That chapter was short....

Do you think about chapter breaks in novel writing?

I didn’t until I saw this piece on Emma Darwin’s Itchy Bitesized blog and started thinking about what I do.

I write until I think there’s an end of chapter coming up - a point where the story line is about to change. Most scenes come to an end naturally when there is no more to say without repeating what you’ve already said. On the other hand, I have occasionally written a long scene that goes across more than one chapter.  I need not say that sometimes I love doing a cliffhanger ending to a chapter!

Usually I have (without looking to check, which is unwise!) a chapter containing two scenes, occasionally more. I prefer not to do this, but occasionally it just works that way. Of course, those scenes will be short.

There might be a change of location necessary, or I want to change the POV and if all the other things concur, then a new chapter is a simple way of achieving both those things.

In a long reading life, I would say chapters in general and particularly in genre fiction are now a lot shorter than they used to be. I can remember reading in bed at night (often under the covers) anxiously waiting for a chapter to end so I could switch off and go to sleep. For me, in my books, chapters average out at between three and four thousand words. When I first began a decade or so ago, they averaged about five thousand, but reading modern books has influenced me without my noticing the change.