It’s actually quite interesting to me how often I see this question posed in writing groups: how long should the chapters be?

While some readers love a long chapter, others short, and writers everything in between, ultimately, a chapter is generally at least a scene, and oftentimes will see a micro story within the overall novel. The fun thing with chapters though, is that you can play with cliffhanger endings that you can then pick up in a later chapter. It would torture your readers if you left a book that way, but it’s a technique commonly employed to keep readers turning pages, particularly in anything thriller-like.

Other writers will each give you their own answer of what a chapter is, but I like to start and end chapters with a particular theme or character goal in mind. That’s not to say that a goal will be achieved within that chapter, but the chapter in itself well focus on a particular topic within the plot. Sometimes it is a tiny little scene, while other times it is a much more sprawling endeavor, sometimes even from more than one point-of-view characters.

I will take this opportunity to point out that if you do choose to have multiple POV character scenes within one chapter, be sure to have a clear break in the text so that the reader can identify the break between one character and the next. If the paragraphs flow directly into one another, it confuses the transition between them.

Defining chapters is not always that cut and dry. Clearly. Sometimes, however, we have to accept that we might not know or have a clear idea of a chapter beginning or ending until later drafts when the story is clearer and more realized and developed.

A technique commonly employed is to simply break the early drafts into scenes, and then later those scenes can be organized accordingly into chapters at the writer’s discretion. Defining the beginning and ending of a scene is a lot more straightforward, as they are generally tied to a location and/or event within a specific character’s POV.

Dividing your “chapters” this way in the beginning makes it a lot easier to keep track of your work, and then reorganize later. I even go so far as to title each scene the core event of that scene. Obviously, those will change in the final draft, but for the writing process it is the easiest way to paraphrase the event of that scene so that I can find what I need to review easily.

Programs like Scrivener allow you to title your scenes as you wish, and then deselect whether or not they should appear in the finalized PDF. It takes a little fiddling to figure out the features, but well worth it. Scrivener also allows you to summarize the scene with a cue card view, enabling a deeper description of that scene’s events for quick review, as you easily arrange them into the preferred order with drag -and-drop.

Every writer you ask will give you a slightly different answer, but all of them will say that the most important thing is getting the story down. So, worry less about your chapters and your chapter length, and get the story out. So much changes through the revision process, so you have much bigger fish to fry.

The chapters will often define themselves as they become ready.