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Most novels consist of a series of chapters. Chaptered works vary in a few ways.

• Average length of chapter. Short chapters, used sparingly, can be dangerously effective. NOTE: This does not contravene Rule #318: An author can only use a chapter with fewer than twenty sentences once a story and fewer than twenty words once in his career. Sorry, no exceptions.

• Changes in perspective (whether the narration is first-person or third-person). For example, the third-person narrator in the Harry Potter books only rarely shifts from Harry’s perspective. The non-Harry scenes, generally a Voldemort kill scene, always precede the rest of the book.

• Experimental writing, most of which is pretty weird and essentially impossible to publish or sell.

• Chapters that aren’t in chronological order. In nearly every novel, the first chapter describes what happens first and the last chapter covers what happens last. By contrast, in Superhero Nation, the first set of chapters (Lash’s origin story) actually happens after the second set (Mallow’s origin story). Deviating from chronological order is really dangerous. Readers, particularly Westerners, expect chronological progression and will likely be annoyed and/or confused by anything else. If you plan to use a non-chronological work, consider these obstacles.

1. It’s often hard to follow the flow of the story. What causes what? If we’re on page 50, which of the previous pages should guide our understanding of what is happening now? The more you flip around, the more these extremely basic questions will torment your readers.

2. Readers have trouble constructing a mental timeline. Readers expect to be able to put the chapters in chronological order easily. There can’t be any ambiguity. Is it clear whether chapter 4 happens before, after or concurrently with chapter 3? If not, you have committed authorial malpractice. One source of ambiguity is that the author hasn’t entirely fleshed out which chapters happen in which order. Make up your damn mind and make a timeline for your easy reference. If you don’t know the order of your story, your readers never had a chance.

3. Non-chronological structure seems gimmicky. It should be clear why you chose this unusual and jarring structure. Hopefully you didn’t wake up one day thinking “wouldn’t it be neat to write a book in reverse order?” Unfortunately, many writers that make unusual structural choices are essentially looking to do something “neat” rather than something effective. In Superhero Nation, I used a bit of reverse chronology to play on audience expectations that the story starts with the hero’s arrival. By the time Lash has superpowers, Jacob Mallow has already spent six years preparing his scheme. I feel that starting with year six, going to year one and then proceeding in order shows that Superhero Nation is about more a larger group of heroes and villains rather than a single hero. There is a cost in comprehensibility, but I mitigated that by moving the reader’s perspective backwards at only one point, where Lash’s arc ends and Mallow’s begins. So, instead of going from 1-2-3-4-5, we go from 4-1-2-3-5.

• Chapters that aren’t in the same tense or frame of narration. For example, I once wrote a short story that consisted of two parts, the first a scene narrated by the main character and the second a newspaper article describing what happened to him (he went crazy and killed someone). This is jarring, but your audience will probably understand what is going on. The main problem with changing the frame is that it feels gimmicky and often isn’t necessary. For example, in the above example, I probably could have shown the newspaper by having the narrator read it in prison. That would have kept the frame constant.

• Chapters that have no chronological order. This is distinct from and much weirder than rearranging the chapter order. For example, the more normal version might have a chapter order that goes 4-1-2-3-5. In this tamer version, there is a chronological order, but the writer has to lay it out for us because it isn’t what we expect. Some experimental fiction has no chronological order, which means that readers are meant to go through the chapters in whatever order they like. The story is different for each person and there isn’t an objective timeline to understand the story with. This is (perhaps) theoretically a neat idea, but no one but English majors will actually start, let alone enjoy, the resulting work. You also have to consider that writing your chapters so that any one could flow into any other would make all of your chapters terrible. This structure is hugely gimmicky and I heartily discourage it.

The Evolving Chapteration of Superhero Nation

Originally, I wrote Superhero Nation as a set of around ten over-sized chapters that would each give the perspective of a different character. For example, chapter 1 focused on Lash, chapter 2 focused on Mallow, chapter 3 might have been Paingod, etc. That approach was deeply flawed for many reasons, some of which have probably occurred to you.

You can’t have ten main characters. Sustaining even five major characters is quite difficult. Every additional character strains your reader’s ability to keep them all apart. Captain Carnage… which one is he, the gungho Marine superhero or the ordinary drill instructor? You can paper over this problem with distinct names/mannerisms to some extent. But even if your readers can keep the characters apart, that doesn’t mean they can understand the more complex roles characters play in your story. For example, what do their relationships look like? How do their agendas and objectives relate to the plot?

Each additional character makes relationships exponentially more superficial. The typical fantasy story has one main hero, two major characters that help the hero, a villain (or group of villains) and then maybe an object character that is only developed to the extent that she’s the hero’s girlfriend and she’s been kidnapped. Side characters come and go, but it’s usually pretty easy to understand how they tie into the relationship web.

For example, in Harry Potter you have Harry, Hermione and Ron. Then you have the villainous group, Voldemort/Snape/Malfoys. Harry doesn’t really have an object character, but you could make the case for his parents (whose only defining characteristic is that they’re what Harry lacks). This is all pretty simple. When Dumbledore and Neville are introduced, it’s pretty obvious that they will like Harry’s gang more than the bad guys. This model also handles slightly more complex situations well. The two major friends will often perform as foils, characters that contrast each other in a few key ways, usually to help illustrate tension or conflict. For example, Ron was impulsive and rebellious but Hermione was methodical, reserved and cared more about playing by the rules. What often happened was that Ron and Harry would do something rash and then Hermione would act in a way that illustrated the consequences of their actions.

Hopefully all that is pretty simple. Now let’s imagine a much more complex situation.

· There’s no central hero. Every hero’s perspective seems at least somewhat flawed and no one seems unquestionably heroic.

• Instead of a Cold War-esque breakdown between two roughly monolithic good and evil blocs, the good guys and bad guys both consist of several infighting groups. To be especially confusing, let’s say that the fault lines between some of these groups are unclear and situation-based and that some of the “groups” are really just a single person who isn’t aligned with anyone else.
• Confused yet? Let’s throw in the variable of setting. Before we worked with a relatively simple setting that draws on reader experiences but adapt them so that real doesn’t confuse their interpretation of the story. We know what British boarding schools are like, but we don’t know anything about magic. To the extent that we have any political preconceptions going into Harry Potter, we all agree with the author that the Nazi-esque Death Eaters are bad guys. What if we wanted to make a setting that was more complex? For example, instead of a Manichean fight between absolute good (anti-Nazism) and evil (Nazism), let’s divide the good guys between liberals and conservatives. Each group is still pretty heroic but sparring with the other. Then let’s throw in a few independents and libertarians, just for kicks. Each reader will likely reach different conclusions about which characters are acting most justly in a given situation.

Have you deduced yet that this utterly baffling world of relationships is Superhero Nation? My premise is inherently more confusing than Harry Potter. Having many characters, particularly ones that aren’t really central to the plot, is a recipe for catastrophe. I’d have conflicts that are both confusing and under-developed.

The third and final main problem is chapter length: chapters that are 8000 words long don’t work. The chapters are too hard to finish and it squanders a prime authorial asset (chapter breaks).

The Evolutionary Imperative

For the above reasons and even more, having ten different points of view obviously wasn’t going to work. I’ve made some changes but am still evaluating whether I’ve gone far enough.

• I drastically cut down the cast to five main characters: three anti-heroes, one villain and an anti-villain (Agent Orange). Incidentally, you can see all of these characters in my header art (from left to right: Lash, Agent Orange, Jacob, Catastrophe and Oliver Ryan).
• I’m still cutting down chapter length from an average of 8000 words to somewhere between 1500 and 2000. That’s 5-7 double-spaced Word pages, a length I think is pretty reasonable.
• Changing perspective at chapter breaks can easily confuse readers. If the author does it once, readers will have to wonder at every chapter break whether the perspective has changed again. Soon I Will Be Invincible suffered from unclear narration, I think. It had two narrators that sometimes switched at each chapter-break. Sometimes I read through the first page or two of a chapter and suddenly realized that I had actually been wrong about who was narrating. To help readers follow my narration, I will separate the book into arcs and chapters. For example, the first ~10000 words (Lash’s perspective) will be the first arc. The second arc is Mallow’s story, etc. It should be easier to determine whether the perspectives have changed, only at the beginning of each arc.
• I anticipate writing five arcs, or maybe four if #3 and #4 are really long.

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