Five Components of Successful Chapters
An interesting structure tool I've been playing with
What’s new in my writing room: My latest novel, Last Bets, was selected in December for Kirkus Reviews' Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year! Kirkus reviews thousands of indie books, and less than 1% receive a coveted starred review (which mine did). Of those, only 100 are selected across all genres for the “Best of” list. Kirkus is (to many) the Michelin Guide to industry book reviews. A star is like a Michelin three star award. A Best of is way beyond! I’m humbled, stunned, delighted. Grateful to all who helped me get here.
In my view, chapters have a single purpose: to keep the reader engaged enough to transition to the next chapter without a pause.
Chapters are artificial components of a story. We writers play with their length, what happens in their pages, what we begin and end with. Many of us don’t know, really, about what makes a chapter successful. We make intuitive decisions about chapter size and where to begin and end. But I’ve gathered a few loose “rules” along the way, that make my chapters work better.
The goal of a chapter is to keep the reader reading—right? We want the reader to turn to the next chapter immediately. To keep going on the train.
Your opening line/paragraph
The start of the train is your opening line or paragraph. In a book, every chapter is a car on the train, each hooked to the one before and the one after. Chapters don’t exist without what’s before and after.
Yes, a chapter is a tiny world in itself, where things change and we readers learn more about the main quest or question of your story. But they are always connected to the rest of the train.
How you end one chapter and open the next lets the reader know we’re still on the same train (the same story). It also lets us feel connected to what we’ve just read and what we will read in the chapter that follows.
I study the opening line and paragraph of my chapters and ask these questions:
How does this connect my reader to the chapter before?
Does the opener hint at a question or a quest?
It’s fine to use the opening lines and paragraph to set your scene, but that gets boring every time (you wouldn’t believe how many newer writers find this groove and repeat it every single chapter opening!).
Consider, instead, how you might present a dilemma. Start some momentum for the chapter.
How does this opener carry the reader forward into whatever the chapter's main action will be?
It might be as complex as someone wakes up that morning and discovers their mate is not in bed or in the house. Or an invitation comes. Or the doctor calls with news. Or a meeting begins, someone leaves, someone arrives.
As you open your chapter, you’re also reflecting on whatever will change, in future chapters, with the false beliefs the narrator holds and will come to face. I call these “false agreements.” Such as, “The world is out to get me,” “I’ll never find love,” “There is no kindness anymore,” etc. Stories prove false beliefs as incomplete truths, often long held.
Does the chapter opening hint at any conflict to come? Do we wonder if the quest will succeed? What else might happen (or go wrong)?
So we read on to find out.
Screenwriting guru Syd Fields is credited with the maxim, “Enter late, exit early,” as a guidelines for writing scenes for film. It’s a good mantra for all writers, because it tells you everything you need for beginning (and ending) your chapter.
Your acceleration
A second element of successful chapters is momentum or acceleration. Think of chapters as capsules of change. Something shifts during those pages.
Either the character’s or narrator’s understanding of a situation or another person moves in some way, forwards or backwards. After the opening setup, usually within a page or less, there's some acceleration of the quest or question presented in the opening.
Ask yourself:
Do things do get more complicated?
Why? Because it gives the chapter momentum. As I said before, your reader keeps reading to find out what resolves or gets worse.
Ask yourself:
Do you pause the acceleration to deliver lengthy backstory or information?
Some is OK, but be cautious about more than a few lines or paragraphs. It'll drop the tension you've created with the opening setup.
As an editor, when I review manuscripts that offer pages of backstory, I know the chapter is not successfully structured. As a reader, I often skip or put the book down just there.
Your dramatized action
Ideally, the acceleration leads to a specific moment of time in a specific place, not summarized but dramatized fully onstage in front of the reader.
Ask yourself:
Is there is a sequence of moments, linked to build tension, one to the next?
Within a chapter, these moments need to be related, dramatized to keep your story’s tension level. If the moments of action are not related, the reader pauses and disconnects to think about why. Which, of course, drops both engagement and tension.
Ask yourself:
Is each moment of action delivering a different purpose?
Otherwise, we readers feel we're hearing the same thing again and again.
Your window of truth
In so many books I explored for this series of questions/steps, I felt it was almost a requirement for chapters to have what I call it a "window of truth."
You can also consider it a dismantling of whatever belief or false agreement that starts the chapter.
Say the false agreement is that a broken mental health care system is intact. The window of truth might be the moment when the narrator realizes that's not true--they see the brokenness. Maybe they reject that realization, but as readers we notice the inner shift. Or maybe that moment moves the narrator to a new decision or action.
It's not much, sometimes. It's potent, often.
In many chapters, it’s placed towards the end, after we've experienced full dramatization of the question or quest.
Your ending
I paid a good amount of money for my MFA degree, and it earned itself back with one advisor, at the end of my two years, who told me how to end my chapters. “End early,” she said, “while things are still hot and bothered. Don’t wrap things up.” She was echoing that mantra from Syd Fields mentioned above: “Enter late, exit early.”
In other words, each chapter must lead to the next chapter. You don’t want the reader to stop, feel finished, put the book away. Leave something unresolved from the opening setup OR hint at a new dilemma, quest, or question, so we’ll start reading the next chapter.
This was a great piece of wisdom, and it showed me so simply where to end the chapters. I stop when things are still unresolved.
I often craft the closing setup at revision. This kind of transition is often hard to see when you're just drafting. After the whole-book structure is intact, and your chapters built successfully, it's easy to go back in and tweak the end of each chapter to include a closing setup line or paragraph.
Hint: the closing setup often loops back to the false agreement. Not always, but often. It can fully re-embrace the false agreement, solidifying it even more.
Your weekly writing exercise
Check out the screenwriter’s view of opening and exiting in this article. Then locate a troublesome chapter draft of your own. Go through the questions above and see if you find areas to revise.
Share your thoughts!
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I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.
I’m also the author of 15 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
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