Mastodawn

A client has me thinking about chapters.

Chapters can feel essayistic (coving a topic) or episodic (covering an event). Some writers care most about their length.

I consider their shape & how they make patterns & how the breaks influence a reader's experience.

They're kind of arbitrary like paragraphs--which is fun.

How do you think about chapters?

I used to agonize over chapters.

Break on the end of this scene so the reader understands the action ends?

Time passed so I need to tell the reader with a chapter heading?

After having written a few hundred of them, I break them when I feel like it.

I still look for time breaks which usually means a different activity happens.

I also try to balance them a bit just so the narrators get finished audio with breaks every 20-30 minutes.

Agonizing over something until it becomes muscle memory is a LOT of how this all works, right?

But I also like your thoughts about time breaks, activity breaks, and just... balance...

... narrators get finished audio with breaks every 20-30 minutes ...

Oh. Wow. Yeah. I'm going to do this now.