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Where to Put Chapter Breaks

June 30, 20237 Comments
Where to Put Chapter Breaks

There’s no shortage of advice for indie authors these days. If you’re thinking of self-publishing a book, there are scores of professionals who stand ready to offer you tips on everything from cover design to pricing to social media advertising.

This abundance of free expertise isn’t just limited to marketing questions, either. There are so many writing resources available just a few clicks away that right now is arguably the best time in history to learn how to be a writer.

I certainly benefited from the wealth of information that the internet has placed at my fingertips. But one skill of the writer’s craft that a lot of sources are oddly silent on is the subject of chapters. You’ve got a book. According to established convention, it needs to be divided into chapters. How do you proceed?

Here I’ll share the bits of advice regarding chapters that I’ve learned from other pros, along with what my own experience has taught me. The following mainly applies to novel-length works of fiction.

What chapters are for

Like every part of a book, chapters shouldn’t be simply ornamental (even a book’s ornamentation serves a purpose). Everything you put into a book has to pull its own weight. Here are some of the jobs that chapters do.

  • Give the book an internal structure or “skeleton” to hang the story on
  • Help to organize the writer’s ideas
  • Aid in setting the story’s pacing
  • Serve as guides for interweaving plots and subplots
  • Provide readers with points of reference to mark progress and remind them where to start/stop reading.
As you can see from this partial list, chapters play a vital role in the structure and pacing of a book. You would think that creative writing teachers would have more to say about them.
Personally, I think that most authors and readers take chapter organization for granted. Unlike dialogue, grammar, and even punctuation, poor chapter placement is usually misidentified as other problems; and good use of chapters is often overlooked.
Don’t make the same mistake. Be intentional with your chapter divisions!
Approaches to Chapter Organization
Like every aspect of writing, there are many schools of thought when it comes to organizing stories by chapter. Some books–mostly older ones–have long chapters that can go on for dozens of pages. Contemporary writers tend to favor short segments of only a few pages between chapter breaks. At least one newpub author has a book with no chapters at all.
While omitting chapter breaks entirely can be clever and effective in the right kind of high-tension story (it pretty much forces people to keep reading), I advise new authors against trying it their first time out.
My preferred approach to deciding where a given chapter should begin and end goes like this:
  • Stay on the shorter side. Few people these days have the time or attention span to curl up with a book. Most will be reading your novel on their phones during the train ride to work or for a few minutes at lunch. I try to keep my chapters to 5 pages; 10 pages max (though no one’s perfect).
  • Each chapter should be a self-contained movement of the story. A good rule of thumb is to have each chapter contain a complete sequence of events that take place in a specific setting at a particular time. In other words, one scene per chapter.
  • As much as possible, limit your chapters to advancing one plot or subplot each. This is one rule that I break a lot, so I can’t blame anyone else for doing it too. Just make sure your decision to cut between scenes within a single chapter does some greater service to the story.
  • If your book has multiple plots/subplots, it’s a good idea to alternate between them every chapter. Advancing plot A in chapter 1, plot B in chapter 2, and plot C in chapter 3 before getting back to plot A in chapter 4 gives readers variety and evens out the pacing. Bonus points for ending sections of plot advancement with cliffhangers that audiences have to read 2-3 more chapters to see resolved.
  •  Start and end each chapter as close to the action as possible. This is the famous “in late, out early” rule, and there are few better cures for bad pacing. If this chapter features a shootout at a warehouse, don’t bother writing the scene where the characters drive there. Similarly, skip the mundane details of the immediate aftermath; or save them for later.
Methodology
There are three basic methods for dividing books into chapters.

You can put in the chapters breaks during the process of drafting. Inserting chapters as you go saves time up front, but it can lead to headaches later if you need to rearrange material while making revisions.

Some authors write the whole draft from start to finish and then go back to put in chapter breaks. It takes a little more time, but you get the most flexibility this way.

At least one author I know composes each chapter as a separate document and strings them all together at the end. This is an interesting approach that I only became aware of within the last few years. The main advantage of this method is that it makes editing really, really easy.

I mainly use the first method, but I tried option three for an earlier draft of my Dragon Award winner Souldancer.

Chapter Layout
In a standard, double-spaced manuscript, start each chapter with the chapter number positioned two spaces down (a single hard return) from the top of the page. The first line of text begins two spaces down from the chapter heading. It should be indented an extra half-inch, just like the first line of every paragraph in your manuscript.

If you want to add a professional touch, and ingratiate yourself to your editor, create a custom Chapter Heading style. Set the font size to 18, center it, and set the spacing above and below the line to 60 pt (0.83″) each. That’s it.

You could get cute and give each chapter a title or include a quote in the heading. I just use nice, clean numbers.

Now you know everything that I know about chapters. Go forth and use this knowledge to tell great stories even better.

You can see my chapter writing skills for yourself in my horror-adventure novel Nethereal:

Nethereal
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Last updated on June 30, 2023

7 Comments

  1. Zaklog the Great
    July 1, 2023,

    Scott Sigler’s Infected has what I called Lay’s potato chip chapters. They’re fairly short; they reliably ended on cliff-hangers; and they alternated between distinct characters/sub-plots. All put together, the reader always ends up thinking, Yeah, I could do just one more chapter.

  2. The Lizard King
    July 2, 2023,

    Comparing your suggested approach to what I’ve written myself. I’d say that I fulfill point 3 well enough. The first act of my story has the main character on a pilgrimage with her family, with each chapter marking a milestone on that journey being reached and with the last 3 chapters each representing the first 4 days spent at their destination until the first major plot point happens.

    My biggest failure would be with pacing. I know every modern book needs a break-neck pace, but between needing to set-up future events, not wanting to trivialize my character traveling 200 miles, my style of writing, and not much action happening in the first act. All my chapters so far are a little longer and slower than they perhaps should be.

  3. Zaklog the Great
    July 5, 2023,

    I realize I’m asking for a bit of a giveaway here, but would you mind telling me what you think of something I’m working on?

    I’m posting it in progress (which I realize is liable to create certain problems) so I’ll stay motivated to keep moving on it.

    I have more, but this is the public story so far: https://zaklog.wordpress.com

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