How to write a chapter
A novel is a collection of chapters.
I know that this statement is pretty obvious, but it matters because a lot of people get hung up on the question of “how do I write a good novel?” when I think a better question is “how do I write a good chapter?”
Think of it from the point of view of building a car. Building a car is just assembling a series of components, and you need to assemble your engine before you put it into the car. You need to stitch together your seats before they go into the car.
Your novel is the car; the individual parts that make up your car, well those are your chapters.
Before we talk about writing a good novel, let’s talk about ways to effectively write chapters.
Planning your chapters
There are as many ways to plan out a chapter as there are authors trying to write novels. Everyone will have their own way of doing it, and while some people have similar ways of doing things, everyone is different. Some authors do almost no planning, others will plan everything down to what a character ate for breakfast.
In this article, I’ll go over five different considerations that can help you to produce a better chapter.
Chapter outlines
Chapter structure
The flow of time
Integration and function
We won’t be addressing specific technical elements (things like voice, verb tense, etc.) in this article because our main focus is to get to the writing stage.
Chapter outline
For me, I try to start writing my novel by putting together a rough outline of the story. I need to know where my character is starting and where they wind up at the end. Once I have that figured out, it’s just a question of getting them from point A to point B.
Cue cards are my go-to for this sort of activity and I can write down major plot points on the cards and arrange them in order to form my story. When I’m happy with the general story, I can put things into chapters.
Even if are a pantser, having a foundation that tells you what you are working with is a good idea. When you have a sense of what a chapter is going to be (a simple example might be something like “Chapter 1: Introduce the main character and their dilemma”) it’s time to start putting the chapter outline together. Here are things that I like to track in my outlines:
Who are the characters in the chapter?
What is the narrative purpose of the chapter?
What are the events of the chapter/what is accomplished?
When does the chapter occur relative to the rest of the story? (See the section below about the flow of time.)
“Even if are a pantser, having a foundation that tells you what you are working with is a good idea.”
Who are the characters in the chapter?
This is most important because it’ll let you keep track of two points in particular: the voice or tone of the chapter and what part of your story is moving forward.
Different characters may have a radically different impact on the overall flow of the story, and putting a very funny chapter immediately after a downer of a chapter might not be what you’re aiming for. This helps you to visualize your chapters. It can also help you spot if a character gets lost in the mix and you don’t revisit them in a dozen chapters.
What is the narrative purpose of the chapter?
This is also very important. What is the point of the events in the chapter? How do they matter and what influence do they have on the rest of the book?
“Protagonist meets antagonist and realizes who they’ve been facing” might be a major chapter that you know you need to really focus on, whereas “The hero has an introspective night drinking scotch and discovers something about themselves” might be something that you can leave in a rough state until much later.
Each chapter needs to serve a purpose. If it doesn’t have a good purpose, that’s a good indicator that you can probably take elements of that chapter and just fit them in elsewhere in the book.
What are the events of the chapter/what is accomplished?
While this might sound similar to the point above, it is different. The narrative purpose is the overall significance of a chapter. An example of this might be “Character and best friend have a falling out to isolate the protagonist”, but the events are more granular and real things. For example, the character and the friends have a falling out because the character “discovers that their friend has been stealing money from them”.
Where the narrative purpose is the significance to the story, the events are how that is communicated. Make sure that you have a sense of how you want to communicate those themes.
When does the chapter occur relative to the rest of the story?
This may not be relevant to all stories, but will be relevant to some.
Some stories aren’t really linear. In some cases, like Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, jumping backward and forward through time is part of the story.
Using some form of system to keep track of when your chapters occur chronologically might be very important. Something as simple as a colour-coding system might be sufficient. For example, let’s imagine a hypothetical novel where the main character controls time. A yellow highlight might be the normal flow of time, a pink highlight is when something is moving backward in time, and green might be when time stops.
More on the flow of time later in this article.
“Some stories aren’t really linear. In some cases, like Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, jumping backward and forward through time is part of the story.”
Chapter structure
When you’re getting ready to write a chapter, you want to have a pretty good understanding of who are the characters in the chapter. Also good to know are the setting and the primary conflict and reason for the events of the chapter. Knowing the cause and effect relationship of your chapters is very important to the overall flow of the story.
Consider the following:
Chapter 1 (A) of the book is the beginning of the journey. The last chapter (B) is the conclusion. Everything between them should serve to get you from A to B.
If any given chapter isn’t contributing directly (or even indirectly) to that goal, is it work keeping that chapter in the book? It might be worth thinking about either removing it or at least making changes to that it is more integrated into the story.
Planning a chapter
Think of your chapters as a micro version of a novel. They should have a beginning, middle and an end, and within each chapter there should be a “story” that needs to be told. To help you in accomplishing this, an easy tool to achieve this goal is to determine what your POV of the chapter is. It can also help to give your chapter a name (though these names don’t have to persist through to completion). Having a name can help you define the story of that chapter in your own mind and help you in the writing process.
The flow of time
As we noted above, this particular point might not be relevant to all stories. The progression of time in some stories is perfectly clear and linear. But not always.
The passage of time occurs at the chapter level, is the overall passage of time. How much time passes over the course of the chapter? If the chapter is happening concurrently to other events (typically events in other chapters), do those events take the same amount of time?
It can be jarring for two characters occupying the same amount of time doing radically different amounts of things.
For example, imagine a novel where both of these events occupy the same amount of time:
1. Person A: Has a cigarette.
2. Person B: Does the groceries, runs into an old friend at the store, and then drives home.
Both of these events occupying the same amount of time seems impossible and can pull your reader out of the story. Make sure that time flows properly through your book.
Make sure that the amount of time that events take are considered in both your chapter outline and in your novel outline.
Integration and Function
Here’s where we get a little more technical about chapter structure. There are two things that are very important to a chapter in the context of how a single chapter relates to the novel as a whole. We’re going to call these two points “integration” and “function”.
Integration
Chapters ideally fit together like puzzle pieces. Sometimes though, you might need to rotate pieces for them to lock into place correctly.
This is to say, you might have put a chapter in the wrong place.
If a piece of information can only be delivered after a certain event occurs, then this needs to be accounted for and you may need to change the order of the chapters to achieve this. It is very common for this sort of issue to pop up in first drafts, but it is also quite common for these points to be missed in the planning stage.
Taking a moment to go through the plot points one by one and making sure that they are in the correct order and integrated properly can save you a lot of headaches in the long run.
Don’t be afraid to move your chapters around to see if they work better in a different order.
Function
While integration deals with how chapters fit together in the greater structure of the novel, function deals with what the chapters specifically accomplish. As a few examples:
Character 1 needs to get from Point A to Point B, so a chapter might address traveling from Point A to B.
Character 2 needs to get a piece of information to advance the plot, so a chapter where they speak to a person in possession of that knowledge is needed.
Character 3 has been searching for a map to a secret tomb. After discovering the map, a chapter where they decipher the map and travel to the location might be useful.
Remember that, sometimes, specific events (even minor ones) can greatly affect how immersed a reader is your work.
Make sure that you’re keeping tabs on the logic running throughout the story as a whole. Sorting out these issues can help keep your chapters consistent and organized.
Writing a novel
Writing a chapter is like a microcosm of a novel in a lot of ways, but the writing of a novel has many more factors to keep in mind to function properly. We’ll be coming back and talking about how to write a novel in the near future.
Good luck writing your chapters.
