Chapters

 When I decided to write a novel, I had no idea how to write chapters. I am still not sure I do know how to write chapters (and considering the feedback I am getting - or not getting - on "Love Stinks", I may not know how to fill those chapters!). I can tell you what I did: read and pay attention.

I learned that Leo Tolstoy writes short chapters. Considering how much fun our prison writing groups had with James Patterson's short chapters, this counted as a shock.

I learned that James Jones's Thin Red Line was divided into four chapters; relating to the days of the battle, as I recall.

I had read Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders around the time I started college, and had already read a novel without chapters.

Minnesota Star Tribune published Writers like Louise Erdrich and Stephen King use chapters cleverly. What do they tell us? by Chris Hewitt and Google News tipped me off of its existence. I am quoting extensively since you have to register to read it, and I think some great points are made.

One thing is the discussion is not limited to the "literary":

I’ve often thought something similar about the thrillers of Michael Connelly, whose chapters are longer than Ewan’s but still come in at less than ten pages apiece. “The Lincoln Lawyer” author often cuts between a couple points of view in his brief chapters, which establishes a speedy pace in the same way cross-cutting between two images in a movie can heighten the suspense by making us envision — and wait for — the moment when the two threads will intertwine.

Something similar happens in Louise Erdrich’s upcoming “The Mighty Red,”which contains 116 chapters in its 369 pages. That’s if my count is accurate. Erdrich’s chapters aren’t numbered in “Mighty,” which is set in 2008 and 2009 in a North Dakota community where most people have a rooting interest in which of two young men a woman named Kismet will marry.

I do not recall how many chapters there are in War and Peace. 

When I was still practicing law I came up with the idea that the world could be divided between information and its marketing. I am not so sure I want to keep that as an operating principle for what remains of my life, but I do think that is what a chapter is supposed to do: convey information of character/action/theme.

I think of chapters as a clue to readers. Writers use them to give us a hint of how much information we’ll need to take in at once and also how quickly they plan to proceed, something that’s especially important in the first few chapters, which can serve as a roadmap to reading the rest of the book.

But I think these are important paragraphs, if only because I have never thought about feelings in terms of chapters. That for me, has been the business of sentences. This is why this blog has the name it does.

Stephen King, who knows a thing or two about creating suspense on the page, may have influenced Catton. Most of his books have chapters, but at least two don’t. King said he didn’t divide his dog-as-monster “Cujo” into chapters because he wanted it to feel as if it came at readers in a rush, like “a brick through a window.” There are breaks provided by spacing in “Cujo,” but King’s “Dolores Claiborne” lacks any kind of respite for readers, presumably because it’s meant to be one long outpouring, the title character confessing crimes to the police. (Virginia Woolf’s chapter-less “Mrs. Dalloway,” is also a stream-of-consciousness book.)

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In pretty much all of Marilynne Robinson’s books, what she wants us to do is linger. Her contemplative, every-detail-is-important novels want us to luxuriate in the moments, not to race to find out what happens. “Gilead,” for instance, has no chapters and her message is clear, both for the reader and for the person who’s living in this world: Slow. Down. 

A writer I want to recommend, for their writing generally and for how they handle chapters is Adam Hall. Who? The other great spy writer of the Sixties trio (Le Carre and Deighton being the other two). His Quiller novels were in my head when I started writing as an exemplar on writing chapters. While writing this post, I wondered what there was on the web about Hall. I knew he was dead. I found In Praise of Adam Hall and Quiller. Check it out and you might understand why he needs to be read. (My favorite sentence is: "And Quiller is the perfect existential hero." I thought I was the only who thought this.)

One other writer who knows how to move action along (although the divisions in the text may not be his): William Shakespeare.

Write and read!

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