Chapter breaks

I'm thinking a lot about chapter breaks today, since I've been reworking them in my novel-in-progress.

Ideally I want to end a chapter on a cliffhanger, but a chapter also needs to have a feeling of completeness--the way a paragraph does, the way a scene does. There's a reason that certain scenes are grouped together to form a chapter. And so I hunt for those spots where I have both completeness (such as, when I'm about to shift to a new place or focus on a different character or subplot) and suspense (ending on a question, or a foreshadowing, or when something unexpected has just happened).

My last editor was very good at pointing out less-than-stellar chapter endings, and asking me to do more with them.

For this book, I'm realizing I want shorter chapters--I love short chapters anyway, as both a reader and a writer--and I now have many more chapters than I did yesterday.

We'll see if this work holds up tomorrow. That's the thing about revising: I usually can't tell if something works until I've stepped away from it and come back to it.