From the Archive: Sentences, Paragraphs, Chapters
"How long should a chapter be? And how do you know when to start a new one?"
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is a reader-supported newsletter providing advice and support for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. If you know someone this applies to, you can forward them this email and encourage them to sign up. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response.
News!
My debut novel Greenwich will be out July 22!
Adrienne Brodeur called it “A stunning debut…Fast-paced, beautifully written, vividly peopled… impossible to put down.”
Publisher’s Weekly says it’s “[An] insightful debut…Fans of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere ought to take note” and included it as one of their “buzz books” for summer 2025.
Pre-ordering early is the best way to support a novel and help get Greenwich into stores and in front of other readers! Order now and it will ship to you on release day.
“Care and Feeding” is out in The Rumpus
“Good Dead Girls” is out in No Tokens
And two more pieces are forthcoming — a short story in The Brooklyn Review, and an essay in Bellevue Literary Review.
I’m traveling to see family, so here’s a post from a year ago on craft that’s as relevant today as it was last May. How are you building your units of thought through sentences, paragraphs, and chapters? If you read this post last year, has anything changed in your writing since then? If you’re coming to this post for the first time, does it spark anything you can use in your current work in progress?
Happy writing to all!
Dear Kate,
I have an Ask an Author question: how long should a chapter be? And how do you know when to start a new one?
- (un)Divided
Dear (un)Divided,
This is a great question and it immediately makes me think of two others: How do you know when a sentence ends? Or a paragraph?
All of these building blocks—sentences, paragraphs, and chapters—express units of thought. I suspect you have a sense, when you’re writing or speaking or thinking, of where you want a sentence to end and a new one to begin. It feels so intuitive that it’s somewhat weird to stop and really think about it! There are lots of ways you can play with sentence length and sentence structure in your writing, varying the sound and pacing and musicality of the thought so that the reader stays engaged in the flow of your words as you carry them through the sentence. It depends on the context, the moment in the story, and what you, the author, are trying to get across. Think of yourself as a master manipulator (muahahaha), using not just words themselves but the pacing and structure of language to impact the reader’s experience.
The same strategies apply to paragraph breaks. The paragraph is also a unit of thought—larger than a sentence, but not as large as a chapter (usually), and not (usually) a full scene or moment on its own. Yet a paragraph has a similar structure to a chapter, with a break that’s larger than the period that ends a sentence, but not as large as a chapter break (or a section break within a chapter). It’s a minute pause that gives the reader an almost subconscious breath of air. It can signal a slight turn in a moment, a shift that draws some kind of attention. Often, a paragraph begins a new thought or idea in the story, or someone doing something slightly different than what they were doing/thinking/saying/feeling/ in the moment before. Of course, sometimes the paragraph subverts those expectations and continues when you might expect the pause to come. This, again, comes down to the author’s choices. There’s no formula to “this is when to end a sentence” or “this is when to end a paragraph.” You probably know that, right? The same thing applies to chapters. It really comes down to how in control you are of the choices you’re making, and how, with time and practice, you can start to better see why you’re doing what you’re doing, and then keep doing it cleaner, tighter, stronger, and more effectively.
You’ve asked about dividing chapters, not sentences or paragraphs, but sentences and paragraphs are the building blocks of chapters so it’s worth taking this step back and seeing how you’re making choices all over the place, long before you get to the point of deciding where you break a chapter. Better understanding and controlling your pacing within the scene will help you become more conscious of when, why, and how you’re dividing your scenes when it comes to larger breaks in the text. You’re already considering divisions and units of thought in your writing, long before you get to the question of chapters. The underlying concept is largely the same: what is the thought you’re expressing? What is the unit of sense that you want to convey?
But you’ve asked about chapters, so let’s talk about chapters. A chapter is a unit of thought. It’s like a bundle you’re giving the reader. It should feel complete enough to stand on its own, and yet the end of one chapter should also launch the reader into the start of the next. Think of the reader saying “One more chapter and then I’ll go to bed.” And then turning the page because they’ve reached the end of that chapter and still don’t want to stop.
A unit of thought can be a scene. (Oh no, now we have to think about what a scene is!) A scene has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and something that moves or changes from start to finish. It’s a sequence in which something happens. That something can be large or small, action or dialogue, internal or external, long or short. A chapter can consist of one scene or multiple scenes.
There are two ways to approach a chapter break:
Complete the unit of thought —> chapter break —> move on to the next unit
Subvert the expectation of completion —> chapter break —> pick up somewhere that continues this subversion
Another way to think of this:
Change chapters when you change major scenes
Intentionally break the expectation that new scene = new chapter
If you know poetry, think of this as an enjambed line versus an end-stopped line. In an end-stop line, the line ends where the thought or sentence naturally ends; you could put punctuation there and it would fit. Enjambment is like a run-on, where the syntactic unit runs into the next line, breaking the expectation that the end of a line equals the end of the sentence, clause, or phrase. A chapter can be end-stopped: this is the end of the scene, now we pause and move onto the next. Or a chapter can be enjambed: we aren’t done yet, and we’re pushing the scene into the next chapter to keep the reader on their toes.
A chapter break can increase tension by compelling the reader to keep turning pages and getting into the next unit of thought. But any pause naturally deflates tension, too, because it gives the reader a chance to come up for air. So you can’t just end a chapter every time you want something dramatic to happen! You have to make sure you’re earning the pause, and that it feels necessary and essential to the flow of the story.
Within that pause, there generally needs to be some kind of movement that happens during the blank space on the page. In other words, if you’re just like, gee this dialogue has been going on a while, better end the chapter—it makes no sense to have the next chapter pick right up in the middle of the same conversation. Rather than injecting tension into the narrative, the break deflates everything you’ve been building. The reader has an expectation that a chapter break will *do* something in the story—move us somewhere else, add something different, give us a pause or a shift for a reason. If no change comes, then we’re left feeling blah about it, because we anticipated something we didn't get.
Likewise, ending a chapter on a cliffhanger can amplify tension by leaving the reader in suspense. But if every. single. chapter. ends that way, it can start to lose its punch. Sometimes a subtler ending is even more tense, because it pulls back and offers something unexpected. Sometimes subtle is too subtle and you need to give more oomph. Variety is your friend here! In all cases, a cliffhanger only works if the book can deliver what it promised. If you give a cliffhanger that goes nowhere, you break the relationship with the reader in which the reader trusts the book to give them something. A cliffhanger, or a chapter break, is no substitute for something actually happening in a story. (In fact, the more you’re able to build tension and hold the reader’s attention, the less you’ll need flashy moves to signal *hey I have a story here, keep reading!*)
Strategies for revision:
Play with your chapter breaks and see how your book reads when you change up where you put them. If it’s weird and not working, can you pinpoint what doesn’t work about the change? Recognizing where you don’t need a chapter break can go a long way towards showing you where you do need one, because you can see the difference between scenes and moments that belong linked together, and ones that benefit from a separation. (You can do the same exercise with paragraphs, too, and see where and why you need those breaks and where and why you don’t!)
Sometimes chapters start sooner than they need to, and drag on just a bit too long. Go through and see what happens if you cut the beginnings and ends of your existing chapters, so that we arrive a little late to the party and leave a little sooner. Does that eliminate vital info we need as readers? Or does it help up your pacing and make the story snappier and more compelling?
Read other books and pay attention to their chapter breaks! Read James Patterson, and then read Faulkner. What are their chapters doing, and why? The more you start to notice the choices other authors are making, the more you’ll be able to read your own work with the same attentive eye.
Outline! An outline won’t automatically signal where your chapter breaks belong, but seeing your story laid out scene by scene can help you develop a deeper understanding of those essential blocks, and give you a sense of how they fit together and where the breaks belong.
Reverse outline! Outline what you’ve already written and see how your units of thoughts stack up. A very long chapter can signal a very long thought. A very short chapter can signal a short thought. Chapters don't all have to be the same length, and I hope it’s clear by now why not! That would be like saying all your sentences have to be the same length, or all your paragraphs. Of course not! But if you have something that stands out because it doesn’t quite fit with the rest of your manuscript, see if your pacing would benefit from breaking up a long unit of thought, or from filling out a short unit that might signal something underdeveloped.
Note that I’m NOT saying “A chapter should be X number of words long.” Sorry! The answer is never going to be that simple! I can’t say that you should break a chapter after 5,000 words or whatever, because I have no idea what’s happening 5,000 words into YOUR scene in YOUR book. There’s nothing wrong with trying new drafts and playing with when you put in chapters. Sometimes the best teacher is finding what doesn’t work, and using those “mistakes” to lead you in the right direction. Keep dividing, (un)Divided, and keep writing!
Kate
My favorite chapter for length is in "Through the Looking Glass," and reads "...and it really *was* a kitten,after all."