Larry M. Coleman

NaNoWriMo Day 23

There are two schools of thought when it comes to giving your chapters titles. These schools, unsurprisingly, go by two names: “yes” and “no.” (There is a third school named, “Chapter? What’s that?” Please don’t be one of those. That school can sleep with the fish.)

Let’s deal with the naysayers first. There are people who think that chapter titles are unnecessary: all you need is a number. They’re not wrong, but they’re not right. A number is the bare minimum that you need, yes. But that’s not necessarily all you need. Books had chapter titles for centuries: numbering them is not the only way to do it. No one would ever say that a television series shouldn’t have episode titles because they can just be called, “Season 2, episode 11.”

There’s a lot of advice on the subject. Like almost all writing advice, you’ll find completely contradictory guidance and some unnecessarily strong opinions. Chapter titles are no different, even though it seems like it would be a simple matter. One literary agent even said once that she considers having chapter titles as one of the list of things that will cause her to immediately reject a manuscript.

The lesson from that? Never write to please a literary agent. Write your story in your voice and if it’s powerful enough, it will end up where it needs to be, chapter titles or not.

I’m not here to give you a strong opinion; I’m just here to tell something that has worked for me. When I wrote my first novel, I started with just numbering them. No need to get complicated right from the start: writing a novel in a month is hard enough as it is.

I stuck with that for all of November, and then through the revision process for a year and a half afterward. Here’s a preview of a post that will come out on November 6th, when This Beautiful Sentence resumes:

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Richard was lying in a lounge chair he had dragged out in front of the door of his motel room. He needed to stare up at something more interesting than the old water stain on the ceiling from a roof that had been slowly leaking for what looked to have been several years, the same faded paintings on the wall that he hadn’t looked at, the same… sameness.

This is the beginning of “Chapter 47ish,” which is an inside joke that only I’ll get because up until this revision, I still used plain old chapter numbers in this book. As the book expanded, contracted, and blocks got shifted around, chapter numbers became unwieldy. Chapter 47ish actually started as Chapter 30, then got changed so many times that it’s actually Chapter 51 in the final product. If something was deleted (and, yes, sometimes even entire chapters from a NaNoWriMo manuscript are junk enough to not make it through the revision process), sometimes there would be a gap in numbers. Other times, chapters would have letters after their number (I had a Chapter 33 and 33A and even a Chapter 37, 37A and 37B). It wasn’t until this revision, Rev. 8 [dated May 7, 2022, although this book’s first draft was “finished” on November 30, 2020], that I started using chapter titles.

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I learned a lot about my own working process as I wrote my first book. I don’t use complicated writing software: I just sit down and type into a document. (I’m not saying software might not be valuable, I’m just saying I’m old school.) That means I need to keep all of what’s going on and all of what has already happened inside my head at once. I’m actually pretty good at that, perhaps because the first thing I do when I sit down to write is to re-read what I wrote the day before, so I’m reviewing as I go.

But it also means that if I’m chugging along writing and I come up with a better idea than I had ten chapters ago and I want to go that direction instead, I need to track down that little part all those chapters ago to change it, too, because almost everything in my writing connects to something else. I rarely waste my readers’ time by bringing up something that will only be used once.

Trying to remember which chapter number each detail was in was sometimes beyond my mental capability: I had no problem remembering it was there, but was it in Chapter 7, 15, 5, 12, or what? For example, the chapter where Eileen first appears is a majorly important chapter. This chapter is going to be referenced, changed, added to, and so on as Eileen becomes more fleshed out as the book goes on and I add details about her that hint about things to come in future chapters. It would be nice to know right away what place to go to instead of trying to remember the number. Things like these were merely minor annoyances during the November writing process, but they became a major headache during revision. (This alone is why someday I might actually break down and learn Scrivener someday.)

During the revision process, I wished I had a way to remind myself what chapter did what. If only there was a way to briefly describe them. Something like a, oh, I don’t know… let’s say a title? So instead of trying to remember if Eileen’s entrance was in Chapter 17 (or did that get shuffled to Chapter 20 when I had to split a few overly-long chapters ahead of hers?), I can just go to the chapter named, “What do you call a girl with one leg?” Or what number is the breakup chapter? I won’t remember that, but I will remember the chapter called, “Say what?”

Chapter insertions and deletions are so much easier that way, too. No more Chapter 37, 37A and 37B or Chapter 8 coming directly after Chapter 6 because Chapter 7 was thrown on the junk pile.

So when I started my second NaNoWriMo project, I used chapter titles from the very beginning. They were incredibly helpful for me, but there was a bit of a learning curve. Chapter titles can do so many things:

• They can serve as a few-word outline of what you’re going to write, and then you can write them ahead of time.

• Sometimes they’re a useful summary of what you did write, and you can just put “Chapter X” as a placeholder until you find the right title once the chapter is over. I particularly love titles that don’t make sense until after you’ve actually read the chapter, then they add just a little pinch more to the soup. Those are rare and hard to do.

• They sometimes give you a chance to make a pun (“Crêpes of Wrath is Not Punny”), a very short joke (“What do you call a girl with one leg?”), or just a nice turn of phrase (“Blue at the Blue Hole”).

• Sometimes they can act as a meta-quotation if the chapter title is a quotation from something in the chapter, as in “What is the Opposite of Sepia?” Is the chapter quoting the title or is the title quoting the chapter?

• Sometimes they give you the opportunity to set the reader off in a different direction, adding a little extra layer of irony or pathos. One of those that stands out to me is a chapter titled, “Walk of Life,” which is about suicide. The “life” part makes it sound hopeful and/or bright (especially if you know the Dire Straits song), so when it ends up being about an attempted suicide, the reader finds their expectations horribly subverted. Then the title snaps to fit as the character walks to the bus stop to re-start their life, doing a literal “walk of life.”

Another chapter title I’m particularly proud of is, “Alpha and Omega,” which references a particular paragraph within it:

The only other award Richard made space for was the team trophy from a Tour of Lombardy in Italy. The last one he had ever won, and the last one he ever would win. He had won his debut race at the beginning of spring, and then his team won Tour of Lombardy in the fall a couple of decades later. Spring then fall. His alpha and his omega.

So it’s both a quotation title and, since it’s the title of the first chapter of the first book, the first word the reader comes across is quite literally the alpha word. That’s a trick you only get to pull off once, and you can only do it if you’re using titles.

With those things said about how fun chapter titles are to write and use, based on my own experience, here’s my advice for writing your first NaNoWriMo novel: don’t use chapter titles. They take up a lot of time to do well. They’re just as much a part of doing art well as writing well is, and they take up too much time that you should be devoting to writing.

Once you’ve got your book done and finished, then you’ll know if titles are useful for you. Save that time and mental energy and invest it in writing your novel first before you try to make it better. Don’t feel like you have to use them because some authors do and don’t feel like you can’t because other people say not to. Do what works for you, but the easier road is to start off without them. Those chapters will be waiting there for you to give them a name the other 11 months of the year if that’s what you think is best after it’s done. Good luck!