: Re: Chapter names: The various ways of implementing them and why should I care I see many times, that authors use various name formats for chapters: "***" "Twenty Four" "Chapter 5" "XIX" "Last Resort"

@Lee1909368

That's one of artistic liberties the writer is free to take. If you write a scientific paper, you name your chapters, sections, subsections 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 but other than that, you're completely free to choose. Choose whatever you see fit, whatever you feel like it fits your book.

* * * is usually reserved for sections/scenes, a subdivision within a chapter. But then, your book may have no chapters at all, just scenes.

Chapters with meaningful names come at risk of spoilers. Readers often peek into the table of contents (even if to find the chapter where they finished if they don't have a bookmark!) and a too revealing chapter name may be a spoiler, so some authors choose more generic names - or ones more obscure.

OTOH, sometimes the author has a difficult time thinking up titles at all, so they skip the whole bother of naming chapters.

But overall, it's artistic freedom and choosing what you feel matches best. Of course roman numerals have a certain weight and elegance to them, fitting a mystery or gothic horror. A fun book for kids may have elaborate names like Chapter 16 or how Agnes learned that broccoli is not the worst of world's evils. A topical non-fiction will have descriptive titles, Chapter 5: Fluid mechanics. But in the end, it's author's hunch and personal preference.

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: Re: Chapter names: The various ways of implementing them and why should I care I see many times, that authors use various name formats for chapters: "***" "Twenty Four" "Chapter 5" "XIX" "Last Resort"

More posts by @Lee1909368

: Learning storywriting for videogames - Handling deep nonlinearities A recent question asked for pointers for writing for games, and the gist of the answers was that it's not very unlike writing

: Should a long flashback be written in first or third person? In my novel there will be a chapter-length flashback as one character relates a story from his past. The rest of the novel is

: How to have a character be nameless for the first few paragraphs of a book? Let me first explain what is going in in the beginning of the story: My main character belongs to a tribal culture

: The best place I can suggest to turn to with this kind of open questions - on military and weapons - is 4chan/k/. It's an imageboard gathering fans of all things connected with weapons of

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