Hi,
Do any of you guys put names for your chapters? I shied away from it at first, but am now starting to think it's kind of cool. I see authors doing it without giving away the plot. Any thoughts for or against it?
I almost always do. Unless it's something like Part First, or something like that.
I LOVE naming my chapters, and often spend way too much time coming up with clever chapter titles. Word of advice, don't use song lyrics to name your chapters, you'll have to ask for permission from the copy right holder. I'm now having to rename all of my chapters for a novella I'm working on because I'm pretty damn sure John Densmore of The Doors is not going to let me use them.
Well I'll break the pattern and say no, for some reason I always saw it as a thing more for children's books, below YA, and maybe some genres like mysteries or westerns perhaps. But also, I have a hard enough time naming my entire piece half the time, so to do it once a chapter? I'd never finish!
I *think* technically yes.
As well, if you write spoofs, the free and fair use act totally covers you.
Wait, so can you reference a song lyric without permission, like if you blatantly state that it's from a song like a quote or something or are you not allowed to use them at all under any circumstances?
No. Now, if you have something like this: Tim strutted down the street, head banging, humming, "We're not gonna take it" by Twisted Sister, as he entered the offices of Solcum, Barlow and Calous. that's okay. But if you use the lyrics say, in like an epigraph:
We're not gonna take it--Dee Synder
then you better ask for permission. Trust me, that's the stupidest shit I've ever heard, and there are those that say you cannot even use lyrics as in the first example, but my sources tell me the first is okay, and the second is not. If I'm wrong, let me know...quick.
Titling my chapters is one of my favorite parts of novel-writing. Sometimes it even helps drive the themes if I come up with it before the chapter's done.
It's true you can't use actual lyrics without permission (the logic being that lyrics and poems are so short that even one line from them represents a significant portion of the work), but they can't copyright a title. So if you wanna title your chapter "Stairway to Heaven" or "Rhiannon" or whatever, there's not much they can do. That said, a title whose wording is so specific it could only be the one it's famous for, I would avoid, because they might be able to make a case for it.
When it comes to using lyrics in my text, I always just paraphrase. "He sprinted down the hallway humming that Alice Cooper tune about the last day of school."
Either way. If they're good names, great, like epitaphs they can add something.
Nothing wrong with numbers though, or just unnamed, unnumbered section breaks.
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I think titles of songs and other works are fair game. You can write another song called "We're Not Gonna Take It", you can write another book called "The Exorcist"; and I'm pretty sure (in that book) you could write, "Maxwell listened to 'We're Not Gonna Take It' twelve times before bringing his silver hammer down on the goliath beetle, splintering the carapace and spluttering guts all over his brand new Nikes."
[As ever, please correct me if I'm wrong.]
I do it.
For my first book it was about theming. The chapter title set up the content for that particular installment.
For the second book, I pretty much had no choice. I had four things going on: main narrative, book entries, and two different character sublots. All four of these things went in a rotation, so titling was the avenue to let the reader know which character they were on.
I've only written one actual book (everything else has been short stories) and yes, each section has a title. I don't refer to them as chapters however, because most of them are too short to be considered chapters. One advantage I think to having chapter titles is that the reader has a Table of Contents to reference when they want to see how long a chapter is going to be. If you don't have titles, then you probably won't have a ToC. That's from a reader's aspect, however. As for the creativity of chapter titles, yes, have fun with it. It can definately keep the reader interested.
You don't have to call them chapters. Just a thought.
I never name chapters. I used to but I found myself taking so long to decide on the names that I felt like I was wasting time.
I name my chapters when I write the first, second, and third drafts. It helps me keep the story organized. I like to shuffle the chapters around, just to see how it works. I leave the names of the chapters out of the final draft. I figure it might turn off literary agents and publishers, but I'm not really sure if it matters.