#54: Putting Your Chapter Titles to Work

Hello friends! A few bits of news before this month’s craft essay: First, I’ve got a new short story titled “Home Sweet NewHome” in the journal Daedalus, for an issue themed “How Will We Talk About the Past in the Future?” The issue includes new work by Jericho Brown, Anne Carson, Natalie Diaz, Madeline Syet, among others, plus my friend and colleague Leah Newsom, who contributed a fantastic story called “Horseplay” that I can’t recommend highly enough. (Leah also designed the logo for this newsletter!)

I’ll also be doing another quarterly Zoom craft lecture for paying subscribers, on September 9, 2025, at 7pm ET. Next week, I’ll send out a survey with a handful of potential topics to anyone who is currently a paid subscriber at that time, so that you can vote on which lecture you want this time out. If you’d like to be part of that vote and/or the lecture, all you have to do is upgrade to a paid subscription. Thanks again!

Putting Your Chapter Titles to Work

Every short story necessarily needs a title—even “Untitled” is a title—and generally we want that title to do as much work as it can. As Diane Williams said once, “The title is one’s first chance—Please listen to me! It’s a beckoning, the first opportunity to bewitch after I’ve written a story, done all this work. Here’s the opportunity to create more implication and latitude.” But what about chapters of novels? Do they need titles? And if so, what should they accomplish?

Many novels do not have chapter titles, of course. Some of those simply use numbers, and some forgo even that, preferring page breaks and white space to any kind of adornment. Even chapters aren’t strictly necessary. In one early draft, my novel In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods was a five-hundred page scroll of text without any subdivisions. I remember telling my agent that—after I’d already fixed it!—and watched him put his head down on the table. Perhaps not the most commercial choice! (That novel is now in numbered parts containing unmarked sections—and my editor Mark Doten was the one who figured out where to break the parts. Thankfully!)

If you do decide to include chapter titles, then you may try to get out of them all the that story titles can do, including creating anticipation, adding nuance to