Segregating The Chapters Of My Debut Novel

Hey all! Hope y’all have been holding up well since the last time we talked. As you’d know that I am a little extra charged today, as I’ve been invited to an author interaction and book signing session at a part of the town, and frankly I am excited, not only to meet my friends, but also the book lovers out there. Sure, I’ll share the experience here soon. 

Coming to my blog here, y’all would know that I have been working on sharing my book writing journey with y’all, and in case you missed it, you can catch a glimpse of it here. So, today I am going to be telling y’all how segregated the chapters of my book - rather how I chose to move ahead with the plot. Of course I didn’t have a set plot in my mind when I began writing my novel - I just went with the flow and when I kept writing, it came to my knowledge that everything happened organically. 

Even though I didn’t have a routine of how I was going to proceed with my book, I was sure that each chapter would herald a different story. No, I wasn’t attempting short stories here, it was very much a novel where I had thought of giving a different flavour to each chapter. So, chapter 1 would showcase a story of an individual, chapter 2 would portray another protagonist, and then again chapter 3 would talk of the guy from the first chapter. Ultimately, the author would reach a point where there’d be a consortium (which is also the name of one of my chapters) and then there’d be an open-ended conclusion. 

So, that was how I had decided to segregate my chapters and it worked wonderfully in my favour - of course I can’t deny that. So, I marched ahead with it, aligned every alternate chapter, and finally arrived at an open ended conclusion. So, that wasn’t too difficult a task. What seemed difficult, however, was the fact that there were times when I had gotten myself into an immense confusion, as sometimes I didn’t know how to proceed with a character. I was sure that I wouldn’t want to stretch it unnecessarily. 

In situations like these, I had introduced characters who had kind of had a past connection, kind of a flashback to the main character, but that had to be done carefully as you wouldn’t want it to appear redundant. When I did actually proceed with it, I discovered that this process really works well, and that I could move ahead with the chapter almost without hiccups. Now, I gotta mention here that I get a little sensitive with nomenclature, so all the chapters that I segregated not only had to be categorically divided, but they also had to be properly named. And, it’s an open secret these days that a lot depends on your title. If your title isn’t catchy enough, you might run thin on your audience. 

Following this what I did was take a sample from a particular chapter and name the title after it. Let’s say for example, my chapter mentioned something where a person (not necessarily the protagonist) gets really daunting and says something like “I have been feared by all and sundry”. So, I used this sentence as my title of the novel - one that kind of sounds intriguing and one to arouse the curiosity among the readers. 

So, this was a process that I had followed myself religiously and have to say that it worked well for me so far, as have been validated by the reviewers. So, when you can satisfy your reviewers and critics, what better than that, right? 

Hmm, not necessarily. The most important person that you are writing for is you, and convincing yourself is of utmost importance.

Image by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash