Most books are written in the format of chapters, where each chapter follows a piece of a stream of events. Chapters makes it significantly easier to digest a story, and it also gives you room to break when the scene is not necessary to keep writing. The passage of time is also typically done through the flow of chapters. It can feel a bit daunting to write chapters and try to decide what needs to happen and when to actually end the chapter. For today’s post, I’ll be covering how to write a great novel chapter and how to ensure you’re doing it the right way.
What is a Novel Chapter?
A chapter in a novel is basically just a piece of a story that is broken into a specific, identifiable chunk. Most chapters follow an event in a piece of the story and focus on something important happening that will draw the story along. Some chapters serve as fillers sometimes, where things may not necessarily be action-packed, but are important to understand for characterization purposes. Either way, a chapter tries to focus on things that are important to the overall story and keep readers engaged.
How to Write a Great Chapter in a Novel!
Get an Outline Going
I know that this method does help some people and it’s basically to start with an outline of your chapter. This is especially a big thing if you’re still a bit new to the writing process and chapters may not come naturally to you just yet. Trust me, the more you write, the easier the idea of writing a chapter gets to the point where you just start writing and know when to start/stop. Still, outlining or planning the major events of the chapter is something you can do even with tons of experience.
When you create a chapter outline, you want to identify the key points which are the main events, which characters are in it, and what’s going to happen before the end of the chapter. You want to line up the events to create a sort of mini-timeline for that chapter and then you want to add just some brief points of description such as the scene, what the conversations will be, etc…
If you’re writing a book with multiple character perspectives, you want to think about which character will be speaking in this particular chapter, even if the point of view is first or third person.
Create a Hook
I’ve talked about hooks before when it comes to the first page of your book, but in general, the beginning of a story, chapter, scene, etc… should be started with a hook. This is something that needs to pull your readers in and show them why they need to feel invested in this story.
You want to start with something strong that will make people curious. This could be a single word. A question. Something dramatic happening, or something of that nature.
For example, Chapter 2 of Soldat, Book 2 of my series, The Fallen Age Saga, starts with just one word: “Blood.”
The next sentence makes it clearer to the reader that Joel is running through an area where there’s a battle happening and that he’s panicked, covered in blood, and trying to save himself.
Work on the Characters in Your Chapter
Chapters can do a lot of good for your characters and reveal lots of information about their personalities as well as how they engage with the plot of the story. You want to build the development of your characters and you want to show how the character is as a person. Chapters help to reveal more info about the characters, not just important events that are happening in the world of the story.
Work on the Setting
Within your chapter, you don’t just need to work on the characters, but you also need to show the settings and create the world for the readers. You’ve worked hard on world building, so now it’s time to put that all onto your pages. You want to avoid the “white room” issue that some readers get when a scene is not described better. You want to use the senses to invoke feeling in the reader and you want to also integrate the things happening in the setting to the overall story that’s occurring on the page.
Focus the Pacing
Pacing is a very important part in keeping readers engaged with your chapters. Pacing is basically the speed at which your scene is progressing as well as how intense the scene is playing out to be. You can certainly start out slow with your chapters, but overtime you’ll need to speed things up, otherwise your readers will be bored.
You want to mix slow, descriptive scenes with action and intense moments. The variation in the two styles allows readers to get excited for what’s happening and get a sort of brief respite and break.
Chapters Should Serve the Plot
Chapters can be short and long and talk about anything you want, but at the end of the day, you need to ensure that somehow, the chapter serves the overall plot. This can be done through developing your characters, actually pushing the plot forward, exploring the themes of the story, or creating moments of hard-hitting action.
Overall, the chapters should have something important happening in them that, in the end, makes sense for the story and the plot. You can also throw in some foreshadowing to keep readers on the edge about what’s going to happen next.
Work on Dialogue in Your Chapters
Dialogue is a big part of a chapter, but a chapter doesn’t necessarily need to include dialogue. It could just be a character thinking about something or a chapter could be an event that will be integral to the rest of the story. However, dialogue is usually included at some point in a chapter.
Dialogue serves as an important way to reveal information about the characters, the plot, and the situation happening in the story. Writing realistic, natural dialogue is important and the words being said should feel realistic to your story, your characters, and the situation that they’re being placed in. If you want to learn more about writing realistic dialogue, check out this post.
Once you’re done writing the chapter, you basically just want to focus on editing, proofreading, adding your headers and other formatting things. Just focus on getting the chapter written down first and then worry about all the other stuff later.
Before you head on out, check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga, and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter to get updates on my book releases, WIPs, posts, and more!