So this just occurred to me yesterday. I’m curious to see how people title their book chapters?
I know for me, I try to find a word or phrase that best fits the theme of the chapter I’m writing. as a bonus, I try to challenge myself to fold that word into the chapter somewhere, so there’s always a name drop within the story.
How about you guys? Do you name your chapters? Do your titles have specific purposes? Do you prefer just to number your chapters?
Please let me know! I’d love to hear how other authors go about naming their sections in their magnum opus!
I used to just number the chapter and that was it.
Now, I chapter my titles are a bit vague or is exactly on the tin! Most of the time, my chapter titles are really vague since the purpose is hidden deep in the chapter.
Then there is the part where I name just the location in which this chapter takes place, or I find/make up a word or two that derive something from history (of my imagined world).
Nice! Yeah sometimes it’s hard to find a word that fits the theme of the chapter that can also be used in story without seeming OOC or way off in left field.
I nearly always just use chapter numbers, with three exceptions:
The soundtrack was very important to one story I wrote, so each chapter had a song that went with it, and the chapter title was a lyric from that song - not usually the most well-known lyric in the song, but one that best fit what the chapter was about. This was fun but difficult to do.
The epistolary story I wrote, the chapter titles were simply who the letter in that chapter was to. Easy to do, but not particularly creative.
I love writing dialogue (my first drafts are mostly dialogue) so my plan for my next book is chapter titles being the key line of dialogue from that chapter. Not sure if that’s going to work yet…
They have titles and chapter numbers on them. The titles are notes for me, so I know where I’m at in the story. Sometimes its clearly to do with the story, other times its something that pertains to me.
My Daughter does this with her Fan Fictions. She has a lot of fun with it.
I considered doing this for Saying No, but I’m not necessarily fond of this tactic from published works, so I hybridized my typical style with a subtitle for the person whose point of view it is below it.
Ooooo… now that is intriguing! I’m partial to my dialogue as well, so I feel you on the “dialogue heavy drafts”.
- I have learned how to weave exposition between the talking to balance things better, but I can still recall chapters with pretty much nothing but dialogue!
- I have learned how to weave exposition between the talking to balance things better, but I can still recall chapters with pretty much nothing but dialogue!