What Writers Need to Know about CHAPTERS 

I was so glad you mentioned chapterization as something that seems to work better in late drafts than in early drafts. I could not agree more. Chapters are not the building blocks of story, scenes are. And scenes will be as long as they need to be. So I think the best thing to do is concentrate on scene structure from the beginning, and leave chapter structure for later. Fretting about how to break things into chapters early on only adds to the confusion. Writing is difficult enough already. Unlike scene structure, chapter breaks are arbitrary. That's an artistic decision left up to the author, while scenes sort of define their own length as you write them. My recommendation would be to keep a lookout for logical places for a chapter break during early drafting, and if you see one, make a note or add a comment (which will be invisible during compiling if you are using something like Scrivener). Get the scene structure done first. Get the story written. The current novels I'm working on total about 830,000 words. I try not to have a lot of variance in chapter length, but of course that is driven more by how the scenes play out than it is by simple math. My chapters were averaging about 2,650, and were beginning to feel as if they might be a little too long. So I did an experiment and restructured a particular sequence of 19 chapters to an average of 2,200 words, this without really changing the content in any significant way. Since the content remained the same, this means the pace remained the same. But what was surprising, nearly astonishing, is the perceived pace is now much quicker. It seemed like such an improvement that I rechapterized everything to average 2,200, and I think it made a significant improvement. Perception always trumps reality. I think it also makes things easier to read. Upon finishing a chapter, a reader pulls out slightly from the fictive dream, just for a few seconds, to the 10,000 foot level view. They think, possibly unconsciously, about what's happened recently in the story and try to make a sort of global sense of it. If enough things have happened in a chapter, they get a feeling of having a satisfying chunk of story, and if not enough things have happened, they don't. If too many things have happened, making global sense of the chapter is just that much more difficult. And within a few seconds, they dive back into the fictive dream, confident, hopefully, that they're following the story. I intended to just number my chapters. but I gave them placeholder titles so that I could keep track of them a little better, thinking I would remove those titles at some point. I just took a few words that were the most significant moment from a chapter and used them as a title. Then I realized when I read the TOC, that these titles really were kind of fun. That they might actually be perceived as intriguing by a reader. So I decided to use this as a tool. Now, all my chapters have numbers and titles. Each title is like a little hook. Each title foreshadows what's going to happen in that chapter just a tiny bit.

I love one-word chapter titles.

Hello there, hope you're well and safe. I'm new to your channel and this is the second video I've watched. Thank you so much for these helpful tips. Although, I couldn't help but get distracted when you mentioned the character's name as Feryan. I don't know how you spell his name but I just wanted to tell you that this is why I was distracted; I have a character called Feryan (again I don't know how you spell it) too! Except I spell his name like this: Fearian. It's interesting to discover someone else who has a name that is identical to mine. It does sound identical but I'm not sure if it's spelt the same way I do. How did you come up with the name? 😄

Thanks so much!! Your energy is infectious as I teach less and write more!❤