: Re: 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

@Annie587

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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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