A few among the book reviewers who read Revived were a bit puzzled by a feature of the book: there are no chapters. That’s right: scenes are broken by a simple space. This may seem strange at first, and it is perhaps a little unusual, but it isn’t exactly new: at least one (very famous) author did this before in one of their books. Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia is the story of the titular Italic princess, and just like Revived, the book totally lacks any sort of traditional chapter division: scene after scene flow without any sort of break. While I would never dare compare myself to such a master of writing, I cannot deny that Lavinia was, in part, the inspiration for the (lack of) organization of Revived: Le Guin’s work made me realize that such a thing was possible.
The specific reason I chose not to break Revived into chapters is that I consider it a “slice of life” book. Revived is about a person and what they do in their ordinary, zombifying-parasite-infested life, “life” being the keyword here. Lives aren’t broken into chapters: they flow, they crash, they stall, but they’re never broken. The books skips parts of Violet’s life, of course, for the same reason every book does it: we readers want the meaty bits, not the characters’ bathroom routines. However, the parts that are shown flow uninterrupted, with just a space between them to tell the reader that something else happened in-between; it just wasn’t important.
Does this make sense to you? I hope so. It did make sense for me, though, so I wrote my book that way. The beauty of being an indie author is that you can do whatever you want. However, if you disagree with me or have anything else to say, just leave a comment or send me an email and we’ll talk 🙂
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