: Re: Are there any established rules for splitting books into parts, chapters, sections etc? I am working with an author, whose approach is to write her text, approximately divided by indicators where

@Yeniel532

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There are major works of SF that follow a structure like that. David Brin’s The Uplift War is the first example to come to mind. It’s divided into seven parts (each of which jumps forward in time to a new phase of the war) with 111 chapters, each of which is named after its viewpoint character and about six pages long on average. (It’s part of a series written in the same style.) Another variant I’ve seen is to insert section or chapter breaks headed by the location, or location and time.

A number of “classic” SF novels are divided into two or three “Books” (other than the volumes printed and sold). For example, the novel Dune is divided into Books I–III and Lord of the Rings into six “Books,” so that each volume of the trilogy was divided in half. Tolkien, a scholar of Medieval England, was following the conceit that he was translating a collection of a multi-volume work, and might have been trying to evoke the sense of ancient works written on scrolls, which are shorter than a modern volume and usually printed that way today. This device allowed Tolkien to use a parallel story structure for the second and third volumes. The break in the middle of The Fellowship of the Ring instead marked a major turning-point in the story, where the main characters stopped running for their lives and learned about their mission. Frank Herbert had read and lifted several terms and lines from The Sabres of Paradise. While I don’t know if it also inspired any of the story structure, this source of his did have three parts.

A “Part” or “Book” containing multiple chapters usually represents a major shift, like a new stage of the main character's life, a jump in time, a change in viewpoint character, a change of setting, or a switch to a parallel plotline. If one picks up where the other left off, it’s probably a chapter.

Chapters and parts don’t need to be close to each other in length.

Numbered or named sections would be more unusual, the memoir class has commands to typeset them “by just leaving a blank line or two between a pair of paragraphs, or there might be some decorative item like three or four asterisks, or a fleuron or two,” (according to the manual). That would be more conventional in a novel.

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