Chapters

A scene is an isolated arc, and a chapter can either be one scene or a series of arcs.

Or: A jump in time or setting can lead to a chapter break

Or: When I've come full circle (and made my point) I put a chapter break to add more punch to the idea.

etc

To me, each chapter is a mini-story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end; no seriously. Each one moves the story in a certain direction and has it's own little arc, when I get to the end of it (sometimes in one paragraph, sometimes in twenty pages), I break for a chapter.

storygirl said:

To me, each chapter is a mini-story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end; no seriously. Each one moves the story in a certain direction and has it's own little arc, when I get to the end of it (sometimes in one paragraph, sometimes in twenty pages), I break for a chapter.

Click to expand...

Yes, to me, a chapter is the minimum recommended serving of a book. By that I mean, I try to structure my chapters so that by the end, the reader can put the book down and do something else. If the same scene is continuing at the beginning of the next chapter, I may leave a cliffhanger to make a reader want to stay and continue immediately. In general though, as a reader, I tend to read until I hit a chapter break (if I have the luxury).

To me, scenes are more important than chapters. You can move scenes around among chapters (or remove them entirely!) to play with chapter length and dramatic effect. Chopping scenes up is more difficult. Hone your scene skills and don't worry too much about chapter divisions until editing.

Not to dispute the value of your question: once you are editing, the posts here will have invaluable advice!

I'm lucky that it is easy for me to determine where to stop one chapter. The action is in Australia, England, Medieval England (and here there are serious scene changes when an attack occurs on the castle etc). In each case it would be strange for it not being a new chapter. So I don't have to think of make a decision which suits my personality perfectly.

There seems to be a trend toward shorter chapters. Perhaps it has something to do with the way people read nowdays.

Personally, I tend to look at mine and try to keep them within the same general length (1,600 - 2,100) words). My wife is currently reading a book in which the first chapter is 7 pages long and the second is 54 pages long. To me, that's too much of a variance and upsets the general continuity of the sory.

This is a structural question, and so it's something that you should be wrestle with at the same time you are dealing with other structural things like POV, and where exactly the story begins and ends.

In my current WIP, I have 4 rotating viewpoint characters, so the chapter breaks are easy -- they're where I change characters. But that kind of finesses the question, because the real decision came when I decided which parts of the story I wanted each character to tell.

The way I write, I like for each chapter to accomplish 3 specific things -- 1 that advances the plot, 1 that reveals something about the viewpoint character, and 1 that tells you something about the world/backstory. (I write fantasy, so revealing setting is very important; it may be less so in other genres.) If I can work some other stuff in too, that's even better, but those are the minimum. Then I structure the scene around that -- the actual action often ends up as a side effect of the forces set in motion by the setup.

As for length...the chapter should be long enough to do all that, and no longer. I honestly haven't even done a word count on it; I don't even conceive of it in terms of word length. It's all about *scenes*.

I went with shorter chapters-- they make for nice bite sized chunks. (I don't think it's so much of a 'now' attention-span thing, because when I look back at some of the chapters in the 1950s noir and hardboilded books that HardCase Crime is re-printing, those have short chapters, in short books.)

Most of my chapters are in the 1500-2000 range, with some getting up to 2500.

I prefer to torture the reader, though: I try to break at some moment that makes it hard to put down the book. Glass shattering, bullets flying, people dying, that sort of thing. Heh heh heh.

And to think, I *look* like a quite, bespectacled, nice person. >=)

Here's some advice from a former professor that has always stuck with me:

"A chapter should be like a lady's skirt. Long enough to cover the essential parts. Short enough to keep it interesting."

I'm one of those people that worries about chapter breaks during the rewrites.

To me it's a matter of a few things:

- flow.. how the scenes flow together and what makes them one logical unit

- plot... a chapter should have some kind of arc, if you will, or beginning-middle-end

- length... I tend to not like my chapters become too long

I don't think there's a science to it. You have to look at your own work and make that judgment. Sometimes my chapters are 1 page long, and sometimes they're 15 pages. But I use those three criteria and it becomes an intuition to me.

Also, if you look at my first novel, TPB, and the first half of the book -- every chapter seems to have some kind of conclusion, a nice unit of beginning-middle-end, if you will. It makes for a more leisurely pace. But in the second half of the book, the pace speeds up and I often ends the chapters with some kind of "cliffhanger." The result is that my readers found it harder to put down the book -- at the end of the chapter (which would be a good place to stop), they'd want to turn the page to find out what happened next. So that's definitely a good way to end a chapter, if that's what you want to accomplish (but still, even chapter should be a logical unit and collection of scenes).

Also, I don't worry about chapter breaks in first drafts.

I think it might help to think of the chapter for having a specific plot-related goal for being in the novel. Then the chapter can naturally end with a new problem or complication. I went through mine to see how they ended, and a lot of them were with a new problem or complication, with some also ending on a point of humor or a chilling point. Because of the story pacing, some are high action endings while other endings are more low-key.

Also, check out the books in your genre and see how the endings of the chapters work.

windyrdg said:

There seems to be a trend toward shorter chapters. Perhaps it has something to do with the way people read nowdays.

Personally, I tend to look at mine and try to keep them within the same general length (1,600 - 2,100) words). My wife is currently reading a book in which the first chapter is 7 pages long and the second is 54 pages long. To me, that's too much of a variance and upsets the general continuity of the sory.

Click to expand...

I agree.

I check the word count as well (between 1800 and 3200 words for me, so far in my WIP).
I have a outline which follow, but its not rare that I had to split a chapter that came too long or the material would require a different exposition, resulting in one extra chapter or one less.

In books I like chapters of between 8 and 15 printed pages.

Somehow I just know. It's like a sixth sense.

For me, I just intuit where the chapter breaks should be. There are no rules that I follow, it just seems natural to put a chapter break in where I put it. Sometimes I change the breaks, merge chapters by making scene breaks instead but that's usually during the editing/rewrite phase. In first draft, I just go with my gut.

I'm not terribly helpful here in that for me, like a few respondents above, it's something I don't really have to think about much, I just know where to end a chapter. There's a point where it just becomes obvious, like reaching a roadsign.

Then again, since I write mainly serials, most of my chapters end on cliffhanger notes and range between 20-30kb so that makes it kind of obvious where the chapter breaks have to be, too. "Hm, this chapter is now about 25kb and somebody looks ready to die. Guess it's time for a new chapter!"