Craft your chapters so that readers can’t put your book down!
As writers, we think of books as made up of scenes—but for the readers, they’re made up of chapters. The end of a chapter is the point most readers choose to end their reading for the day or night—to put that book down. Your goal is to keep that reader turning the page from one chapter to the next. To keep them engaged, wondering, enthralled, always asking, ‘What happens next?’
How a chapter is structured and how it starts and ends is the key to a story being unputdownable!
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[description] => “This seminar exceeded my expectations. Pamela Freeman knows her stuff. She is always entertaining and opens up a much deeper perspective to the course content. I will now go back through my work and look for action scenes that need more work.”
Karen Payne
So is there a formula for chapters?
Not exactly, because genres and stories vary widely. But there are basic principles you can follow to make your story grip the reader and to pull them through the story.
How do you start a chapter so that the reader is pulled straight into the story?
How do you end a chapter so that the reader has to start reading the next one?
And what are the rules?
- Is it one scene = one chapter?
- How many points of view can you have in a chapter?
- If you have more than one point of view, do you have to alternate chapters?
- How long should each chapter be?
- Does a chapter need a story arc?
- Readers are engaged from the first word of each chapter
- Chapter lengths and content match the overall story arc
- Readers move from one chapter to the next seamlessly
- Each chapter raises the narrative tension, and
- The end of each chapter prods the reader into reading the next one.
FOCUS ON improving your craft
Each of our popular FOCUS ON seminars explores an important aspect of the art of writing – in an accessible and efficient way. The session consists of a 1 hour expert presentation plus an additional 30 minute Q&A – designed to entertain, educate and inspire you to improve your craft.
“This gave me a better understanding of action scenes and how to enrich them on the page for my readers and not to write them just for my entertainment.”
Gail Killen
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