Chapters Consist of Scenes--Not!

So, I spent most of a week trying to figure out how chapters and scenes fit together. The internet is packed with useful advice on the subject. I’d never imagined that there could be so many ways to say “chapters consist of scenes.” Unfortunately, this wasn’t nearly enough for me to work from.

Part of the problem is the idea of the cliffhanger. There’s probably a more technical term for this that I’ve learned and forgotten, but it comes down to the idea that, to oversimplify rather grossly, at least every other chapter needs to end on a high note of tension. This is the essence of the “page-turner,” which is one of the high-priority goals of every genre novelist: inciting in readers the compulsive need to find out what happens next.

The idea is simple: you have some stuff happen in the opening stage of the scene. Say, your sexy-yet-brainy 400-year-old vampiric antiheroine gets attacked by villains with holy water-filled Super Soakers. She fights her way through them, dodging streams of the deadly liquid and clubbing the righteous bastards over the head with her heirloom mandolin. Now, thinking she’s got them all, she turns to check on her plucky werepig sidekick and whoa momma! There’s one left, and he’s aiming his deadly toy right at her pale and youthful face. His finger tightens on the trigger. How will she get out of this one?

Whitespace, chapter break, maybe even cut away to another set of characters working on a different subplot to prolong the tension.

The problem I have with this isn’t the technique. Not only does it demonstrably work, it’s key to managing tension on the mid-level scale. The problem I have with it is that it’s a very common rationale for the placement of chapter breaks—arguably the most common reason for chapter breaks in the first place—and it involves splitting a single scene across chapters. It’s clear evidence that no, chapters do not consist of whole scenes.

The contradiction between these common pearls of advice is something no one seems to talk about, and it’s incredibly frustrating to someone—well, me—trying to understand proper novel structure.

So if chapters don’t consist of scenes, what do they consist of? That’s what I had to figure out. Through messing around with pieces of my own story and several conversations with writing-type friends, I came up with some theory on the subject, and answered the question well enough for myself, at least.

In the interest of shortening these blog entries…tune in next time.

Hey…I’m doing it RIGHT NOW, aren’t I? I didn’t even do that on purpose. How’s that for internalization?