The chopping, er... chapter test

I call it the chapter test.

I've been editing a book for months and months. It was about 27,000 words too long (which, if you're keeping score at home, broke down to about 44 single-spaced pages in Word). That's a whole lot of wordy. And — as pretty much every entry on this blog clearly shows — I have a problem with wordy.

That's why I invented the chapter test.

In order to speed up the pacing of every story I write, I force myself to read back through it and chop chapters. Now, chopping chapters is extremely difficult. Like, hold-still-while-I-cut-off-this-arm difficult. You feel a little bit like the mom in the King Solomon story, where you'd rather give away your baby than see it cut in half. In my first edit of the book that is almost ready to be sent out to agents (curse you, you evil appendix), I probably cut out 50 words, and every one of them hurt like the dickens. At that point, I thought the pain was over.

However, after reading some interviews with book agents, I concluded that my book needed to be around 75,000 words long — a far cry from where it was. That convinced me that I had to get serious. Rather than scraping away a few words here and there with a scalpel, I had go full Jack Nicholson and attack the story with an axe. The chapter test helped me do it.

See, I decided that every chapter needed to drive the narrative forward. That seems like a stupid conclusion — OF COURSE the chapters should drive the narrative forward — but you wouldn't believe how easy it is to veer off course with your characters. Nobody loves your characters more than you do, so it's easy (so painfully easy) to transform into a doting parent. Your characters become your baby, and you want to capture their every move.

Walking?

Yes!

Talking?

Yes!

Shopping?

Yes!

Breakfast?

Yes!

It's very, very easy for the actual story to get buried under things that seem important to you as the writer, but tend to bore the reader to death. Hence, the chapter test.

So (having put it off for this many paragraphs — see the wordy problem?!) let me explain:

The test probably evolved from my journalism background. All through college I worked on the campus newspaper, and part of my job was writing headlines. An 800-word story would need to be summed up in eight words, or maybe five words, or even (heaven forbid) as few as three words. It was terrible, but I learned, and I've transferred it over to my writing. With the chapter test, I read through the chapter and summarize it with a brief headline explaining what it's about. If the chapter doesn't push the narrative forward, it's eligible for axing.

I've got 33 pages of chopped chapters saved on my computer, and they can all be summed up like this:

"Character tries to avoid girls"

"Character remembers a conversation"

"Character draws a picture"

"Character gets annoyed"

Let's face it — none of those chapters were make-or-break-the-story types. They needed to go. I may have loved them to death (the drawing one is a favorite) but they were bogging down the story, stalling the narrative, and belaboring points that could have been made more succinctly elsewhere.

That's the chapter test — sum up the chapter, see if it adds to the narrative, and then chop if it doesn't. It's clinical, it's clean, and it's far less painful than you might think.

Once you get the theory behind the chapter test, you can apply it to all sorts of books. If I had a copy of Twilight (I don't, but if I did) I could probably narrow down the chapters like this:

"Bella whines."

"Bella mopes."

"Bella stares."

"Bella wonders why everyone likes her." (So do the readers…)

Don't think I only pick on "Twilight," though — other books could benefit from my brilliance. If I were to cut out all of the "Harry whines" chapters from the fifth Harry Potter book, it would've been about 400 pages shorter. And if I cut out all of the "Fanny is boring," "Fanny is tired," "Fanny is silent," "Fanny is dull," chapters from Mansfield Park, that book would cease to exist. Take out the "Dang, these Parisian sewers are awesome" chapters from Les Miserables, and that book would be a breeze. If only Jane Austen, J.K. Rowling, and Victor Hugo knew about the chapter test…

Parents may love their kids to death, but they're also willing to tell their kids to stop being ridiculous when the kids act out. The same theory can apply for authors.

So, chapters, stop being ridiculous.