WriteWorld

The Arbitrary Nature of the Chapter

Anonymous asked: Do you have any advice for trying to extend the chapters in a WIP? My chapters always seem so short and full of dialogue, and I’ve given all the description/narration I possibly can for that moment.

We think we can help you here. As you’ll see, pretty much all of this is up to your discretion, but there is some advice I can give to guide you.

First, for the folks at home, let’s define WIP, because I had no idea what it meant myself.

WIP (n): “Work in progress”; an unfinished story, which could be anywhere from updating regularly to assumed scrapped.

Ah! Now that we’re on the same page, let’s examine the word chapter.

Chapter (n): A main division of a book, typically with a number or title.

The definition of a chapter is not one that holds much literary weight, which is a fact completely critical to your use of chapters. Chapters can be whatever you define as “main”. Besides, all of your work is divided into paragraphs and sentences, and who decides where those go with relative ease? You do. Chapters are hardly any different.

The use of chapters is just one more element of the work that you control. In fiction, you decide absolutely everything that happens, including the length of chapters. Literature is not regulated.

A chapter does not always mean a scene. Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men is a whopping 215,249 words and is divided into only ten chapters, which is honestly a little excruciating. Obviously, this book did not have ten scenes that ran at around 20,000 words each. You can have scenes closely follow each other and tie them together into one chapter. If you’re going to do that, you should be aware of the following:
You must move from one thing to the next organically. A character is not at the supermarket and then suddenly confronting his sister in her apartment across town. Your character somehow got from one place to the next, and it is your duty to explain that. You can use that time to introduce a symbol or flesh out a theme or ask an important question, like JD Salinger famously did in The Catcher in the Rye with the relocated ducks in the winter. Novels are full of cushioning material in between moments of action. They make the novel flow and turn it into a story, not a series of jerky but somehow connected events.
Know the size of your switch. The most effective way of shifting from one scene to the next without doing any work is to make a new chapter. If you do that all the time, however, your work appears disconnected just like if you only use simple sentences. There are plenty of “transitional words” (WriteWorld has created a list of transitional words and phrasesfor you) that you can use in small transitions. The key word is “small”. This does not work in large transitions. For example:

“I was having a bad day. First, I ran out of crackers. Then, my grandmother died.”

That is not an adequate way of representing the absolute horror of the death of this character’s grandmother (unless you’re going for black humor). It ruins any sensitivity that your character has as well as demonstrates his or her unprecedented affinity for crackers and/or a great indifference towards his or her grandmother. If that’s what you’re trying to show in your character, by all means, use “then”. If not, try something much larger and drawn out. If you still want the shock value of this person’s death, you can arrange your character hearing the news via phone call, or dropping by her apartment and finding her on the floor. Remember, you’re running the show, you can put the characters where you need them.
Look to your genre. Pull your favorite books from the genre that you’re writing off of the shelf. How long are the chapters? Chapters tend to run longer in Fantasy and shorter in Young Adult and Thrillers. What about other genres? As in all cases, the writers you admire are great resources for demonstrations of how you should consider structuring your writing. Not sure what your genre is? WriteWorld has a list of genres for your perusal.
Know when to end. You know when you say to yourself as a reader, “At the end of this chapter I’m going to do the laundry”? And you know when you get to the end of the chapter you think to yourself, “To hell with the laundry, I MUST know what happens next”? Well, writers love it when the laundry gets neglected in favor of the next chapter. That means that you’re completely invested in the story and the characters. End your chapter in a way that gets people excited about what’s coming next.

The chapter should end right at the crucial moment. it is good to have each chapter finish with a question that will not be answered until a following chapter… Chapters that split the action and end at a crucial point are called “cliffhangers.” (x)

The cliffhanger is a great way to end a chapter. Sometimes, however, in lower stress situations (especially near the beginning of the story), the chapter gets too long and the scene is over. Cut it there without a cliffhanger. No harm done.

At the end of the day, it’s all up to you. You’re the storyteller. You invented all of this, so you might as well invent how the story is divided up. If you need things to flow more organically, move some scenes around. Although it’s all fake, it should (unless this is pivotal to your premise) feel somewhat natural so you don’t lose your readers along the way.