Hey Readers!
Been a while since I posted here on the Dark and Mysterious blog. Life has been super crazy for me raising two kids and running the BEST coffee company in the midwest. Anyway, I had a thought this morning during my early morning commute that’s been rattling away in my head all day.
Is there a need for chapter titles?
As I’m finishing post production of my next novel, Echoes From A Distant Star, my mind is starting to shift to the book design, specifically the table of contents. As every novel should have one, I was thinking about if adding chapter titles is a route I wanted to take, or is it even necessary for a modern fiction novel?
So, historically chapter titles were used for signposts in a way to signal important events, plot twists, and character development, but looking at it from a mystery novel sense, is there another purpose it could be used for? A thought I even had was trying to integrate the chapter titles into the narrative of the novel itself, creating an interesting immersion for a murder mystery of sorts set in space.
Every novel I’ve had the pleasure of reading by my fellow indie authors seems to shy away from using chapter titles. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even read a book with chapter titles that wasn’t written in the early-mid 2000’s. I’m wondering if somewhere along the way they became a bit archaic or deemed too insignificant to add much to the novel. I mean, your chapters are already organized numerically with page numbers to go along with them, so is it actually necessary to have each one titled?
I’m curious about what my fellow authors think on this subject.
– John McCool
John McCool 