The answer is both yes and know. This is because writing a
book is not immediately confined to a set layout. The chapter system has proven
its worth over the centuries of novel writing because it is useful for
organizing the story and for giving the reader timely breaks should they need
them without losing their place when they come back to pick up the action
again.
I do not use chapters when writing the first draft, however.
The reason for this is that I believe that it is important to get the actual
idea of the story down as soon as possible. For me the first draft is a crucial
part of doing this and getting distracted by formulating a chapter matrix is a
hindrance. I might insert breaks in the manuscript that I think are logical but
they are not set in stone. In fact they invariably never survive.
The question of how to organise the book only really
surfaces when I approach the end of the first draft (actually I usually never
complete the first draft). By this point I have a very good idea of what the
story is, the themes, the main characters, the plot and everything else. This
is when some organisation is needed.
For ‘The War Wolf’ I quickly realised that a standard
Chapter One, Chapter 2, etc., simply was not going to work. This
was because the action, once it started in 1066, occurred in a very brief space
of time. It seemed better to me to use each day as a chapter and group the
events in the story accordingly. This gave me a very strict framework to work
within and removed the need to consider how many chapters I needed to write.
I applied exactly the same approach to ‘For Rapture of
Ravens, which was logical as it followed on directly from ‘The War Wolf’
and if you are writing a series then readers generally appreciate a degree of
consistency. However, for my next novel, ‘Eugenica’, I was straying away
from the early medieval period to something much closer to home; the 1930’s.
For this project I did actually attempt to write the first
draft in chapters. I created folders on my computer and inserted first draft
file copies into them accordingly. It did not work however. The reasons for
this were numerous. First, there was my approach to writing; getting the ideas
down as quickly as possible and leaving the polishing for the first re-write. I
get so deep into the writing that I lose track of time, never mind all the
finer points of constructing a book. I quickly found that my ideas were running
much faster than the chapter system and trying to keep up proved frustrating so
I effectively abandoned it. Another reason was the emergence of other stories
within the main story. There was an awful lot going on between the characters
and even independently as well.
Once I got the first draft as close to completion as I wanted
to I took the time to step back and consider the organisation of the book. I
quickly noticed that in trying to write it chapter by chapter I had not done
myself any favours; plot-wise it was a mess! Events were not happening in a
chronological order if I maintained my original chapter matrix. Obviously I had
to abandon it.
That might seem a little radical but really it is not. I
believe that my problem was that I was trying to force my story into a system
of organisation that was poorly thought out at the beginning. Serves me right
for allowing myself to become a slave to convention. I decided to use each
individual day as the basis of the chapter organisation. It was similar to what
I had done before but the reason for doing it was different. In writing ‘The
Sorrow Song Trilogy’ actual historical events were the determining factor.
‘Eugenica’ is an alternative history novel, however, and so it not so
closely tied to the actual history of the day. It was one of the major themes
of the book that decided the issue.
When I re-read the first draft I realised that there were
two stories that were mirroring each other. Both featured a journey, one by
airship and the other by bus and then by any means possible. The journeys were
triangular, returning to their points of origin. In the airship the theoretical
consequences of eugenics are discussed by a congress of savants in superb
luxury. In the other journey disabled people experience the practical
implications of that same theory when it is applied to them. I did not set out
to write the story in this way; it grew and developed as I wrote the first
draft. I could see the attraction of it, however, as a vehicle for telling the
story. This is where another determining factor came into play. The airship
completes its’ triangular flight, Britain
to America, America to Germany,
Germany to Britain, within a definite
timeframe; approximately nine days.
I reviewed the other part of the story and realised that it
benefitted greatly from an immediate increase in tension if played out over a
relatively short period of time. The move from apparently benign treatment of
the main protagonists to a fight for life is accelerated and the tempo of the
story picks at a speed much faster than the apparently casual progress of the
airship might suggest. It made sense to use each day as a chapter.
When a reader opens ‘Eugenica’ they will see an
instantly recognisable table of contents arranged in traditional headings;
Chapter One, Chapter Two, etc., but these are not the elements that define the
book’s actual organisation. Beneath those headings will be the real determining
factors of how the events in the story are organised and presented to the
reader. You might read it from Chapter One through to Chapter Nine but that is
certainly not how I wrote it!
