What is a Chapter?

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Over the years I have read writing advice books and attended numerous courses and panel discussions on writing, but I don't remember a single discussion about what constitutes a novel chapter. Yet, I view the chapter as the unit of my novels. When I sit down at my computer, I don't aim to write x number of words or spend y number of hours at my desk or complete z scene that day. My writing goal is to finish the next chapter, or get as far along in it as I can. Ideally, I like to start a chapter and write it to the end in one swoop, however long that takes.  

My focus on the chapter in novel structure has led me to wonder, what is a chapter? Is the concept of the chapter studied so little because anything goes and there are no rules? Today I'll share my random thoughts on novel chapters as a writer and reader. I'd be curious to hear your ideas.

A chapter can be any length, from one word to a whole book, that is, a chapter-less novel. The only novel with no chapters I recall reading was short, about 150 pages. Evidently writers and readers like breaks in a long story. The most effective super-short chapter I've read was in the novel Last Orders by Graham Swift. The story involved a young man travelling with his father's four drinking buddies to dispose of his father's ashes in the sea. The chapters alternated between the viewpoints of the five characters. After several chapters of his father's buddies going on about the old days, we turn the page to the son's chapter, where he simply states Old farts. I found this hilarious and it expressed the son's frustration with his travelling companions better than 2,000 words could have done.

                                                                     
Chapter lengths in an individual novel can be consistent or wildly varied. I've written both kinds. Several years ago I wrote a suspense novel with five viewpoint characters. Each time a voice changed I started a new chapter and they couldn't all have equivalent amounts to say when their turns came. But, as a writer, I prefer consistent chapter length for pacing, so that high points in the story arrive at more or less even intervals. As a reader, I get more comfortable with a book when I know how long the next chapter will be. While it's good to shake readers up with story content, novels tend to work best when the reader is unaware of structure. Now I'm revising the suspense novel and combining voices in chapters, with scene breaks, making the chapters more even. I don't know if this will help the pacing, but cutting the numbers of chapters in half saves trees by using fewer pages.    

When the novel changes viewpoint, is it best to start a new chapter or break to a new scene? Not necessarily. Many successful novels fluctuate between points of view within a chapter, scene or paragraph. But my personal preference is for a new scene, if not chapter break, before a viewpoint change because I want my readers to be solidly in the head of a particular person and feel along with him or her.

What about titles for chapters? As a reader I either ignore them or find them clever. As a writer, I have enough trouble coming up with one title for a book, never mind fifteen or thirty more. If I ever go that route, I expect some of my chapter titles will add to the story experience, while other titles will be there simply to conform to the pattern I've set. The same with quotes and images at a chapter's start.

Now we come to the meat. I tend to view each chapter in my books as a kind of short story within the whole. Something needs to change in the course of the chapter. I think of each chapter as building to a mini-climax, which, hopefully, propels the reader to turn the page. That's why the ending is the most important part of each chapter. A great cliffhanger ending is a demand to keep reading, although continuous cliffhangers might start to feel melodramatic and manipulative. So I save my true cliffhangers for a few choice spots and try for intriguing endings with the other chapters.

A trick of some writers is to cut a dialogue mid-scene. For instance, Jenny tells Billy, "I'm pregnant" and the chapter ends. The next chapter starts with Jenny continuing, "What are we going to do about it?" This trick gets me to turn the page and contributes to suspense, but it also feels like cheating. As with scene breaks, I think there needs to be a gap of at least a few minutes from one chapter to the next, or a change of place or point of view.

Of course, these are all my opinions, derived from my particular reading and writing idiosyncrasies. There are no rules for novel chapters, but with their importance to a book's structure, I say let's bring them out of the shadows and give them a little more attention.

    

Dry Me a River by Karla Stover

 bwlauthors.blogspot.com

Here’s my idea for a mystery. The date is sometime in the mid-1960s. The place is New York. Someone murdered someone else and wants to dispose of the body. He / she loads up the body, drives for 6 or so hours, and dumps it in the Niagara River, near the falls. Safely back in Manhattan, the perp lets out that the individual was running from the law. There’s no body, no crime scene, and no evidence to shift through—EXCEPT—oops, the year is 1969 and the body shows up because that year the falls quit—well—quit falling. They went dry. And two bodies were found.

Nineteen sixty-nine was not the only time Niagara was dry. In 1848, a gale force wind began blowing off Lake Erie and caused thousands of tons of ice to jam up at the river’s mouth. For the next 48 hours, as the river bed dried and thousands of fish and turtles were left floundering, people flocked to the river. They couldn’t work because with the mill race was empty, and the mills and factories dependent on Niargara's water power had to shut down.

At first, venturing out on to the unexpectedly dry river bed was fun. People picked up bayonets, gun barrels, muskets, tomahawks, and other War of 1812 items. Some men with an eye to business drove a logging cart onto the bed and picked up 12-inch pine timbers measuring from 40 to 60 feet long. In as much as it could back then, the strange event became a tourist and media event. People walked from one side of the bed to the other, or crossed by horse, or in a horse-and-buggy. A squad of U.S. Army Cavalry soldiers put on an exhibition by riding up and down the bed. Downstream, some of the rocks which had been a boat hazard were blasted away.

But, then, it wasn’t fun any anymore. The more they missed the roar of the falls, the more people’s fear and anxiety grew. A Domesday scenario developed, and special church services were held on both sides of the border. Then, on March 31^st, the temperature rose, the wind shifted, and the ice jam broke apart, and the falls fell again.

The winter of 1847 – 1848 wasn’t unusually cold ,but the wind was the crucial factor. The Niagara River can only hold 2% of Lake Erie’s ice, and generally, 98% of the lake’s ice remains in the lake until spring weather melts it. The next time the falls stopped falling, it was a man-made situation. And two bodies were found.

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Smoke Gets In Your Eyes...By Gail Roughton

Take a Trip Down Home!

Yep, it's that time of year down home here in the country.  That time of year when smoke gets in your eyes. And ears, and nose, and mouth, in your hair, and on your clothes...well, you get the idea.  It's raking time for my yard, which also means it's time to burn those piles and piles of leaves.  I know a lot of folks do that in the fall, but if we did, we'd still have piles and piles of leaves come spring. See, our trees are stubborn, they hang onto a lot of their fall foliage until the young leaves of spring literally push them off the branches.  Or maybe they're just modest and don't like being naked. 

Whatever the reason--and a lot of our trees are water oaks and therefore technically entitled to hang onto their branches till at least mid-winter anyway--a three acre yard accumulates a lot of leaves. Our house is actually built in the middle of a fifty acre tract of land we long-ago christened "Fern Gully" in honor of the banks and banks of wild fern gracing our woods, but the yard proper's about three acres, even though hubby likes to wave his hand toward our gorgeous untamed woods and tease our grandson we've still got a lot of ground to cover. We've devised a system, and generally can manage to rake and burn about half of one-quarter of the total yard per day.  Consequently, it takes about eight days to completely finish with our yard. The finished product's worth it, though.  

Fall's a beautiful season here at Fern Gully, and in fact the cover of Country Justice is eerily akin to the paths criss-crossing our acreage. 

See?  Told you so.  But so is Spring, full of the smell of newly turned earth and the promise of burgeoning green.  It's time to say good-by to the thick carpet of golden brown, time to run around the bottom catching a softball and kicking a soccer ball without fear of disturbing unwelcome guests very similar in coloring to those leaves. I don't mean to sound inhospitable, mind you, but those slithery unwelcome guests are hard enough to see without the camouflage of a leaf carpet, let alone with one. It's time for the ground to ditch its heavy blanket and bask in the sun wearing nothing but short grass, wild flowers and new earth.  

Now if I can just survive the smell of a few more fires...we've still got the last quarter of the yard to go.  But if any reader wants a trip to the country without the work of keeping a country yard, stop in and visit a while at the Scales of Justice Cafe, located right across from the Courthouse and right next door to the Piggly Wiggly, all three of which are located squarely in the middle of the pages of Country Justice.

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Writing Romantic Historical Fact Fiction by Rosemary Morris

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About Rosemary Morris

My large collection of fiction and non-fiction is kept in bookcases throughout my house.

 To bring order to my books, files and magazines I decided to use the smallest bedroom as a combined office and library. The walls are painted a honey-tinted cream, there is easy-clean laminate flooring and an oriental rug in which reds and cream predominate. When the cream Venetian blinds are raised, I look out of the window at my organic garden, beyond which is a green and a fringe of trees which border woodland.

Now, I am looking forward to the arrival of a custom made 6ft high 8ft wide oak bookcase and a desk.

I spend a lot of time reading non-fiction and making notes for my novels.

It will be about eighteen months or more until I begin writing Grace, Lady of Cassio, the sequel to Yvonne, Lady of Cassio, which is set in Edward II's reign. Before I write the first sentences of a new story I immerse myself in the era.

Today I read that in 1369, during the reign of Edward III, the Black Death broke out in England for the third time. Among those who died was the young Duchess of Lancaster - the lady Blanche wife of John of Gaunt, daughter of the great warrior Henry of Lancaster, the heroine of Chaucer's earliest major poem.

Froissart's description of her touches my heart. "Who died young and fair, at about the age of twenty-two years. Gay and glad she was, fresh and sportive, sweet, simple and humble semblance, the fair lady men called Blanche." 

Writing Romantic Historical Fact Fiction

There is a hypothesis that there are only seven basic plots. This should not deter new novelists, who need to devise their own special twists in the tale and write from the heart.

I write romantic historical faction fiction, which I shall focus on it in this blog.

You might ask, what is the classification of all genres of historical fiction? The Historical Novel Society’s definition is: ‘The novel must have been written at least fifty years after the event, described, or written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events, and who therefore only approached them by research.’

Historical novelists are under an obligation to readers to transfer them into another believable time and space, that need to be based on fact, even in, for example, time slips in which the social and economic history should be correct.

My characters, other than historical figures, are imaginary. Their backgrounds are researched to the best of my ability.

To ground my novels in times past, I weave real events into my plots and themes. To recreate days gone by I study non-fiction and visit places of historical interest, including museums, which are gold mines of information.

There are many excellent novelists who write, historical fiction, romantic historical fact fiction, and genre historical romance, etc. Unfortunately, there are other novelists who cause me, and, presumably, other readers, to suspend belief.

Once, I was torn between shock and hysterical laughter when I read a mediaeval romance in which, the hero, a knight in full armor, galloped to a castle with sheer walls to rescue the proverbial maiden in distress. Without putting aside his shield and weapons, he flung himself off his horse. The knight scaled stone walls that had neither handholds nor footholds. The author described him climbing through a window - impossible as a castle in that era only had narrow apertures through which arrows could be fired. When he gained access through the mythical window, the fair heroine, seemingly unaffected by her ordeal, asked: ‘Would you like some eggs and bacon and a nice cup of tea,’ as though she were offering him a modern day English breakfast. At that point, the sense of the ridiculous overcame me. I lost faith in the author and did not read on.

Of course, the above is an extreme example from a novel accepted by a mainstream publisher. However, I am frequently disappointed by 21^st century characters dressed in costume who have little in common with those who lived in previous eras. Over the centuries, emotions, anger, hate, jealousy, love etc., have not changed, but attitudes, clothes, the way of life and speech has.

To ground novels in historical periods, a novelist should study them and verify their research. Inaccuracy in any novel, whether it is set in the past or present, annoys the reader, and, there will always be someone who points out a mistake, or even tosses the book aside and never reads another one by that author.

Recently, I was enjoying a historical romance when an American author described the heroine admiring bluebells in bloom and simultaneously picking ripe blackberries in a wood in England. In the United Kingdom, bluebells bloom in spring, and blackberries ripen in the autumn. This is not the only novelist, who has jerked me out of a story with horticultural errors.

Misnamed characters also make me pause when reading. The first pages of a mediaeval novel held my attention until I reached the part when the heroine’s sister, Wendy, joined her. I sighed and went to make a cup of Rooibos tea. J. M. Barry first used the name in his novel Peter Pan.

When searching for a name, for example, suitable for a Tudor novel, the author might be tempted to call the heroine, Lorna, although R. D. Blackmore invented it in 1869 when he wrote Lorna Doone.

I’m sure that I’m not the only historical novelist, who agonises over character’s names. I recommend The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, an invaluable resource.

Since R. D. Blackmore wrote, a significant change in some published fiction has been the introduction of explicit sex, which is often gratuitous. In my opinion less is more. The impact of the scene in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, in the book and in the film, when Rhett Butler sweeps Scarlet off her feet and carries her to their bedroom, would have less impact with explicit details of how they made love.

In conclusion, a skillful historical novelist should hold the readers’ attention and take them into the realm of fiction on a factually accurate, enjoyable journey.

Yvonne Lady of Cassio

When Yvonne and Elizabeth, daughters of ruthless Simon Lovage, Earl of Cassio, are born under the same star to different mothers, no one could have foretold their lives would be irrevocably entangled.

Against the background of Edward II’s turbulent reign in the fourteenth century, Yvonne, Lady of Cassio, contains imaginary and historical characters.

It is said the past is a foreign country in which things were done differently. Nevertheless, although that is true of attitudes, such as those towards women and children, our ancestors were also prompted by ambition, anger, greed, jealousy, humanity, duty, loyalty, unselfishness and love.

From early childhood, despite those who love her and want to protect her, Yvonne is forced to face difficult economic, personal and political circumstances, during a long, often bitter struggle.

Novels by Rosemary Morris

Early 18^th Century novels. Tangled Love, Far Beyond Rubies, The Captain and The Countess

Regency Novels. False Pretences, Sunday’s Child, Monday’s Child, Tuesday’s Child, Wednesday’s Child.

Thursday’s Child will be published in July 2018

Mediaeval Novel. Yvonne Lady of Cassio. The Lovages of Cassio Book One

www.rosemarymorris.co.uk

http://bookswelove.net/authors/morris-rosemary