A recent browsing of Reddit's writing sub raised an interesting question. What is the purpose of chapters in a fiction story? A few people seemed to feel they had no purpose besides tradition, which got me thinking. The structural elements of how text is put together aren't something that usually get's a lot of attention. You know what a paragraph is, what a sentence is, what a word is. Right? It seems almost ridiculous to even talk about.
Yet... for most people, that understanding is a vague thing. Asking someone what is a paragraph will usually get either a physical description (a block of text), some rules about how to write one, or a vague "You know" while waving a dismissive hand.
There is a difference between knowing something instinctively and understanding it well enough to explain. Having that clear, crystal concept of what each elements purpose is can help you to write better. It can be the difference between thinking "Something about this feels off" and knowing "This is what I need to change". A full understanding of convention lets you know when breaking it is the best move.
Plus, it can just be good to review the absolute basics from time to time. Re-enforce the foundation of your skills to strengthen the whole. So without further ramblings, let's start at the beginning.
Fair warning: This is going to get more philosophical than scientific - writing is an art-form, so take all this as one writers perspective not set in stone rules.
A word equals a concept.
I'm not going to bother writing about how a letter is a sound, because I'm sure you remember that from year one.
Once you group a bunch of letters together though, what do you have? A word. What's a word? A group of letters? A series of sounds that mean something? We can do better.
One word = One concept.
Think about it. Words aren't just nice ways of separating sounds one paper. Every individual word, taken on it's own, invokes a particular concept in your mind.
There's evidence to suggest this is actually an essential element in complex thought. Our minds can only hold so much in active consciousness at once time, but words give us a shortcut, a way to chunk more complex concepts together and cheat that system. Once we understand a concept and define it as a word, it only takes a fraction of the mental resources to hold that concept in mind, leaving us free to hold other concepts alongside it to form more complicated ones.
Think of a programmer assigning a command to a set of code. The code might be hundreds of characters long, but once those have been defined as "COMMAND", they won't have to re-type hundreds of characters every time they want to use them, just the phrase "COMMAND".
Words, likewise, are just placeholders for otherwise difficult to express concepts.
This is also why thesauruses can be both beautiful, and deceptive. Every word, even extremely similar ones, are a unique concept. Often with different levels of specificity, some meaning something broad (like "book"), and others meaning something more specific (like "tome", a particularly heavy and usually old book). Wise writers pay attention to those distinctions and use the most accurate word, conveying the most accurate concept, they can.
Quick tip: Etymology is your friend here. Learning the history of a word, where it's derived from and how it came to mean it's current meaning, can tell you a lot about when and where it's most potent to use.
A sentence equals a thought.
If a word is a concept, then what do you get when you string a group of concepts together? You get a thought.
Thinking of sentences this way makes a lot of intuitive sense, and also makes a lot of sentence structure rules seem more logical. A sentence is not complete unless it expresses a complete thought. Sub-clauses and complex sentences allow partial thoughts that build on and require the original thought to still be expressed.
There isn't much else I can say on this one that isn't intuitive, or discussed in most grammar guides and semi-competent primary school English classes. Moving on.
A paragraph equals an idea.
Going up another level, if a sentence is a complete thought, what's the point of a paragraph? To form an idea.
It seems pretty obvious in non-fiction, but in fiction it's arguably more important.
Say you have four or five sentences describing a character. One sentence talks about their hair. Another talks about the way their walking. Another, what they're wearing. Each of those individual thoughts are expressing the same idea, the image of the character. So they get grouped into a paragraph.
Another example would be a fight scene, where each character responds to the enemy and takes action in return. You'd use a new paragraph each time you switch the focus character, because you're now expressing a new idea - What Caleb does next, then what Mara does next, then what Caleb does next, etc. The characters reaction and then taking action are two separate thoughts, but both express the characters response in the fight.
This one also ties in well with my last article about not prioritising SEO - breaking up a more complex idea into one or two line paragraphs might look good to the bots, but it weakens the idea and isn't as pleasant to read.
Quick tip: A paragraph should be as long or short as it needs to be, even a single word at times. But, if it's more than about five lines long, check you can't split it into multiple, smaller paragraphs instead. Such as one paragraph describing a characters clothes, and one describing the characters face.
A Chapter equals a subject.
Ok, finally we're getting to the point of the article.
We've gone from individual concepts, to complete thoughts, to idea's. Why do we need another layer of structure? What on earth is the point of a chapter?
It's easier to see if you look at non-fiction books. A chapter defines a subject. It gives all the idea's within it context. When you pick up a book on wildlife and open the chapter called "Lizards", you know that everything in that chapter is going to be focused on lizards, so you're unlikely to find information on lions there.
It's the same, but much less obvious, with fiction works. A chapter breaks the story down into manageable chunks and gives each of those chunks a focus point. A chapter titled "The man on the train" is going to focus on the part of the story that involves the man on the train. Titles aren't necessary, by the way, they just highlight what that chapters focus is.
Given how much bleed through happens between chapters in fiction, it might be easier to picture a story that uses chronological chapters. Everything that happens on the first day forms chapter one. Everything on the second forms chapter two. Each of those chapters is defining an event in the story, a section with a focus.
To put it another way, each chapter is a story within a story. It's "the story of Day One", while the whole novel might take place over a week. The same way a chapter in a non-fiction work is a lesson within a lesson (the lesson on "lizards", while the whole book is a lesson on wildlife). It focuses the story down into segments, giving the reader a chance to absorb what's just happened before the next bit.
Numbered chapters also give a way of indicating progress through the book, help readers find where they're up to when they come back the next night, and create pace. A book with 50 chapters will be a lot faster paced than a book the same length with 12 chapters.
To the question on Reddit that inspired this article; what about writers who don't use chapters in their novels?
The short answer is that they still do. At least, they use the structure of them to a degree. Sir Terry Pratchett's books never note a chapter break, but there are plenty of moments where one could be included without any change to the story. The difference is those divisions are seamless, the story moving from one "chapter" to the next without pausing, the reader being carried across without noticing.
If you read through Pratchett's earlier books though, such as The Colour of Magic which I re-read recently, there are moments where he hadn't quite got the technique down yet. At certain points in the story, there is a sudden shift exactly like the start of a new chapter that doesn't quite manage to go unnoticed.
That doesn't mean there's any set rule to using them though. Like sentences and paragraphs, a chapter is just a way of grouping idea's together on a larger scale. They can be as long or as short as needed. They can be highlighted, numbered and titled, or ignored and made invisible by a skilled writer.
A book is... well, you get the idea.
We could keep going up and find a definition for a book, then a series, but they're pretty self-explanatory I think.
There's also scenes, sequels, and sequences to discuss, but I'll leave them for another article. This one is getting a little long already, and those elements are more about story structure than writing structure anyway (I know, semantics, but that's half the fun!). If you're eager to learn about them now, have a look at Jim Butchers LiveJournal posts.
Cheers for now,
Chris