Post # 267 August 9 2021 “Chapters and Parts: Organizing Your Story” Virtually every book published, fiction or nonfiction, is divided into parts and chapters and other sections. While the publishing industry has its own guidelines on how this should be done, in this post I want to talk with you, the writer and author, about how to organize your story in ways that make sense…to you and the reader. Stage plays usually have three acts. Many teleplays for TV have 4-act structures. Let’s say you have a plot or outline of some kind. You have a narrative that starts off, builds to some kind of climax and then ends. How should it be segmented into chapters and parts? And what’s the difference between parts and chapters anyway? First off, let me say I’m not a fan of using parts instead of chapters. To me, a part is a major shift in the narrative, a major discontinuity. It’s something that chapters can do just as well. If you google the difference, the results tell you that a chapter is the details of an event, using context, characters and action. This search also produced a result telling me that a part was a subdivision of a chapter, though I’ve seen it the other way around just as often. One search result claimed that chapters were primarily used to make a book more user-friendly, which I think is true. To try to clarify this, let’s put some structure and guidelines to our discussion about structure and guidelines. I can think of 3 reasons why a chapter break (as opposed to a scene break inside a chapter) might be useful. 1. A chapter break can imply a change in location. One chapter might show events and actions in Casablanca. The next one might be on Mars. The chapter break reinforces in the reader’s mind that what is coming is different in an important way. This helps prepare the reader mentally and emotionally for a major shift in the narrative. 2. A chapter break can imply a change in time. Perhaps Chapter 1 takes place today and Chapter 2 is a flashback, showing events in the past. Or perhaps Chapter 2 is just a few days or weeks ahead. We’ve all seen films where the passage of time is graphically illustrated by spinning clock faces or newspapers flying around. These are like film versions of a chapter break. In my work, I like to begin each chapter with a little insert that indicates the place and time of the upcoming action. 3. Chapter breaks can also imply a change in character. Chapter 4 might be dealing with our hero Joe Blow and his efforts to fend off the evil Tralfamadorians (with apologies to Kurt Vonnegut). Chapter 5 might then be a depiction of Joe’s girlfriend Frieda and her efforts to grow more magic crystals to empower Joe and his superhero friends for future battles. Of course, the chapter and the narrative in general can switch back and forth. In fact, this is a good way to build tension in the narrative. But a chapter break would be a good choice in one chapter that deals mainly with Joe and the next one dealing mainly with Frieda. It separates the two in the reader’s mind. Chapters allow the storyteller to manage multiple plot lines and keep them straight more easily. Imagine a stage set in a stage play. After one scene, the lights dim and stagehands move furniture around to new positions. That’s a kind of stage version of a chapter break. I develop chapters in my stories at the tail end of my planning. First, I write down a ‘sequence of events,’ a list of things I think should happen in the story. Then I group them into whatever groups seem logical. Those groups become my chapters. In years past, I even made a table for different plot lines and wrote down in each column (row by row) what happened in that plot line. Then I would make chapters by grouping the table cells across the table into logical units. I don’t do this anymore, since I can usually get a sense of narrative flow just from my original sequence. Just remember this: chapters imply continuity and chapter breaks imply a change in that continuity. Longer books, fiction and nonfiction, need the flexibility that chapters bring to keep the reader’s interest and manage all the pieces of the narrative, forging them into some kind of coherent whole. Use chapters wisely and they’ll contribute much-needed structure to your story. Use chapters poorly and they’ll interrupt and poison the reading experience. The choice is yours. The next post to The Word Shed will come on August 16 and deal with made-up words and when to use them. See you then. Phil B.