Anyone else break a novel into chapters after its done?

Prawn · Jan 2, 2008

I write scenes, and then when the novel is done, I break the flow up into chapters, often moving scenes around for contrast or thematic fit.

Do any of you organize your chapters after the whole book is done?

althrasher · Jan 2, 2008

Yeah, I do that as well. Chapter breaks just get in the way when I'm writing. If I break it up as I'm writing it in my mind, I break it up into major scenes or plot points.

ishtar'sgate · Jan 2, 2008

Interesting. I can't do that. Probably because I love to read mysteries, although I don't write them, I always end a chapter with a mini hook. It's sort of a subconcious thing and chapter breaks are pretty well defined as I go along.
Linnea

scarletpeaches · Jan 2, 2008

Prawn said:
I write scenes, and then when the novel is done, I break the flow up into chapters, often moving scenes around for contrast or thematic fit.

Do any of you organize your chapters after the whole book is done?

Yes.

The fact you do it the same way as me, means you are correct, as I am never wrong.

Toothpaste · Jan 2, 2008

I don't tend to move my chapters around, but I do wait until the end to decide where the chapter breaks go. I do this because the first time I wrote a book I was told to cut each chapter in half, because they were too long. So now I just wait until the end to figure it out. However I do write with chapters in mind, with cliffhangers and a sense of this chapter . . . is . . .coming . .. to .. . an ...end.

Conman · Jan 2, 2008

I write in chapters from the beginning. I don't think I would be able to do it any other way.

JoNightshade · Jan 2, 2008

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In the past I have written a lot of "episodic" fiction, in the sense that each chapter is almost a standalone, or the book almost divides itself into acts. So those get chaptered as I am writing. But with Ghosts of Ivy House, I wanted a single, tightly knit narrative, so I wrote the thing straight through. Then I printed it out, cleared my living room floor, and made little piles of paper where I thought chapter breaks should go. It worked out quite well because I just went through and pinpointed all the scene breaks where I thought, "if this was the end of the chapter, the reader would have a hard time NOT flipping the page to find out what happens."

Bekah · Jan 2, 2008

I write it by scene, then separate them into chapters when I'm done. I had to start doing this after spending days feverishly arranging and rearranging chapters instead of writing anything new. Maybe someday I'll have the self-control to start off with chapters, but I definitely lack it at the moment.

BlueLucario · Jan 2, 2008

Nope. I just write a chapter and plan out how it should end.

Shadow_Ferret · Jan 2, 2008

ishtar'sgate said:
Interesting. I can't do that. Probably because I love to read mysteries, although I don't write them, I always end a chapter with a mini hook. It's sort of a subconcious thing and chapter breaks are pretty well defined as I go along.
Linnea

Ditto with the hook. And strangely enough, each chapter works out to somewhere between 1500 to 2000 words. It's not something I do consciously, it just happens.

slcboston · Jan 2, 2008

I discovered I write in chapters because the ideas come to me that way, and then also it's easier to find what I want in my WIP. I tend to save the individual chapters as individual files, too, because then I don't have to open the whole thing if I want to review/fix something in chapter 15.

But I've been known to alter where those breaks are after the fact.

PeeDee · Jan 2, 2008

I don't, because I have a rhythm that goes from page to page, and a chapter break is as much a part of that as a new paragraph, or a new scene.

But if I wrote something without proper chapters, I'd probably just leave it that way, ala Terry Pratchett. It works wonderfully.

ChaosTitan · Jan 2, 2008

I write chapters as I go. That's not to say the chapter breaks stay the same from first draft to final.

tjwriter · Jan 2, 2008

With this WIP, I've not broken it into chapters yet, but I do have scenes. It's different than my previous attempts, and so far I've found that it works, so we'll see.

I can always figure out where the chapters go later.

ishtar'sgate · Jan 2, 2008

slcboston said:
I tend to save the individual chapters as individual files, too, because then I don't have to open the whole thing if I want to review/fix something in chapter 15.

I used to do that too. But it's a real bear when it comes time to forward all those chapters to an editor. Lots of attachments. And then there's the hassle with numbering pages. Of course, I'm pretty dense when it comes to the computer so maybe I did it wrong. I keep the entire manuscript as one file now. I also keep a paginated hard copy. Editing isn't hard because I can just do a page number search. Then after editing it's not so much trouble repaginating before I send it off as one attachment.
Linnea

Straka · Jan 2, 2008

I chapter as a go. Usually I don't stop writing until I finish a chapter.

scarletpeaches · Jan 2, 2008

slcboston said:
I discovered I write in chapters because the ideas come to me that way, and then also it's easier to find what I want in my WIP. I tend to save the individual chapters as individual files, too, because then I don't have to open the whole thing if I want to review/fix something in chapter 15.

But I've been known to alter where those breaks are after the fact.

Why not write your entire novel in one word document, with page breaks to separate chapters? That'd save an awful lot of work if you had to renumber pages.

Shadow_Ferret · Jan 2, 2008

I find it easier to have it all one file. I used to have it seperate ones until I realized at one point that I had started calling something different, I forget now, but say it was like a character's eye color or a name mispelling. Before I'd have to open each chapter and do a search, but as one file find and replace was much easier.

PeeDee · Jan 2, 2008

I have never been given any persuading reason why I should want to keep my chapters in separate files. Long ago, it was to help prevent computer slowdown, but I cannot think of any computer that I've owned in the last ten years which does anything more than pause for a second when I first open the document as it re-paginates.

And that is the fault of the word processor, more than the file.

JoNightshade · Jan 2, 2008

The laptop I've been using for the past year actually took about 5 minutes to load my entire WIP (110K words) and often crashed if I was trying to do anything else, like open my browser. I would double click on the file, go do something else, and come back later to start work. For a while I divided my manuscript in half, but that got confusing.

But I just got a brand new laptop and I no longer have that problem. Hooray!

PinkUnicorn · Jan 25, 2008

I do not write in chapters.

I do not write to a set "hours per day"

I do not write to a set "words per day"

What I do is, I write small segments or scenes from my book. Say a conversation between two characters. Or maybe the description of a room. Something like that. I find this easier, because I can see a very clear beginning, middle, and end. Not the beginning, middle, and end of the entire book. Not the beginning, middle and end of the entire chapter. Just the beginning, middle, and end of that one scene, which in most cases is 2 to 4 paragraphs long or about 600 - 800 words.

I make it my goal to write three of these segmants each day. One in the morning as soon as I wake up, before I even get out of bed. One in the afternoon, when I get back in from taking my dog out for his daily walk. One in the evening, last thing just before going to bed. It takes about 15 - 30 minutes for me to write each segment. Or about 40 minutes to an hour and a half each day. In the end I end up with about 2,750 words written at the end of the day, but not a single chapter!

I usually divide into chapter breaks at the last minute during the final draft.

Atlantis · Jan 26, 2008

I don't write in chapters at all. I write in segments, part one, part two, that sorta thing, just a habit I picked up.

loiterer · Jan 26, 2008

I have never written chapter breaks in anything. I guess therefore I write in scenes. Chapters would be something I'd deal with when I finish something--whenever that day may come.

megan_d · Jan 26, 2008

When I started my MS chapters made me nervous, so I just seperated scenes with exclamation marks. It's really just a matter of going back and replacing them with chapter 1, 2, 3, etc. Or maybe clever little titles. I still haven't decided.

juneafternoon · Jan 26, 2008

Yeah I do that too. When I wrote in chapter breaks, I always felt the need to make everything dramatic and each chapter have this mega-significant, marking ending--needless to say, it wasn't cutting it for me. So I've started writing just a huge ol' text now. We'll see how it goes.

Anyone else break a novel into chapters after its done?

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