21.30: Chapter Breaks Soon

Introduction

0:00This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writingexcuses. Season 21, Episode 30.

0:19This is Writing Excuses. Chapter break soon. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Wan. I'm Aaron. And I'm Howard.

Chapter Breaks

0:31And today we're going to be talking about how do you use chapters? So we've been talking about scenes and narrative transitions. We wanted you to have kind of those building blocks before we dove into chapters. A lot of times I get this question a lot, and I wanted to know when I started, like, what is the ideal length for a chapter?

0:50And it's a funny question because if you read Terry Pratchett, there are no chapters. It's just scene breaks. And if you're reading James Patterson, it's about two pages. Yeah. And I've seen chapters that were one sentence long. Yeah. Basically, what we're getting to is there's no hard to pass rule here. Right. Unsurprisingly, given our general theme. But, you know, I think chapter breaks can be really useful. You know, we've talked about scene breaks. We've sort of talked about transitions. But when do you want to bundle up a group of scenes into a defined section, right?

1:25Which is effectively what a chapter is. You know, we're not going to have one specifically around, like, section breaks or act breaks. But I think in thinking about what makes a chapter a chapter, you know, how do we feel like you have enough scenes together to make that break? So, I go back to the thing you've been talking about all season, which is the microcosm, macrocosm. That there are times when a chapter is actually a single scene or, as we've said, a single sentence.

1:55And there are times when I want to group them together. For me, when I'm thinking about the chapter break, I'm thinking about it in terms of pacing. The things we were talking about when we were talking about transitions, about whether or not I want to frame or group a set of things together for the reader to kind of think about them as a contextual whole. If I'm trying to use a chapter break to interrupt action, to really underline a moment, then I will often group stuff so that the chapter ends after a scene that has been a dun-dun-dun.

2:31Yeah. Well, one thing to think about is readers read in chapters, right? Often they will get to the end of a chapter and finish a reading session at that point, right? Whether or not they had planned to. But sometimes they will be like, I'm going to read till the end of this chapter, right? When you came in to record this morning, you had said that very thing of like, oh, I meant to read until the end of this chapter and then I realized, you know, so on and so forth. And so I think part of the reason why a James Patterson or a thriller writer uses very short chapters is their audience is generally one that's reading in smaller chunks, right?

3:04Than say an academic reader who is used to very long, very dense chapters, right? And so I think for you, one way to think about it is in terms of audience and the audience experience. It's not, can be difficult to think about that at the drafting stage. But as you're getting into editing, sort of thinking about that experience can be a useful one.

Writing with Chapters

3:25I'm wondering how much of the chapter is a sort of a thing we would naturally do if we were like writing in a world in which chapters did not exist. Like, and how much of it is the way that we are used to reading stories at this point. And the reason I ask that is not because there's any way to know, but because it makes me wonder, should you be writing with chapters in mind? Or are chapters something that like you've written and then you go back and look for dividing lines and think this makes a good chapter?

3:56When we had our discussion with Margaret about three-act structure, specifically, you know, how it applied to writing for TV, there are norms, there are expectations, there is a meta. If you are writing to a genre that typically has 4,500 word chapters on the average, and the editor you are sending your manuscript to edits for this genre, I would argue that you should have 4,500 word chapters.

4:35That you should force yourself to work within that form because that's the expectation that you are publishing into. And, I mean, to your question, Aaron, would chapters exist if we just, you know, invented writing out of whole cloth and decided, you know, I don't think they necessarily would until we reached a point where someone said, you know, I would like for reading to have break points in it.

5:10I think that they would have, because you see chapters arising independently in multiple different cultures. And to your point about writing to, you know, it's like, this is genre expectation. There's genre expectation, but then there's also playing against expectation so that you stand out. The chapter length, like, I stressed about this so much when I was starting out. It was like, oh, my chapters all need to be about the same length. And now I realize that I was very wrong about that. And it is in the same way that repetition can become boring on a sentence level or a tonal level.

5:51The same thing can happen with chapter lengths. And I'm not telling you that all your chapters need to be different lengths. What I'm saying is that you're doing that variation as a way to control pacing. And when you're thinking about chapters, I think about it as a way of controlling pacing. I agree that I think chapters emerge organically, kind of going back to this point, because readers need breaks, right? A book is long. And at some point, we need a point to stop and take a breather and think, right? Terry Pratchett, in some ways, can get away with not having breaks because of the propulsive nature of his books.

6:25And you can find natural break points where it's easy to set it down of bigger scene breaks than others, right? But one thing I also want to point out is that the existence of the chapter in English language, Western publishing is very tied to the history of print publishing, right? A lot of novels in the 18th and 19th centuries were distributed as serials. They were distributed in segments, right? The printing press has a thing called a signature, which is a certain number of pages that are bundled together.

6:56I think it's 32 pages, 16 is a signature, because of the way paper is printed and then folded and then cut, right? And so the size of the signature was also very relevant to the size of a chapter for physical distribution, right? And so all of these things do kind of align to put some constraints in the origins of printing that are now kind of present, right? But I do still think thinking about white space, you know, I'm sorry to constantly be on the negative space conversation here, but like the white space on a page is really important.

7:28And a chapter break is a way to sort of visually give your reader that breather in that momentary break. I am curious. That makes that all make sense to me, like that we would have chapters are inevitable, like the rising of the sun. Um, but they, I'm wondering, like, is there a length, like, you know, Howard mentioned like the 4,500, you mentioned like things that were set based on the printing press. Has that continued forward where there is something, you know, even though you can have those variations, do you think there's something that like readers are kind of used to in terms of like a general chapter length and then things that are outside of those windows, like really stand out?

8:08I do think it, it is a genre specific, um, and demographic specific within a genre. Yeah. Yeah. Like why young adult versus specific. Yeah. Um, you know, if you're publishing with retirees, right. Yeah. And, and also like how old the book is, you know? Um, but I think the thing that signals to a reader that a chapter is coming to an end again, macrocosm, microcosm, it's grouping stuff, right? And so when you, when you feel like, uh, this grouping is coming to an end, this arc that I'm on is coming to an end, that's when you can feel that chapter break coming.

8:46And that I think is, is kind of one of the things you're looking at at, at the same time, having said all of that, like when we were talking about interruptions, uh, in transitions, sometimes like I have had the thing where I'm, I've looked at my other chapters. I'm like, they're all around 2000 words and this is 8,000. So what's going to happen is this chapter is going to feel slow, even though there's a lot of stuff happening in it because my reader is spending more time reading it.

9:18Yeah. So I will put in a deliberate break as a way to make it feel as, as a way to speed up the pace, which is why I keep going back to, I think it's a way of grouping things. Yes. But I primarily think about chapter breaks as, um, as, as a way to control pacing. Yeah. I really like thinking about it that way. And I think it's an excellent point that if you have a series of short chapters, inserting a long chapter is very, can be very tricky to do because of reader expectations. Doing the opposite is very easy.

9:49If you have long chapters, throwing a short one in can feel very impactful or surprising in an interesting way where the opposite feels slow or feels, you know, or, or just define reader expectations. They're like, I have 20 minutes to read before bed. Oh my God, how much is left in this chapter? I think that can be very disruptive. Yeah. And I think that you can, in much of the way, when we were talking about like the, uh, the, the long run on sentence that feels incredibly breathless. I think that you can do that with a longer chapter, like a big action battle scene that is enormous and has a lot of impact.

10:23I think that you can do something like say, all right, this chapter is just going to be long because you know that there's enough other stuff going on. There's that the reader doesn't have time to be like, how long is this chapter? Because they just keep turning pages. I think that, uh, we should probably have a chapter break. I love fried chicken and I thought I was pretty good at making it. But sometimes it just didn't come out right. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong.

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12:31Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash excuses. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash excuses. Head to masterclass.com slash excuses to see the latest offer. Mileage may vary, but in my home, masterclass has paid for itself in homemade fried chicken alone. And we're back. I love the idea that chapters are for pacing.

13:03I find that in my own writing, I will often think of chapters almost like TV episodes that get their own title. And I will try to tell the overarching story in ways that a chapter is a satisfying beginning, middle, end chunk of that story. Mm-hmm. Because if I want the reader experience to be, a chapter is a satisfying place to put the book down and to pick it up again tomorrow.

13:39I want it actually to feel satisfying. It's kind of why I brought up the idea that chapters were sort of serialized in some earlier fiction or, you know, 19th century fiction. Because I think that set an expectation for the modern reader of that beginning, middle, end. Not that they should be short stories. I don't think they should be that. But they definitely should have a beginning, middle, end kind of flow to them in a certain way. I think, yes.

14:11And I think that there's a place for that. The one thing that I want to caution is the danger that I ran, or the problem, the failure state of this. When I was making the transition from short stories to novels, I was also thinking in terms of beginning, middle, end. And what happened to me is because I was used to short fiction, I would have chapters that ended. And there was absolutely no reason to open the next chapter. And so I think when you want the reader to be able to take a break, like our friend Brandon, who writes, you may have heard of him, I don't know, Brandon Sanderson, someone.

14:49Known for his very short books. His very short books. Brandon says that he will deliberately put, that's one of the reasons he puts interludes into the Stormlight Archives, so that people have a spot to put the books down because he knows how long they are. What I was doing as an accident was that I was creating these places to put the book down at the end of every chapter, which made the book very slow and very easy to abandon. But when you look at Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, he sets up the ends of his chapters. He's a master at this, despite my other feelings about, he's a master at-

15:25There's a reason he works. Yeah, at making you reach the end and you still have to turn the page. So what I've learned is that I do the beginning, middle, end, and then essentially that reaction shot that we were talking about previously, the, did I leave the stove on? I tack one of those on at the end or something that says there are still story questions open. It's episodic with a cliffhanger. Yeah, it's episodic with a cliffhanger, but it's also, it's not always a cliffhanger because that, again, can become very repetitive.

15:55But it is a reminder that there's still more story. Yes. Yeah. And when I say end, you know, I don't mean coming to a conclusion. I don't mean that falling action. Like going back to what we were talking about in scenes, I think having a chapter start with a slow rise and a drop off does mean that you put it down and don't pick it up again. I think that's a really big risk. When I say beginning and ending, I really kind of mean, going back to the example used when we did scene of like, that one sentence of, here's what we're encountering in this scene. And that one sentence of, here's what we have encountered and what we have encountered can be that, oh, no, did I leave the stove on feeling?

16:28And I think you should have that. You want momentum from chapter to chapter. You want them to make the jump across the gap because you aren't intentionally putting a gap there. So finding a way to bridge it, finding a way to catapult them, whatever it is, is, I think, really important. It's funny, you, Mary Robin, it said the thing that I was going to sort of pose as a question, which is, you know, the difference between a novel as just like a series of short stories that you put like a title on the front of, you know, like a short story collection and an actual chapter.

17:01And I think you've run into this on both ends. I often will see students bring in stories that, you know, they're like, everyone always tells me to write a book about this. And part of the reason is that their short stories feel like a chapter in that I feel like there's always something that like hasn't been addressed. Often something like small has been addressed, but there's some larger overarching question that just is introduced and it doesn't go anywhere. So it feels like, oh, a future chapter will deal with this bigger arc and this chapter is dealing with this small moment within that arc that actually answers something or gives you some sort of feeling of having, it's like some sort of bite within this meal.

17:42Yeah, I see that happen too when people go from novels to short stories. And a lot of times I think it happens because they just haven't read a lot of short stories. And so their model for what something of that length looks like is a chapter. And chapters end with this promise of more, which a short story typically does not, because it does leave to this frustration. You know, to Dong Wan's earlier point about signatures dictating the length of a pamphlet, boy, back in that time, you did not waste paper.

18:16There were words on every page. And so you learned to write to 16 or 32 pages.

18:26That is a skill set. And it's a very, very valuable skill set. If you want to, for instance, write for comics, you are writing for a double signature staple in the middle book that has 20 to 22 content pages and some ads. And if you cannot write a beginning, middle end story that can be broken into panels on that page, you don't get to work in comics. You have to be able to do that.

18:56And that's why I said earlier, if you're submitting to an editor who consistently writes to an average of 4,500 word chapters, if you're submitting to, like, Harlequin or, you know, some factory publisher who, and this is great work if you can get it. But having that skill set, being able to take your story and carve it into same-sized chunks skillfully so that it doesn't feel like you shoehorned things into the chunks, that's a really valuable skill to have.

19:33It can be. But also, I agree with this, that, like, being able to learn how to fit your work into the space that it needs is useful. And I just want to remind people that when you are drafting, especially when you're early in your career, don't think about this stuff. Just don't think about it. Like, I actually, when I am planning my books, because I do at least a loose outline usually. It just helps me keep all of the pieces in my head because I have so much disruptions. I usually have what I call my holding area, which is all of the scenes or beats that I need to hit.

20:10And then above that, I have the chapters. And I will move things into chapters. Sometimes I move them in quite far before I get to that section because I know it's like, oh, I really want, I want this kind of ending there. But usually I don't move things out of the holding area into the chapter area until I get pretty close to it because it is, there is so much, one of the joys of writing novels is that there's so much flexibility. Well, and one thing I do want to raise at this juncture is, you know, again, I don't think this thing that you as a writer should think about that much.

20:45But I'm adding it for context of what's happening, which is we're in a moment of dramatically rising printing and paper costs, right? And so the design and layout of books is becoming more significant. And, you know, there's part of the downward pressure on lengths of books right now just because the more pages it has, the less money publishers will make on it because it's more expensive to create, right? And all of this is just a note to remember that at the end of the day, if you're doing traditional publishing, a book is first and foremost a physical object that needs to exist in the world.

21:21And the decisions you make will descend to that. Now, can you control that in a useful way because so much depends on font choices, layout, design, and all these things? Not really. But it's something to be aware of and at a macro level think about that publishing is still kind of a physical goods business in a very real way and that the materiality of your book will matter at the end of the day. I think in terms of failure modes a lot.

21:52And for me, there are two failure modes for chapter breaks. And one is, well, why haven't we reached a chapter break yet? And there's a lot of reasons why that can fail. And half of it is probably what I, as a reader, brought into the book. And the other failure mode is I wasn't ready for that chapter to be over yet. I don't want to read the next chapter. I want to read more of this one. I bring those up because when I'm writing, I really want to avoid them.

22:27Do y'all think about this? Do you, I don't exactly, but I think I've, you talking about the two failure states made me think of a third one, which is, there's a third way to fail. There's so many. There's so many. There's eight types of failure. No, just kidding.

22:45Which is that there are, there are three, like this one is where it feels like the chapter is just there because somebody thought it needed to be there. And I feel like this happens a lot with two POV, like novels where, you know, they're like, you can feel the writer thinking, you know what? I really think I need to check back in to so-and-so or I committed to having every other chapter be this person.

23:16And so like, I have now finished person A's chapter, I guess I got to do person B's chapter, even though I don't have a lot to put in there. And I think like, my guess would be that the answer is you are less constrained by chapters. Like you control the chapters, the chapters don't control you. And so a lot of these failure modes have to do with when you're trying to force a chapter break at a time when you think it needs to happen because like the publishing world will make it happen or this is how long your friend's chapters are versus when it actually feels like it makes sense for the story.

23:50Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that completely. And just to reiterate, that matters way more than anything I said about like publishing and print size. Because it was, I just had an interesting thought. Yeah, and my comments are aimed specifically to the writer who wants to sell into a specific market where there are constraints that you don't have control of. And you probably aren't shiny enough of a writer to violate those rules yet.

24:21So when we're thinking about how to go in and out of a chapter, I just want to take us back to our transitions, which is that you're still thinking about the same kinds of things that you're thinking about with a scene. That it's still, you are still moving people in time and place that when they come back into a chapter, they need to be grounded. And thinking about how you're manipulating those, it's the same tool set. It's just using it in a different place.

24:52And I'm also going to call back to something we've talked about in other episodes, which is the recency primacy effect. That in much the same way that you can complete a circuit by hitting a point, talking about some things, and then hitting that point again. The thing, what was the thing you were saying? Tell the person, tell them again. Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them. Exactly. That you can use that in a chapter as well. 100%. And also, because the chapter is an artificial thing, it's okay to do all of those things in a scene and then kind of have a through scene attachment at the end of it, which is sort of the reaction shot that is moving you on to the next thing.

25:36So you're thinking about all of those things, but because chapters are longer than scenes, you have more words to do it in. So basically what I'm saying is, if you've learned a tool at one level, the proportions are going to stay the same. It's just like the difference between going from making a cake to a cupcake, same proportion of flour, you just use more flour in one of them than the other. And it's a nesting doll, right? The cupcake lives inside the cake, which lives inside the bake. I don't know. Yeah. What are you cooking? And can I eat it?

26:08Yeah. One of my favorite things. Sometimes metaphors don't work. No.

Conclusion and Homework

26:13It's like a layer. It's like layer cakes. I never metaphor I didn't like.

26:18Oh, dear. It's a scene witch. It's a scene witch. All right.

26:24Chapters versus scenes. One of my favorite things about chapters is that, for me anyway, I treat a chapter as another opportunity to deliver a great first line. Yeah. I don't look at that, I don't look at scenes that way because that's exhausting, but I feel like anytime the page has turned, you know, there's a white space in between, that opening paragraph of a chapter is an opportunity for me again to shine at the beginning of the thing.

26:59Yeah. Yeah. Part of the reason this works is something we've talked about way long ago, is the power of breaks. So we talked about the white space on the page, but when I'm narrating, commas, periods, all of the punctuation exists to encode pauses.

27:23And so for a period you, sorry, a comma you count for one. This is very mechanical. This is just when you're learning. A comma you count for one, a period you count for two, a paragraph break you count for three. And chapters and scenes are just bigger pauses. So a lot of times you can build more of a punctuation by where you place that chapter break, which means that when you're coming back in, you've also got that ability. And also, again, the danger of this is that because there's been this pause, you have to reground the reader.

27:58And sometimes you need to ground them more thoroughly by like, where are we? When are we? Who are we dealing with? Like, what is the connection of this to the last? Because it's also possible, especially when you're doing the changing POVs, for the reader to come back in and completely have lost the thread. Don't think about it as a short story, but do recognize the very real possibility that your reader has not picked up this book in a week. Yeah. And with that, I think it's probably time for us to go to homework.

28:29So for your homework, what I want you to do is I actually want you to go and look for a book. It's going to be a little bit hard to find, but it's called Chapter, A Segmented History from Antiquity to the 21st Century. And it is a history of chapters. You don't have to read this book, honestly. It will not enormously impact the way you write, but I do think it's really interesting to think about, oh, this is how it developed. And these are all the different variations of the ways chapters exist.

29:02I wish I'd read the book before I tried to answer Aaron's question.

29:06Before I said a bunch of stuff about the history of publishing that I hope is right. Like, they had chapter divisions in scrolls. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. This is why I was like, no, no, it's risen across multiple cultures. Anyway, this is just a fun assignment because we've been giving you a lot of homework that is, oh, I have to go, I have to go write a thing. So this one is just for funsies. See if you can find it in your library. The Chapter, A Segmented History of Antiquity from the 20, from Antiquity to the 21st Century by Nicholas Dames.

29:38This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go read. Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com.