A Few Tips On Writing Chapters

letswritesomenovels:

Give each chapter a descriptive title. 

Especially if you find yourself at sea when deciding how exactly to chop your story into pieces. Even if you don’t want to use chapter titles in your final draft, they’re of enormous use when you’re still figuring out exactly what the shape of your story is. By giving your chapter a descriptive title, you’re giving your chapter a focus and a particular story for your chapter to tell. 

Make sure each chapter has its own self contained narrative arc. 

This is not to say that every novel must be episodic, but that each section should have its own beginning, middle, and end. It should have set up, build up, and resolution. It should ask a question an implicit question at the beginning and provide a slightly more explicit answer at the end. 

Example: one chapter in my book is just 500 words. Two new characters drive into town, get out of a car, knock on a door, and they say their names. The beginning is the introduction of the mystery of these characters. It’s the question “who are these people?” As they drive, you see them and where they are going, which builds towards the answer. As a resolution, you get their names. 

You wouldn’t call this a “short story” by any means, but it does have a firm beginning, middle, end. It is a contained unit. 

A chapter break can–and sometimes should–come in the middle of a scene. 

Twists and cliffhangers can appear at the end of novels, so it would be silly to say you couldn’t end a chapter that way, too. Cliffhangers and twists are usually both a result of other plot points, and the cause of a new problem. Narratively, they function both as the ending of one thing and the beginning of another, so they make for great chapter breaks. Separating the scene at a cliffhanger is often better/cleaner than lumping the entire scene into one chapter. 

Example: Alex is warned to stay away from a dangerous cliff. Alex gets adventurous and wanders toward cliff. Alex falls off of cliff. Beginning. Middle. End. 

Alex is actually hanging from cliff! Alex figures out a way to get back to solid ground, struggles. Alex makes it back to solid ground. Beginning. Middle. End.

You want your readers to “just one more chapter!” their way through your book. Stuffing moments of high tension into the middle of chapters that resolve neatly won’t keep them turning pages.

Always end your chapters on a point of intrigue. 

Using points of tension to bookend chapters is important because chapter endings are usually where readers put a book down during a reading session. They’re very naturally places to close the cover and walk away. 

As a writer, you don’t want this. You absolutely don’t want to give your reader great places to put the book down, because you need them to pick the book up again as soon as possible. Not the next day, or the next week, (or never), but while they have a spare minute during their commute, or during their lunch break, or under their desk in class. 

You want to encourage this by taking that perfectly natural endpoint, that place they expect to be able to put the book down, and forcing them to take even a tiny peak at the next chapter. 

This doesn’t mean ending every chapter on a verifiable cliffhanger, but there has to be something. A character can solve a mystery. A new character can appear. There can be a moment of irony. A new idea. Just so long as it’s something that will make the reader think “I need to know what happens next.”