How to make a movie-style website gift worth sitting through

A chapter heading is a claim that something specific happened in it. Nine headings reading Beginnings, Growth, Distance, Forever and five more of the same are nine claims with nothing behind them, and the reader works that out by the second one.

So fill it before you name it. Write down the things that actually happened first — the lift that broke in June, the power cut, the wrong train, the bollard somebody reversed into at four miles an hour and then apologised to out loud — and then count how many chapters those add up to. It is usually four. It is almost never nine.

If you cannot write three sentences about what is inside a chapter, it is not a chapter. It is a title you liked the sound of.

Break where something changed, not on the calendar. January to March, April to June is a filing system with the months doing all the work, and months are not what anybody remembers.

The breaks that hold up are the ones you can name out loud: the week before the move and the week after it, the two months of going quiet and calling it work, the spring you both stopped making plans.

Four to six is the working range, and the reel takes six shots at most. Test each break by swapping two chapters over in your head. If the page reads the same in either order, you had one chapter and cut it in half to fill the shape.

Almost everybody reaches for the pun first. The Fault in Our Stairs. Eat, Pray, Argue. It buys one small breath of a laugh, and then the title has told the reader nothing, and the joke is about a film rather than about the two of you.

Flat beats clever nearly every time. The lift, June. Power cut. Wrong train. Sunday, four o’clock. Each one names a thing that happened, and the person reading already carries the whole story behind those three words, which is the only reason a title does any work.

The front of a reel shot takes twenty-eight characters, which is room for The lift, June and no room at all for a pun with a setup in it. The other test is whether one of you would say it out loud. Nobody has ever said Chapter Four: Growing Together. People do say the night of the power cut.

A deleted scene only works if you say why it came out. A card reading "the argument in the car park" with nothing on the back of it is another title pretending to be a chapter. On the back of that one: forty minutes, both certain, neither listening, and the part where I was the problem.

Pick three or four that are genuinely awkward. The airport in March that nobody thought to film. The flat you looked at near their office in January and mentioned to nobody. Then write the honest reason on the back of each one — four or five sentences fit there, which is more room than the reason usually needs.

At least one should cost you something. A whole set cut for pacing reads like commentary about editing. The scene you cut because it makes you look bad, and then put back in anyway, is the one that gets reread.

Credits arrive one line at a time with nothing else on the screen. Cold rice, once, in the dark gets a whole screen to itself, which four paragraphs saying the same thing would never get.

Build the list out of real jobs filled by the wrong people and objects. Catering: cold rice, once, in the dark. Transport: one wrong train. Continuity: none. Stunts: a mattress and seven flights of stairs. Grip: you, on the fifth landing, refusing to move. Twelve to fifteen short lines is plenty. By the fifteenth, the joke of Role: thing has been made twice already.

Then break the pattern once. After a dozen lines of Role: thing, a line with no colon in it lands like somebody switching the projector off and speaking in the dark. Put the sentence you have been avoiding there, and put nothing after it except your name.

Two or three minutes of real reading beats twenty. The format invites a running time, and a page built to feel like four hours needs four hours of things that actually happened behind it, which almost nobody has written down.

If it does run long, use the intermission properly. Telling them plainly that the second half is the part you find harder to say makes them sit down for it instead of reading on at the same speed.

Point at something outside the film as well. A countdown to the next date you are in the same room, gate number and all, takes the page out of the format and puts it back into the week they are having. If you use one, use a date that exists.

The first instinct is parody: the red logo, a row of fake show tiles, Top 10 in your household today. It is funny once, and then it is a page about a company.

It also ages badly. When the service redesigns its interface, and it will, the joke stops reading as a joke and starts reading as an old screenshot of something else.

Borrow the grammar rather than the branding. A title card, chapters, an intermission, credits — none of that belongs to anyone in particular. A page that looks handmade, all projector dust and splices that show, cannot be dated by another company’s design team.