specific stylistic expectation.
With all due respect to Robert Jordan, all his character voices sound pretty much exactly the same to me, so I don't think this disproves my point.
I dont disagree completely, though some of that I attribute to 3rd person POV in general (and the rest to simply having too many extraneous characters)
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Its not about how long it takes to pick it up from the voice, its the fact that the reader will spend a sentence or two not knowing.
Readers who have a problem with that really to my mind fall into the 'wanting to be spoon-fed everything" category, and I prefer my entertainment to actually engage my brain.
This can be especially important if the chapters tend to end on cliffhangers, and then switch to another subplot. Without some sort of transition, the change can be jarring to the reader.
Jarring is not inherently bad. Sometimes it is exactly the effect the author wants.
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Its not about how long it takes to pick it up from the voice, its the fact that the reader will spend a sentence or two not knowing. Now for some styles thats fine, or even beneficial, but for others it take away when a simple thing like a chapter title can give your reader a heads up so that they are thinking in the correct context, or can adjust for a sudden change in poltline/location/character/etc. This can be especially important if the chapters tend to end on cliffhangers, and then switch to another subplot. Without some sort of transition, the change can be jarring to the reader. Its much like the transitions in movies: sometimes a simple fade-to-black is enough, but other times you need that little bit of text in the corner that says "Calcutta, 23:50 hours" And while yes, any such information could be conveyed in text, sometimes it can be better to get it across in a more direct manner and move on. I see where your point is coming from, but I think it may be due in part to a more specific stylistic expectation.
Isn't that kind of the point of ending on a cliffhanger? Keep people reading, and best way to do that is to switch POV. With Jordan, I don't think I realized the symbols were for different characters until I was several books into the series. I had more trouble when he switched from one POV to another only paragraphs from each other with no kind of break.
The change in POV might be somewhat jarring, but when you get to a new chapter or a space break, it's easy enough to guess that it'll either be a POV change or a time change.
I've more often found that chapter titles can be a bit jarring themselves; they pull me out of the story when I notice them, and I prefer to just go from one sentence to the next.
On a side note, Star Wars is probably the best movie/novel comparison I've come across, where the changes of POV in the novels matches the editing in the movies.
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Readers who have a problem with that really to my mind fall into the 'wanting to be spoon-fed everything" category, and I prefer my entertainment to actually engage my brain.
I agree, with one addition: I approve of situations where the confusion is a deliberate choice on the part of the author in service to the story, and disapprove of situations where the confusion is lack of skill on the author's part and/or it does not serve the story.
For example, consider Niven & Barnes' "The Barsoom Project", in which the murderer gets a few lines and made significant changes to the plot in an early chapter; the authors included that scene to explain what happened later as well as in service to the story (the context of the murderer's actions caught the hero's attention; "That's not supposed to happen in this Game!") without revealing who the murderer was until an appropriate point in the story.
Jarring is not inherently bad. Sometimes it is exactly the effect the author wants.
Exactly I agree, and that is precisely why I personally take issue with the "technique" when it's actually bad writing. Another example is in Alfred Bester's "The Computer Connection", when the story switches from first-person-narration to third-person halfway thrugh the book, then back again. The story flow is not only not interrupted, but enhanced by both transitions. This would be a mark of a lesser writer and a soon-to-be-fired editor, but because it serves the story, the technique works.
Truth to tell, I can't have an educated opinion on Jordan's work, as I never managed to get past the first book. And my tendency to forget "bad" writing means that I can't remember any other examples to illustrate what I mean by that. So it goes...
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Readers who have a problem with that really to my mind fall into the 'wanting to be spoon-fed everything" category, and I prefer my entertainment to actually engage my brain.
Again, its not a matter of spoon-feeding, its a matter of stylistic choice. If you want those first few sentences to be built so that the reader can get his bearings from them thats fine, but if you have something else you want to do with them, some form of chapter text (titles, timestamp, random excerpt, alternate POV, etc) is a good alternative, one that shouldn't be disparaged on its face. It can be done poorly of course, but it can be done well also. Its not a mark of laziness, or a commentary on the intelligence of the audience just because its not accomplished in the body of the text. Hell, it wasn't that long ago (relatively speaking) that even the great authors included illustrations.
Jarring is not inherently bad. Sometimes it is exactly the effect the author wants.
Oh, absolutely. But at the times that it isnt what the author wants, Chapter text can be a good tool to use.