Chapter Format - Ladder
I get lots of great questions asked of me in reviews, and I felt like doing them justice all in one place. I’m also teaching college sophomores how to interpret fiction this semester, and this leads to all kinds of swotty over-thinking on my part. So I’m going to blog on these issues with a series of short essays - this may sound rather pretentious, but it’s not meant to be - I’m just fascinated with language and storytelling (hell, I’ve picked the study of it for a career).
If you’re reading ‘Ladder,’ you might be thinking, ‘Is she trying to drive me insane by writing such short chapters?’ Short answer - not purposefully, no.
The chapter format of ‘Ladder’ wasn’t hit-or-miss or arbitrary. I made some very specific decisions in order to try to reinforce what I want the story to do (even if I don’t succeed).
That’s the thinking behind it, but that doesn’t mean that I’m succeeding. Also, you may still not buy that these are reason enough to have such short chapters. So tell me! [Note: you don’t have to have an lj account to leave comments. They’ll show up as anonymous, but you can state your fandom penname in the comment itself or you can be completely anonymous.]
If you’re reading ‘Ladder,’ you might be thinking, ‘Is she trying to drive me insane by writing such short chapters?’ Short answer - not purposefully, no.
The chapter format of ‘Ladder’ wasn’t hit-or-miss or arbitrary. I made some very specific decisions in order to try to reinforce what I want the story to do (even if I don’t succeed).
- In attempting to force myself to ‘show’ instead of ‘tell,’ ‘Ladder’ is a series of scenes concentrating on the action happening to the characters at a specific time. There is the occasional introspective chapter that also serves as exposition, but I’m trying to keep them to a minority. There won’t be any long passages documenting weeks of time between the action, meaning the chapters are shorter; however, I’m hoping this provides a vibrancy and immediacy to the events of the story. This also requires the readers to do some of the work, to make connections.
- With this in mind, I didn’t front load the back-story into the first chapters, and this also makes them shorter than they might otherwise have been. Instead, bits about the characters are revealed in each chapter as you go along. This is another facet of active reading - guessing at clues and holding ideas in mind as the story builds.
- The chapters are around 1000 words. It's just enough to hopefully have readers not be bored when I switch POVs in the subsequent chapter and repeat a scene. Any longer and it felt like: ‘but that happened ages ago - why do I have to read it again?’ It’s also about as long as the scenes seem to occur (more on this in the near future).
- I could have combined the HG POV and the SS POV into one chapter each time - half the chapters, twice the length! Sounds good, right? Not completely. Combining the chapters would have been awkward when HG and SS aren’t sharing the same scene - e.g., chapter 3 with her at the party and 4 with him at the pub. I wanted to reinforce that HG and SS are each climbing a ladder, but not the same one (we’ll have to wait to see if they arrive at the same spot though).
- More importantly for me, I wanted to keep the characters equal. Combining the chapters raised subtexts of inequality - is HG more important because she’s first in the chapter, or is SS more important because he’s the lingering impression the reader is left with from each chapter? Separating their main chapters hopefully reinforces that they are equally important, just as two people in a relationship should be.
That’s the thinking behind it, but that doesn’t mean that I’m succeeding. Also, you may still not buy that these are reason enough to have such short chapters. So tell me! [Note: you don’t have to have an lj account to leave comments. They’ll show up as anonymous, but you can state your fandom penname in the comment itself or you can be completely anonymous.]