Chapters: how to end them and start the next

From Writers with Love
Extracts from books, guides and articles I believe will make me a better writer. They may help you too…This week SOL STEIN

Solutions for Novelists: Secrets of a Master Editor by Sol Stein published by Souvenir Press 1999

ALWAYS END your chapter with something that raises the reader’s curiosity, and that thrust him into the next chapter. As to the beginning of the next chapter, never take the reader where the reader wants to go…

Your job as a manipulator of the reader’s emotions is to start the next chapter somewhere else or with a different character, leaving the reader hanging. You are not a nice guy, you are are writer. You are consciously manipulating what the reader feels. Never take the reader where the reader wants to go...

There are many variations to this technique. One I’ve used from time to time is to end a chapter with a tense unresolved happening, and then to start the next chapter quietly. The calm at the beginning of a chapter…increases the tension.

ooOOOoo

I borrowed this book from a friend and I didn’t want to give it back, so I bought my own copy. It seems to be out of print, but I found a secondhand one online and grabbed it.

I had never heard of Sol Stein before but he was a best-selling American novelist, playwright, editor and publisher. Among the many famous authors he published were James Baldwin (they met at High School in the Bronx) and the Irish writer Christy Brown (you may remember he was played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the film My Left Foot) .

Apparently he never published his own writing because he didn’t want to compete with the authors contracted to Stein & Day. The fact that other traditional publishers did publish him says a lot about the quality of his work. When his company failed in the late 1980s he wrote the nonfiction book A Feast for Lawyers about the bankruptcy – which I am guessing was a way of getting his own back.