What makes a chapter

Okay, so you have a great opening and people are hooked. Expand your opening and begin to explain your points. This is where you are offering your reader the gold.

How will you solve their problem? What does the reader need to know? Keep the momentum going and make sure each point is cohesively building up. You can have as many points as you want. I personally like sharing three points within chapter topics just because there is so much to write about for each point. For each point, you can simply apply the same strategy just as you would starting a chapter.

Add a story, quote, stat, or some other kind of evidence. Remember when you had to write a five paragraph essay in school? Think about this in terms of your five paragraph essay. These are your body paragraphs in your chapter! This step is where a lot of writers can get sidetracked. Related: Writing Goals. The key takeaway. Keep this short and to the point.

For example, in my book, I summarized my chapter points by creating sentences on each point. Then, I combined each of those sentences together in order. How can you fix something without knowing its broken in the first place?

Begin writing daily in a journal. Track how you feel throughout the day without any judgment. A call-to-action CTA is when you ask the reader to take action by implementing what they have learned and applying their new knowledge in some way.

What do you want the reader to do now? If you want them to think, act, or do something, tell them so at the end of your chapter.

Transitioning your reader to the next chapter gets them excited to keep reading, and it fully closes the loop on the information they just read. You can easily add some transition words and craft a sentence that briefly covers what the next chapter will be about. Ages ago, writers had to write by candlelight with quills and ink. Now, it's as easy as whipping out your phone while w Every November, writers from around the world get together and work on cranking out an entire novel in a month.

Part of the fun of writing a book is simply the freedom that comes with it. You start with a blank sheet of paper and o Skip to content Tweet. Pin 9. Share Chapters can help you tighten your storytelling so that the readers stay on the edge of their seats. Is your eye twitching yet? I know that this question is controversial. While the average book has 12 chapters, many have twice that amount, or even triple.

The goal is to have as many chapters as you need to weave a taut tale. Remember that chapters are all about pacing. So, if you want to unfold your story quickly, you may use more. If you want to create a slow simmer, you may use less. On average, chapters range between words. Of course, there are one-page, word chapters, too.

And every other configuration imaginable. Your best bet in determining the sweet spot for chapter length is to conduct your research study. Check out top-selling books in your genre. This gives you a good indication of what the average reader in your genre expects from your novel. Then, follow your gut and write a chapter that makes sense for the way that you want to tell the story. But keep the following things in mind:. A scene happens when your characters interact with each other.

The scene does not mean scenery. In other words, a scene is not the same thing as the setting or the location where the action takes place. The scene is the action. Each scene has a beginning, middle, and end. A chapter, on the other hand, may contain one scene. Or it may contain multiple scenes. A chapter is not a scene. Rather, a chapter is a division in your book. Once again, no rules on this, but I believe that the most effective chapters begin with action.

The character is walking, talking, thinking, or doing something. The description slows the pace. Start with action. Add description.

Go back to action. Is there a taste in the air? Screenwriter Robert McKee also suggests that there should be a polarity shift in a scene: things need to go from good to bad, or bad to good. Not the boring bits! An action or thriller novel will often have shorter scenes to create a faster pace, whereas a romance or literary novel might have longer scenes to give characters time to muse over their feelings and readers time to sit with narrative threads and themes.

Key scenes like the inciting incident, climax or turning points might have longer scenes. These are usually packed with more action, and this will keep readers engaged. Each chapter, like each scene, is building on the conflict, tension or plot development in the previous chapter. The purpose of a chapter is to:. But our job as novelists is to convince readers that they should just keep reading! Begin and end chapters in a way that will hook readers back into the story experience.

This might mean starting or ending a chapter in a similar way to starting or ending a scene. For example:. Like a scene, you can also begin a chapter with a shift in time, location or point of view, or right in the middle of the action.

The important thing is that your chapter structure enhances your story and moves the novel forward, maintaining that always-vital reader engagement. Voice, story, structure, genre and style can all play a part in deciding how long each chapter should be. Can you try re-ordering your scenes, or taking sections out? Often, particularly for fledgling novelists, editors advise that chapters should be of a similar length, or at least follow some kind of clear pattern.

As you become more confident, purposefully varying chapter length here and there can help to increase tension and suspense. Others say that the length of a chapter should be under 2, words, which means it will likely take the adult-level reader ten minutes or less, in this modern age of short attention spans.

It allows you to separate out each scene, then group your scenes into chapters, with clear word count tallies. Shorter chapters are also usually favoured by younger readers or more action-orientated genres , and longer chapters are sometimes favoured by more introspective, literary works, or romance novels. Read widely in your genre to familiarise yourself with the most common chapter format, as well as creative alternatives.

The break ultimately leads them to stay engaged with your story, either through maintaining a quick pace, or slowing the pace down. Both have value. Your choice of chapter break might also depend on how much digestion time a reader needs.

Like with scene breaks, these are all stylistic choices and ultimately publishing decisions , rather than something you need to obsess over when organising your chapters.

By focussing on your scenes, you are more likely to build a novel where each moment advances the story and the plot. From there, creating engaging chapters becomes a lot easier! Some writers advise not to think about chapters until the end of your first or even second draft. There should be a cause-and-effect nature to your scenes, but also your chapters. Ultimately, the difference between scenes and chapters is that scenes are integral to the development of your plot, and chapters help you control pacing.

Samantha is a writer based in Sydney, Australia. Despite habitually exceeding the word limit throughout her academic life, she has collected a few degrees; most recently, her M. She is currently freelancing while working on a climate fiction fantasy novel for young adults, and preferred it when her writing was classified as dystopian escapism rather than current affairs.

Fantasy novels are well-known for including maps, more so It can be hard to sit down and start writing. Or maybe Skip to content The first piece of advice I received on this topic was from my Screenwriting teacher. What is a scene? Sounds easy, right? Writing never is.