How to Create Chapters. Maybe.

When I set about writing my first novel, Her Daughter’s Eyes, I was truly unsure how to craft a chapter. What was a chapter, exactly? I was not an MFA graduate at that point, and I’d never taken a class entitled: Chapters 101. Was a chapter, I asked myself, like a short story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Or wasn’t it?

Of course, I’d read thousands of books by that point in my life. I was an English major! I taught writing! I had “seen” chapters and noted them and felt them and recognized them, but what was the formula? Was there a formula? There had to be. Google wasn’t a thing yet, so I couldn’t turn to what is now my second brain, a bigger, better brain. At the time, none of my writer friends wrote novels, so no one had a good answer. No writing book I looked at had a chapter (ha!) titled: “The Exact and True Method for Creating Chapters in a Logical and Perfect Way.”

Basically, I was alone with this conundrum, so I decided to tell this story in three parts, an uber beginning, middle, and end. A triptych. A tale told in three large parts, each part with a title. Within each section, I had blocks of story separated by symbols. Voila! I did it my way.

I was able to place the novel with an agent, who eventually sold it, chapter-less as it was. Not one reviewer mentioned the oddness of the format. No readers wrote to me about the problems with reading a book with no discernable chapters (though one did complain that her cover fell off when she left the book in her backyard overnight).

All was well until I started to write my second novel, The Matter of Grace. With great joy, I handed in my final manuscript to my agent who passed it to my editor, who wrote back, “You’re about 39% of the way there. And also, where are the chapters?”

Where were the chapters? Now you want them?

Don’t ask me, I thought.

The good news for me was that this novel is told from four different points-of-view. As I plotted, I decided could break down the story into rotating chapters told from these four characters in third-person close POV. One character, one chapter. Start the next chapter, next character. And on and on until the story ended.

I was living and writing in a time where it was permissible to have a prologue and an epilogue, and these two sections are told in second-person. I didn’t label them prologue and epilogue, so maybe that is why I got away with it.

So that is one way to write a chapter — tell a part of the story from one of the characters. I managed to get to 100%, and the novel was published.

Maybe because I managed to write chapters, I stuck with the rotating third-person POV trick, and wrote my next novel that way. And the next. And the next. All of them. Really, yes, all of my novels except my forthcoming novel The Play’s the Thing are written in my chapter safe way.

But there was something special about my latest novel— a woman flung back in time to Shakespeare’s world and actual lodgings. My character Jessica was going through such intense times that I had to stay glued to her as she figured out what to do in unusual circumstances. I didn’t have the slightest interest in moving around. I wanted to find out how she felt and reacted. I wanted to live through her into this time.

So no shifting in this story.

It could also be that because she does move through time, bouncing between time and characters would have been too much to consider.

How I created chapters for this novel, then, became about process. She’s in her “normal” world. Chapter one. She’s flung into the past and arrives to find herself with Shakespeare. Chapter two. She and Shakespeare have a few arguments and drinks. Chapter three. And so on. The plot began to inform where the chapter should end, and in this way, a chapter “did” seem like a short story.

And maybe it wasn’t so hard at this stage to find the many natural endings needed in this story because all along, for fifteen novels, I’d finally figured out how to segment a story like an orange. I just hadn’t admitted I knew how.