Chapter breakout, the harrowing adventure

When I write, I write… I keep writing until I stop.

This may seem like a, “Yeah, no duh” situation, but hold your judgmental glare for just a moment. What I mean by I keep writing is that the story, as most stories do, rolls on regardless of how I have it broken out.

If you love a novel, one that you can name off all the key points down to individual lines, I dare you to try and name the chapter number without looking it up. I know I can’t, even for books I have read more than a dozen times through. I am more able to flip through the book to the basic area I am talking about by how many pages I feel like it should be in the novel than by going to chapter ‘x,’ paragraph ‘z,’ line ‘w’.

Maybe this is just me, but when I wrote my first novel I had to go back and break it out into chapters that made sense. And just last night I did that again. I went through the book I am shopping around and changed a lot of Chapter numbers, moved whole paragraphs up or down a chapter, and then had more fun with the chapter titles…. And then I did it again… and again…

It was a multi-hour process and I still don’t know if I am happy with it.

I may be spending way too much mental energy on this process. The story hasn’t changed, if you read the book with or without the chapter breakouts everything is the same.

I just know when this thing goes out in the wild, chapter separation is going to drive someone nuts. If that is you I apologize ahead of time. Just know that it is not you, it’s me.