101 TIWIK #76: Structuring Your Novel

The final phase of formatting your book and turning your manuscript into a novel will involve a great many questions. How should you title your chapters? Should you title your chapters? Should your chapters be individual scenes, or a collection of several scenes? What about putting a quote or something at the beginning of each chapter?

These are all questions of style. The answers are ultimately your decision, as an independently publishing author. The answers all come down to this: what do you want your readers’ experience to be?

Examine books in your genre

The best way to get started in answering this question is to look at the internal structure of books similar to yours. If your book is a romance and 99 out of hundred romance novels you’ve read do not have chapter titles, you probably don’t need to either. If you break convention with your genre, make sure you are doing it consciously and with a specific purpose in mind. You want your book to stand out, but readers also have certain expectations, and your innovations should delight the reader, not dismay them.

Here are some things to consider in the structuring of your manuscript into a book:

Scenes & Chapters

If you are like me, you draft and revise the book in scenes. Chapters and chapter titles are only compiled at the very end of the process. For some writers, the opposite is true. They think in terms of chapters and know how their chapters will be structured long before the book is finished.

In some books, scenes and chapters are synonymous. That is, each scene is its own “chapter.” George R. R. Martin does this in Game of Thrones. Each chapter is a separate scene from a different point of view, titled with the name of the POV character. In other books, a chapter is a compilation of two or more scenes, with white space or some kind of border separating each scene.

When you are considering putting together your novel’s structure, think about the experience you want the reader to have. Do you want each scene to end an a dramatic note, with a sense of the curtain going up and a set change? Separating each scene into its own chapter might give this impression. Or do you want the scenes to fade into each other, drawing the reader through the chapters like a needle drawing thread?

Why have chapters at all? Chapter breaks give the reader a moment to pause, and the end of a chapter signifies two things to the reader: One, that something is complete, and two, that there is a reason to keep reading. A chapter ending can often answer one question for the reader while opening up a whole new question. In this sense, it gives the reader a mini-satisfaction, a tiny sense of completion. Without chapter breaks, the book would run on with no feeling of rhythm.

If you haven’t already set up your chapters while drafting and are doing so now, consider carefully where to place their boundaries to create the best sense of both completion and forward movement for the reader. You might want to combine several scenes that flow together into one chapter, or break a scene apart in the middle in order to end a chapter with a strong cliffhanger.

Chapter Titles

If your genre convention tends to be to title your chapters, make sure the titles are enticing but not too revealing. Obviously, you don’t want the title of the chapter where your tragic climax takes place to be “The Death of the Hero” (unless it is a metaphorical death, in which case this might be a clever title). Some of my favorite chapter titles take a concrete detail that has a larger significance and use it as a chapter title. For example, you could use the name of a location where significant events take place, or something like “A Ring of Silver” to name a chapter where a character proposes to another character with a silver ring. A chapter title can be a tiny hint, a foreshadowing of what is to come.

In addition to a title, you might consider putting a small graphic with each chapter heading in your book. And some books include a little something extra at the beginning of each chapter, like a quote or a bit of significant information. Again, these are things you should check against the conventions of your genre, and ask yourself how they will enhance the reader’s experience. In my personal experience, it’s nice to have a paragraph or two of header material at the beginning of a chapter, but after a page my patience for the information wears thin and I want to get to the action. There may be genres, or even just specific books, where you want a cleaner, distraction-free reading experience.

Parts

Some books are split into parts. I find this a lot in my genre, epic fantasy, because the genre tends toward long, complex books. I like to divide my novels into parts because it helps me to structure them while I write. Again, not all genres or books will need to be divided like this, and in some cases using parts might jar the reader, if they are interjected unnecessarily. Parts are good if you have two to four sections of the book that represent different periods in time, different main characters, dramatic changes in setting, etc. For example, perhaps you are writing a historical fiction where the first half of the book takes place in England, the second half in the New World. It might make sense to separate these halves into Part One and Part Two.

To prolog or not to prolog? That is the question.

You may be wondering (as I once was) what the heck is a prolog, anyway? Why is it any different from a first chapter?

Prologs and epilogs are scenes that tend to take place outside of the main action of a story, while shedding some kind of light or perspective on the actual story. A prolog may feature a character who does not appear in the main story, or take place in a time outside the main story, or simply not be woven into the plot in such a way that it can be presented as part of the main story. For example, murder mystery might have a prolog that shows the death of the victim from the victim’s perspective. When the main story begins in chapter one, it starts from the detective’s perspective and remains there for the duration of the book. Or a fantasy book might include a prolog that shows something that happened centuries ago to set up the present conflict between the forces of good and evil.

What is the purpose of a prolog? Like everything else at the beginning of your book, your prolog should have one purpose and one purpose only: to entice the reader to keep reading. In that light, prologs should be used with caution. Just because you think it’s important information or a really cool scene doesn’t mean the reader will be enticed to keep reading because of it. I’ve read many prologs that were confusing and made me impatient to just start reading the actual book.

My advice is to leave a prolog out unless you find it absolutely necessary and it is written in such a compelling fashion that the reader must keep reading. If you are writing a series, this is especially true of the first book in a series, where you are trying to hook the reader. In consecutive books, you can be more daring with a prolog, as it will be more of a continuation and deepening of the story.

An epilog can be safer to include, as it comes at the end of the book. For a stand alone book, the purpose of an epilog should be to wrap up the story and provide closure, maybe show what the characters are doing a year after the end. In a series, the epilog should lead into the dramatic action of the next book.

Interludes

One final thing that you might include in your book are interludes. I like to think of interludes as a prolog or epilog that goes here and there in the middle of your book. If you are writing anything but epic fantasy, you probably won’t need interludes. I suppose other genres might make use of them but I’m not sure. I use interludes in my Dreams of QaiMaj series to introduce a character or story element that will be important in the future and that the reader will need some background about, but that isn’t part of the main story yet. Interludes can enhance a book, but they also have the potential to confuse and frustrate your readers. In that light, they should be kept as short and to the point as possible.

In the next post, I’ll talk about your author bio, a very important little piece of text that goes in the back of your book, and possibly several other places as well. Stay tuned for 101 TIWIK #77: Crafting an Author Bio.