Are there any established rules for splitting books into parts, chapters, sections etc?
I am working with an author, whose approach is to write her text, approximately divided by indicators where she wants the breaks to be, with the idea that later she and I would improve the breaks and decide, what will the sections become: parts, chapters, sections, etc. This is mostly based on the LaTeX memoir document class which I used to typeset the book.
The book is a science fiction novel, but not purely science fiction. It has elements of a psychological drama and bits of other styles, such as crime and action. The overall volume of the manuscript is around 700 pages and she is planning a sequel or several under the same title with different subtitles. Currently it is divided into 8 chapters and each has from 2 to 10 sections with 8 being most common.
The work is almost complete and I have typeset it for the time being as chapters and sections, but now we both are debating, whether our chapters look rather like parts, and our sections should be chapters. The only problem is that early in the manuscript the chapters are much shorter, and increase in length as the text goes.
The chapters currently contain hugely different locations as the plot moves across the book's universe. The sections contain more of a high-level topic as the plot develops within one location. We are kind of content with this sectioning and are not necessarily looking to change it - we are only looking for any well-articulated and commonly accepted reasons to improve what we have.
We are aware of this question and agree with both answers; however, they are more than 6 years old. Are there any commonly accepted guidelines for choosing parts vs chapters vs sections for the work described above and where could we read about it?
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Short answer: break where it makes sense.
Some points at which breaks are traditionally made or ways to define breaks include:
change of site, the place the action is taking place changes.
change in POV character, someone different starts telling the narrative.
change in auxiliary characters, the people the narrator is interacting with changes.
The actual length of any given section of the story isn't that important as long as the break points make sense, some chapters may be longer or shorter and chapters may extend or shorten as the narrative progresses. Unless you're looking at a subgenre like the 50 word story then word count, whether as a whole or any particular division, shouldn't be a primary concern—telling the story is the main thing.
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Your first step is to decide on the levels of division. What is a first level division, a second level division, etc.? Once you've done that, you need to decide what to call them. You have many options here, as other answers have shown. The “read in one sitting” sections should probably be called chapters. Chapter subdivisions probably don’t need to be named at all: you can have a fancy divider (this is traditional), or perhaps just a small gap between paragraphs, which seems to be more common these days.
The larger sections, comprising a few chapters each, could reasonably be called books, sections, parts or something else. (Actually, the words section and part are so flexible that they could also be applied to smaller bits, such as chapter subdivisions, if you did wish to name them.)
Another option, which I have not seen covered in other answers, would be to pick a more whimsical naming scheme which matches your story. Are there any terms from your narrative that you could draw on in picking vocabulary. Many sci-fi works speak of a galaxy/universe divided into sectors. Your narrative parts take place in different areas, different sectors. Could you use the word sector to name these divisions? Other examples will occur to you as you look over your narrative.
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I understand you have short and long chapters.
How about splitting the longer ones into several smaller chapters?
The only rules I can come up with for chapters are:
- The reader uses them as a "reading unit" so they should probably be about equal in size and not too long (but I've seen books with basically one chapter per page...)
- The reader might put the book down when having finished one chapter. So you might want to make sure the chapter ends on a point where the story is interesting enough to get the reader to come back the next day.
Apart from that, I don't think anything says a chapter have to look in a special way.
I've seen authors switching POV in the middle of a chapter, or keeping a POV per chapter, or having many chapters in one POV followed by one chapter with many POVs, or jumping back in time in the middle of a chapter, or having a separate chapter for a flashback. The same goes for settings and plots.
The division of a text into chapters is probably one of the things in writing that has least rules of all.
This is especially true with regards to story structure and dramaturgy. Your division of the story into chapters will almost definitely not affect the overall structure and story arc. Unless you move chapters around...
You could almost think of chapters as the packages your new IKEA furniture comes in. You rip it apart and put it together in your living room, regardless of if it comes in one, or five packages.
Your reader will do the same with your chapters and build your story in their mind if it's in one or 50 chapters.
I was about to say, parts have more logic to them, but when I picked an example I wanted to use, it turned out, there wasn't that much logic there. ("The Passage" by Justin Cronin, I thought it was divided into parts separated by time jumps, but I don't think so—if I could just find that book and verify that...)
Or, as in for instance "The Cloud Atlas", where parts are an important element of the structure. Each part contains one half of a completely different type of story in that book.
Parts pretty much follow the same logic, or lack thereof, as chapters. Maybe, because they are optional, a reader might want them to have a more logical reason to be there than chapters.
I've sometimes experimented with putting an act in a part each, but I don't think it's needed. In fact, it could seem blatant and make the reader aware that you are throwing acts at them.
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