Five Components of Successful Chapters

Free-flow writing and intuitive decisions about chapter size and where to break are great when you're drafting or just beginning to revise. Using the intuitive side of our creative selves keeps the left brain from smothering the subtler levels of story as they emerge.

That’s fine for drafting. When I begin to revise, I can get lost in the mass of words and options. What’s the best place to stop this chapter and begin the next one? Is there a template, a system, a checklist to help me see if I’m on the right track?

My two cents: the go by how it feels mode works well when drafting. When you’re refining your chapters, there are some cool components to consider, ones that make chapters successful, at least to me.

How you open your chapter

Ask yourself: Does the chapter open with a question or a quest?

Rather than using the opening page to set a scene, consider if you can present a dilemma. It starts the momentum for the chapter, it carries 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 the belief or false agreement the narrator is working with. If the chapter presents a successful opening setup, a hint of conflict is also presented: Will the quest succeed? What else might happen (or go wrong)? So we read on to find out.

Do you accelerate?

Chapters are 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 more.

Many writers pause to deliver lengthy backstory or information here. 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.

Is the action dramatized?

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.

Maybe there is a sequence of moments, and they link or build in tension, one to the next. Within a chapter, they are not unrelated or similar in tension level--that also drops the tension of the chapter and the reader feels we're hearing the same thing again and again.

Is there a 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.

How to close the chapter

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.”

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

Find one of your troublesome chapters. Go through the questions above and see if you see areas to revise. Share your thoughts!