Okay, wow, today really got away from me. I woke up this morning with this topic running through my head, but had several things on my to-do list to accomplish today and knew I needed to dive right into them—most especially adding exercise/activity back into my day. And once I got started with everything, the blog just had to be put on the back-burner.

As I do most mornings, I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR as I lay in bed waking up. And as they occasionally do, they had a segment on publishing/reading. This morning’s segment was on the rise of the e-book, which we’ve discussed here before.

Listen to the piece (or read the transcript) here.

I was listening along just fine, enjoying hearing perspectives from both sides. Until they played a clip from a graphic designer they interviewed, who said this:

Pages, chapters, all those things are very necessary in paper. They’re not in an e-book reader.
~Robert Fabercant

As soon as I stemmed my outrage, I reminded myself that this was coming from a graphic designer talking about it from a design standpoint, not from a story-structure standpoint. I, of course, immediately applied what he said to a story-structure viewpoint and was horrified.

Could you imagine trying to read a 90–100,000-word novel with no chapter breaks? I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of one because it would be nearly impossible to write, much less read.

Aside from the fact that we need breaks in books where we can put them down late at night so we can get some sleep, the chapter-style storytelling structure is deeply ingrained in the Western psyche. Think about literature going back as far as written stories exist. They were broken down into episodes, into “chapters”—whether in more of a short-story format or in a way of breaking down a longer story into something that could be serialized and doled out in chunks.

A while back, I had a critique partner who, when writing the first draft of her story, wasn’t writing it in chapters, but was just writing scene after scene after scene. She’d switch back and forth from the hero’s and heroine’s viewpoints between those scenes; but even though there was quite a bit of conflict, it got to the point where it was like watching one endless Ping-Pong rally. Back and forth, back and forth, with no end point in sight. And that’s when I really understood just how important chapter breaks are. It’s more than just finding a point after two to four thousand words to start a new chapter so that the reader can stop for the night. It’s doing what I love to do: writing to a hook, dropping a bomb, leaving the reader with a question that must be answered, having the character come face to face with the one person she did not want to see—and then ending the chapter . . . and picking up the next one with a totally different character/piece of action to keep the reader hooked.

The structure of the chapter is almost the same as the structure of the story as a whole. The character should be in a different place/state of mind/emotional state by the end of the chapter than they were at the beginning. Everything that happens in the chapter should build toward what happens at the end of the chapter (action or emotion, big or little). Chapter endings mark the turning points of the story, and also serve the writer as places where we leave our readers hanging, dangling, needing to find out what happens next. The readers, now faced with the prospect of starting a new chapter, must decide if they want to know badly enough what happens next to go ahead and start reading the next chapter or not. And the sign of a good book is that no matter how late it is, the end of a chapter is the last place a reader wants to put a book down.

So no more chapters in e-books? I think that would bring about the end of the e-book and ensure the survival of the ink-and-paper kind for centuries to come.