: Benefits of Chapter titles in fictional writing? So, I'm in the process of writing a Sci-fi novel, and I use a website to upload chapters before I complete it. On the website, I use chapter

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A table of contents is helpful guide to any reader that wants to backtrack to a certain point in the story, perhaps to remind themselves how a certain event occurred, or see again how a particular character got to be wherever they are, how they look, etc. Not to mention it's also great for when you want to find and reread your favorite part of a book.

In my experience, tables of contents have never been a nuisance and chapter titles have always excited me, ignited my curiosity, charmed me, and even made me laugh. Chapter titles are unique to each author, and I think they add character to the book.

However, neither feature in question is a necessity.

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I like to use chapter titles while I write, as a minimal outline, to keep track of the sequence of events in the story. Typical chapter titles for me look like:

(1) Boarding the Lifeboat
(2) Saying Goodbye
(3) Party at the Chinese Embassy
(4) Driving Off a Cliff

They work for me as an author, keeping track of my story, but they're terrible for readers, because they summarize the events of the chapter before the reader has a chance to actually read those details for herself.

So when I export my final manuscript, I strongly prefer to just use numerical chapter titles.

But having said that, if my chapter titles were less utilitarian and a bit more poetic, I'd be happy to include them in the final output.

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Chapter titles can work for you or they can do nothing.

Numbered chapters only give your readers an idea of what is an average length of a chapter in relation to the total number of pages in your book and offer them a break from the pace of the narration, because one has to turn a page to get to the next one.

You can name your chapters any way you wish if you think it helps to keep the reader interested in your story. You can have them named and numbered, too.

Chapter names do not have to be descriptive to the point of spoiling the mystery element of your story, if it has one, and they can be even deceptive to a certain degree, but only if you can imbue them with a subtle double-meaning, making sure that your reader says 'ahh... that's what happened? nice...' (top of the head oversimplified example: your hero is captured, imprisoned and sentenced to death; next chapter is named Execution, where he miraculously escapes, sneaks up on the villain who is getting ready to enjoy the spectacle, accuses him of being criminally bad guy and executes him instead).

You can use date or timestamps (as it was mentioned elsewhere) is the names of the chapters, if the timeline is important to the story and to elevate the sense of urgency of what is happening. If there is a time bomb ticking, you can use the countdown markers ( 4 hours to big boom, 3 hours to big boom, etc.)

George R. R. Martin names the chapters of his Song of Ice and Fire by the POV character. He has many, different in each chapter, and this naming convention really helps to understand whose story you are about to switch to.

If your story is a quest (as it was mentioned as well), you can title your chapters by the names of places your character(s) travel to, if you wish.

There is no recipe; it is all up to you...

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In a work of non-fiction, a table of contents with chapter titles helps the reader find specific information he may want and see where the book is going. Like if I'm looking for information about World War 2, I might open a history book and scan chapter titles for something about World War 2. Or if I open a math book and scan the chapter titles I might see a title that says "Basics of Calculus" and then I say to myself, Okay, yes indeed this book does discuss calculus.

This is exactly the reason why many, probably most, fiction books do NOT have chapter titles. If I open, say, a novel about a love triangle and the whole point of the book is that Alice is torn between whether she wants to marry Bob or Charlie, if I look at the table of contents and see that the last chapter is titled "Alice and Charlie's Wedding", well, that would rather ruin any suspense. Of course that's an extreme case, but chapter titles could give things away in more subtle ways. In a story about the hero searching for treasure, if I see that there's a chapter called "Egypt" and he finds that it's not there, and then there's a chapter called "Sudan" and it's not there either, and then I start the chapter called "Ethiopia", and I see in the table of contents that this is followed by chapters called "Kenya" and "Madagascar" and then "Returning Home", I think I'd guess that he won't find the treasure in Ethiopia or Kenya either. Looking at titles of chapters we haven't read tells us something about the "future" that the characters don't know.

You could, of course, have chapter titles that are so vague that they tell the reader nothing. But then, why bother?

Not to say that chapter titles are never appropriate in a work of fiction. In a book made up of essentially independent stories, like a story about a detective where he solves ten crimes but each is pretty much independent of the others, chapter titles wouldn't give away anything, and if the titles are interesting, they may encourage the reader to want to get to that chapter.

I suppose you could have deliberately deceptive chapter titles. Like in my love triangle story example, maybe the last chapter is "Marriage With Charlie", but when we get there it turns out that Charlie is marrying somebody else and Alice then runs off with Bob. In general I'd think that would be a lame trick to pull on the reader, but like so many things in writing, if done well, it could be amusing.

You might be able to come up with chapter titles that are vague enough that they don't give anything away, but interesting enough that the reader sees them as something to look forward to.

Children's stories have chapter titles more often because they usually don't have a lot of dramatic tension. When I see a chapter title of, "In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets Caught in a Tight Place", I don't usually think, "Oh, so I guess Tigger does NOT kill Winnie the Pooh in this chapter, because he's still alive for the next one."

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Chapter titles which aren't used as orientation sort of delineate the story: Potions Class, The Quidditch Match, A Long-Expected Party, The Tower of Cirith Ungol. They are a distillation, not even a précis but a suggestion, of what's coming.

The question is whether you feel the reader needs this sort of narrative flag in the TOC and/or at the beginning of each chapter. Does the description add to the experience or does it feel childish? Ask a bunch of your beta readers. Read many books in your genre. See what other writers are doing, and see if you agree or disagree.

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