Why Chapters?

icon by Peg Ihinger

Why do novels have chapters, and how do you figure out where to start or end them?

Well, not all novels do have chapters ( see most of Terry Pratchett’s books and John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless for example). Most do, though, and have since the invention of the novel. There’s even a scholarly book on the subject:  The Chapter: A Segmented History From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century, by Professor Nicholas Dames. I haven’t read it myself yet—the sample looks dense and chewy—but the reviews provide enough information for jumping off into a blog post on chapters.

The first thing is that, according to Professor Dames, chapters have been around since the second century BCE. Initially, they were a way of organizing information—chapters in a long document made it easier to find the material you were looking for. Interestingly, dividing a manuscript into chapters was originally not something the writer did; it was something their editors did, to group information into chunks that made sense.

The Tale of Genji is one of the first recognizable novels, written in the early 11^th century. It has chapters. In Europe a bit later, Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur has chapters, too. The writers didn’t leave notes as to why they did this, but I speculate that it was a combination of four things. First, chapters were a familiar form for both writers and readers (since most nonfiction was chaptered to facilitate organization; plays had scenes and acts; ballads, lays, chansons, had verses, and so on).

Second, chapters can facilitate the writing process. Novels are long (the Tale of Genji is 54 chapters, which are divided into three sections), and chapters provide a sense of where the writer is in the book. Knowing that I’m working on Chapter 15 is easier to comprehend and gives me more of a sense of progress than knowing I just finished page 175 or 180, and I don’t think it is unreasonable to assume that this is true for at least some writers who aren’t me.

Third, chapters are useful. They give readers a place to pause for the night, along with the characters. They can be used to bring out the chronology of a story, provide a sense of time passing, or highlight how much time is passing. Chapter beginnings and endings can also be used to emphasize plot points, epiphanies, and other important events (hence the invention of the cliffhanger ending).

And fourth and finally, dividing a novel into chapters made it easier for writers who were hand-writing everything (typewriters weren’t invented until the early 1800s) to circulate partial copies of unfinished novels among rabid fans (The Tale of Genji was passed around court in small segments as Murasaki Shikibu wrote it. These days, long-form fanfiction does essentially the same thing). Chapters also make it easier to provide beta readers with reasonable chunks for commenting.

All four of those things could be relevant to present-day writers. Chapters are a familiar way of structuring a story; they can be of help to the writing process; they give a feel for the passage of time and emphasis in a story; and, for those that want to work this way, they’re a way of serializing stories-in-process for beta readers and online fanfiction.

Most of the writers I know decide on chapter beginnings and endings more by instinct than anything else, but there are patterns that can help if one is having trouble with this. For instance, one of my students, back in the day, ended every chapter with the viewpoint character going to bed or being knocked out, because that writer was stuck on the idea that as long as the viewpoint character was awake, they had to report everything they saw and did. While this is certainly a way to end chapters, it is most definitely not the only way—and if you end every chapter that way, it gets repetitious. (The same goes for starting every chapter with the character waking up.)

Once a writer understands that chapters have multiple functions, it’s easier to spot (and fix) unnecessary repetitions. The writer can set up a structure that emphasizes the normal rhythms of the story. For instance, if the story takes a few days, making each chapter cover a natural segment of the day—morning, afternoon, evening, night. For a longer story, the writer might choose to have chapters cover weeks, or skip from monthly key event to key event during the first term of the school year or first six months on the job.

Chapters can provide a sense of time passage by varying their length, or by varying how much time each chapter covers. Poul Anderson uses this trick in Tau Zero to give readers a sense of how time outside the near-lightspeed spaceship is passing faster and faster. Writers who aren’t working with time-dilation on spaceships can use a similar technique to focus attention on specific developments or emphasize their importance (if the first three chapters each cover a week, and the fourth chapter covers a few hours in detail, the reader is going to assume that the details involved in that fourth chapter are really important).

But the passage of time is still only one of the things writers can do with chapters. Using chapter beginnings and endings to emphasize plot points is really common, and can be very, very effective. Ending one chapter with the detective flipping back the lid of a box and announcing, “And this is the murder weapon!” emphasizes the drama of the revelation…which the writer can either undercut at the start of the next chapter (“I don’t think so,” the reporter said, staring at the ornate letter opener. “Or have you forgotten that the victim was strangled, not stabbed?”) or build on (“Good work,” the sergeant said. “Take that down to forensics and see if they can get enough DNA to analyze.”). Writers can use chapter endings and beginnings to stress a theme or structure—like having every third or fourth chapter end with the protagonist leaving something (a room, their childhood home, their job, their spouse), or finding something (a penny, a lost book, a stolen handbag, the key to solving the mystery).

So the ultimate answer to “how do you figure out where to start or end chapters?” is “It depends on what you want to emphasize at this point in the story.”