Writing Excuses 21.30: Chapter Breaks Soon

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-30-chapter-breaks-soon

Key Points: Chapters. How long? When do you need a break? Pacing. Audience. Norms and genre expectations. Grouping. Beginning, middle, end, satisfying. Reason to open the next chapter. Episodic with a cliffhanger. Why haven't we reached a chapter break yet? I wasn't ready for that chapter to end! Why is that chapter here?

[Season 21, Episode 30]

[Mary Robinette] This 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/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 30]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Chapter breaks soon.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And 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?

[Howard] And it's a funny question, because if you read Terry Pratchett, there are no chapters.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] It's just scene breaks.

[DongWon] And if you're reading James Patterson, it's about two pages.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I've seen chapters that were one sentence long.

[DongWon] Yeah. Basically, what we're getting to is there's no hard and fast rule here...

[Mary Robinette[ Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? Unsurprisingly, given our general theme, but you know, I think chapter breaks can be really useful. 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?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Which is effectively what a chapter is. 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, how do we feel like you have enough scenes together to make that break?

[Mary Robinette] So, I go back to the thing you've been talking about all season, which is the microcosm macrocosm...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That there are times when a chapter is actually a single scene, or, as we've said, a single sentence. And 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. 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.

[DongWon] Yeah. 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? I... when you came in to record this morning, you had said that very thing...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Of like, "Oh, I meant to read until the end of this chapter and then I realized, 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, than 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.

[Erin] I'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 asked 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?

[Howard] When we had our discussion with Margaret about three-act structure, specifically 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 is... that typically has 4500 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 4500 word chapters, That 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, Erin, would chapters exist, if we just invented writing out of whole cloth and decided... I don't think they necessarily would, until we reached a point where someone said, I would like for reading to have break points in it.

[Mary Robinette] I think that they would have because you see chapters arising independently in multiple different cultures. And to your point about writing to... 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. It is in the same way that repetition can become boring on a sentence level or a tonal level. The 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.

[DongWon] 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. And 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. I think it's 32 pages...

[Howard] 16.

[DongWon] 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... I'm sorry to constantly be on the negative space conversation here, but like the white space on a page is really important, and a chapter break is a way to sort of visually give your reader that breather and that momentary break.

[Erin] I am curious... that all makes sense to me, like that we would have... chapters are inevitable like the rising of the sun. But the... I'm wondering, like, is there a length, like Howard mentioned, like, the 4500... you mentioned, like, things that were set based on the printing press. Has that continued forward where there is something, 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?

[Mary Robinette] I do think it is genre specific...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And demographic specific within a genre.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] Like YA... And audience, young adult...

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] specific...

[DongWon] Yeah. Versus if you're publishing for retirees, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And also like how old the book is. 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 feel like, ah, 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. And that, I think, is kind of one of the things you're looking at. At the same time, having said all of that, like when we were talking about interruptions in transitions, sometimes, like, I have had the thing where I've looked at my other chapters, I'm like they're all around 2,000 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.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, I will put in a deliberate break as a way to make it feel... 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 a way to control pacing.

[DongWon] 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 can be very tricky to do because of reader expectations. Doing the opposite is very easy. If 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... 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.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think that you can... in much the way when we were talking about like... the long run-on sentence...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] 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. I 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. That the reader doesn't have time to be like, "How long is this chapter?" Because they just keep turning pages.

[Howard] I think that we should probably have a chapter break.

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[Howard] And we're back. I love the idea that chapters are for pacing. I 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. Because if I want the reader experience to be a chapter is a satisfying place to put the book down and pick it up again tomorrow, I want it actually to feel satisfying.

[DongWon] This is kind of why I brought up the idea that chapters were sort of serialized in some earlier fiction, or 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.

[Mary Robinette] I think, yes. And 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.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] 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...

[DongWon] Known for his very short books

[Mary Robinette] 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.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] 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,,,

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] He's a master...

[DongWon] [garbled] work.

[Mary Robinette] He's a... 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...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] 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.

[Howard] It's episodic with a cliffhanger.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, it's episodic with a cliffhanger, but it's also... it's not always a cliffhanger, because that again...

[DongWon] Yeah. Right.

[Mary Robinette] Can become very repetitive, but it is a reminder that there's still more story. [DongWon] Yeah. And when I say end, I don't mean coming to a conclusion.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I don't mean that falling action. Like, going back to what we were talking about 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 we 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.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And 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 are intentionally putting a gap there. So finding a way to bridge it, finding a way to catapult them, whatever it is...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is I think really important.

[Erin] It's funny. You, Mary Robinette, said the thing that I was going to sort of pose as a question, which is the difference between a novel as just like a series of short stories that you put, like, a title on the front of, like a short story collection and an actual chapter. And I think you run into this on both ends. I often will see students bring in stories that 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...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] 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.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, 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 lead to this frustration.

[Howard] To DongWon's earlier point about signatures dictating the length of a pamphlet. Boy, back in that time, you did not waste paper. There were words on every page. And so you learned to write to 16 or 32 pages. That 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. And 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 a Harlequin or some factory publisher who... and this is great work if you can get it. Having that skill set, being able to take your story and carve it into same-sized chunks skillfully, so it doesn't feel like you shoehorned things into the chunks. That's a really valuable skill to have.

[Mary Robinette] It 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.

[DongWon] Totally.

[Mary Robinette] 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. And 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 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.

[DongWon] Well, and one thing I do want to raise at this juncture is, again, I don't think the thing that you as a writer should think about that much, but 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 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 and 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.

[Howard] I think in terms of failure modes a lot and 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. Do y'all think about this? Do you...

[Erin] 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...

[Howard] There's a third way to fail?

[Mary Robinette] So many. There's so many...

[DongWon] Oh, my.

[Erin] There's eight types of failure. No, just kidding.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Which is that there are...

[DongWon] None of them are fun.

[Erin] There are three... like this one is where it feels like the chapter is just there because somebody thought it needed to be there.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I feel like this happens a lot with two POV... like, novels...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Where 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 and so, like, I have now finished person A's chapter. 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.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] 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...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or this is how long your friend's chapters are, versus when it actually feels like it makes sense for the story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I would agree with that completely.

[DongWon] And just to re reiterate, that matters way more than anything I said about, like, publishing in print size. It was... I just had an interesting...

[Howard] Yeah. And my comments...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Howard] 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.

[Mary Robinette] So, when we're thinking about how to 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, but 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. And 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.

[Howard] Tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you told them. [DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] That you can use that in a chapter as well.

[DongWon] 100%.

[Mary Robinette] And also because the chapter is an artificial thing, it's okay to, like, 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. So 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.

[DongWon] And it's a nesting doll, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The cupcake lives inside the cake, which lives inside the... I don't know.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] What are you cooking?

[laughter]

[Howard] And can I eat it now?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] One of my favorite things...

[DongWon] Sometimes metaphors don't work.

[Mary Robinette] No. It's like a layer. It's like layer cakes.

[Erin] I never metaphor I didn't like.

[Howard] Oh dear.

[Mary Robinette] It's a scene-wich.

[DongWon] It's a scene-wich.

[Howard] All right. I... chapters 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.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I don't look at scenes that way because that's exhausting. But I feel like anytime the page has turned, 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.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Part of the reason this works is something we've talked about way long ago, is the power of breaks. We talked about the white space on the page, but when I'm narrating, commas, periods, all of the punctuation exists to encode pauses. And 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 re-ground the reader. And 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.

[DongWon] Yeah. 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.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And with that I think it's probably time for us to go to homework.

[Mary Robinette] So, 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 this is how it developed, and these are all the different variations of the ways chapters exist.

[Howard] I wish I'd read the book before I tried to answer Erin's question...

[laughter]

[DongWon] Before I said a bunch of stuff about the history of publishing that I hope is right. [Mary Robinette] Like, they had chapter divisions in scrolls.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is why I was like, "No, no, it's risen. 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 write a thing. So this one is just for funsies. See if you can find it in your library. The Chapter: A Segmented History From Antiquity to the 21st Century by Nicholas Dames.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go read.