Me: I cannot have a chapter entitled ‘You pay in blood’ followed by one called ‘Blood on your hands’. That’s just wrong.
Arkem: Blood around my digits.
Me: Oddly enough it’s not the word ‘hands’ that causing the problem.
Arkem: Viscous red goo that I cannot explain.
Me: Yes, thank you. Very helpful.*
I am trying to break the book down into chapters. It is making me crazy. Not least because I’ve done this before. Once upon a time this book had chapters. And then I added 20 000 words to the book by just dropping the scenes in the correct place in the sequence.
See the elusive scene titles below empty chapter lines, normally unseen by man or woman or anyone. Because they are terrible and scare people.
This leaves me with ridiculous chapters that are three or four times the length of the ones on either side and I’m left wondering if I can possibly justify making a chapter only three hundred words long. I mean, obviously I could. I could make a chapter that was one word long. But I’d have to have a reason. A stylistic statement or a plot device or something other than I-hate-my-book-and-chapters-are-hard. That’s not a reason, it’s a tantrum. And while this process may be turning me into a frustrated two year old I’m trying not to get any of the rage on the book.
Me: Oh god, now I need to name this chapter.
Arkem: Well there’s a good title right there.
Me: I cannot name the chapter that.
Arkem: No, I was thinking of truncating it to make it a little less meta.
Me: Oh god?
Arkem: How about, Oh god, now I need to…
Me: I think that might incite unrealistic expectations.
Arkem: Is this the chapter where they do laundry? Because I can see people being disappointed then.
Me: There is no laundry in this chapter. There’s actually no laundry in the entire book. There’s also no kissing.
Arkem: Wait, no kissing and no laundry? What is this book about?
Right. At this moment the chapter is entitled, ’New folder’. How much worse could it get?
* The advantage (disadvantage?) of having someone working in the same room as you is that when you make dramatic exclamations of woe they reply.
Kandace Mavrick
Paul McLaughlan
David
31/07/2012
“Cloudy with the chance of death?”
Personally, I try to get the chapters a description to keep my heading in the direction I want to go. Some are random like ‘A Western Stranger”, others more on the point like “Plotting and Planning”.
Kandace Mavrick
31/07/2012
Sure. That’s where my scene titles come in. They’re usually indicative of something (if only to me). So I know what they are and can find them. Chapter titles, though, other people get to see. So they have to be… something that will mean something if you’re looking at the contents page later, but that won’t give anything away. Preferably something that can be read in more than one way, or applied to more than one thing within the chapter. (Okay, that’s in no way required, I just like doing it.)
I wasn’t even going to have chapters originally but I my beta readers for the first book thought they were funny. What have I done?