During writing my debut novel, I’d organized ‘folders’ of scenes in roughly the Save the Cat beat structure. Not exactly chapters, but at important touchpoints they align.
To cluster scenes into chapters, you aim for giving readers pacing-breaks, keeping secondary-character or sub-plot arcs spinning, building suspense with cliff-hanger dramatic twists or reveals, etc. A dose of feng shui is involved.
Anyway, for me, chapter-izing started on declaring The Curse of the Unholy Grail is Plot-Complete. The following is the breakdown and chapter-titles I arrived at. Tell me, sounds intriguing, right?
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Not every FBI agent has seen a murder victim in their career. Not one of them has seen the murdered turn their head to stare at her hatefully, the way one had for Nicole Lange.
An experience that would change her. And would change the course of the world.
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- In the Beginning, Darkness Moved
- So, the Rough Beast Stirs
- Thine Bargain, O Mephistopheles
- And When Death Hath Come, We Are Not
- By This Sign Shall Ye Know
- Darkness Shines and Light Comprehends Not
- Bloody, Bold, and Resolute
- Fallen Through the Floor of Heaven
- Within the Breast Can Two Hearts Beat
- The Serpent, Subtle Above All Beasts
- Strike the Waters and They Shall Become Blood
- A Darkness Which May be Felt
- The Quick Doth Bleed Before the Dead
- Behind Every Exquisite Thing, Something Tragic
- To Serve and to Rule
- Behold the Unholy Grail, and Despair
- And There Was Yet Morning
A little Biblical- and gothic-sounding, for moden-day Urban Fantasy, sure. But in a story where an ancient artifact first brought to Earth by a fallen-angel to tempt Judas, re-emerges today threatening to trigger the vampire Apocalypse, … you’re going to need some gothic. No two ways about it.
After Developmental Editing comes back, I may revise one or two, but you’re getting the taste.
The electric, rusty-nail, honeyed-milk taste, … pulsing, seventeen beats until the end.
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