Chapter Breaks Control The Pace
I started writing Warrior Song, the third in the Talmanor trilogy, during NaNoWriMo some years ago. Because of the speed at which you write during that challenge, I didn’t bother with such details as where my chapter breaks would be. I won’t say that was a mistake, since I got a large chunk of the book written, but going back and adding them in is harder than doing it in the first place. Those points in the story that will make page-turning, natural breaks don’t seem to be in the right places. The flow of the story suffers for it and will take a lot of tweaking to fix.
Chapter breaks do several things. They give the reader a sense of accomplishment, like mile markers when walking. They pause the story for an instant, building suspense. Finally, they pace the story.
How a story reads, fast or slow, has much to do with the chapter breaks. Action/adventure and thrillers, in particular, often have shorter chapters that leave a reader breathless. Your eyes feel like they’re running faster to keep up, or catch what happens next. The books themselves may be shorter also, but not always. The longer the work, the more you must pace the writing flow to accomplish what you need the story to do. If you have a 500 page novel with 10 page chapters and a constant breakneck pace, your poor readers will be exhausted when they’re done. With a shorter work, you can have the reader climb a hill and start running, faster and faster down the other side. In a longer work you want more of a roller coaster effect, with an increase in height or degree of turn as the book progresses. Towards the end, many books have the slightly shorter chapters of a faster pace.
Where the chapter breaks falls is at least as important as length. You want the tension building at the end of each chapter to keep the reader turning the pages. As annoying as it is to have a hard time finding a place to put a book down late at night, that’s exactly what you, as a writer, want. If the reader has to force themselves to lay it aside, you have accomplished a major goal. Part of that is having a good story, of course, but without the right pacing, even a good story can lag. You might think of the end chapter tension as the kinetic energy the roller coaster has built up by time it reaches the crest. You want that pause just as the story reaches that crest. The energy is high and it takes effort to hold it back – or put the book down.
This pacing wasn’t something I really had to think about in the earlier books. It seemed to come naturally, but I was writing those breaks as I went. It was intuitive to break the chapter at a point where there was a glimpse of where the story was going, or appeared to be going, just over the crest. You could see somewhere ahead, but still hidden from view were the turns or loops the story would take in the next pages to get there. Often, a story will take unexpected turns at the beginning of a chapter, leading to another build in tension. The reader is kept guessing as to just what is going to happen.
Even in formula romances, at least the good ones, you get the suspicion that the two people, who hate each other’s guts, are going to fall in love. What you don’t know is how the story is going to take you to that seemingly impossible place. The combination of strategic pauses and glimpses of a possible path ahead are what determines the pace and turns pages. This is all the more important in books where we have an idea where the main plot is going to end. If the end point is visible, the path to find it must not be. But that’s another post.
