Asked by: Missy Brown

When would you use a chapter break?

Chapter breaks signify to the reader that you’re ending one scene and beginning another. They can help point-of-view switches and flashbacks feel less jarring to the reading experience and can help build excitement and suspense.

How do you indicate a break in a chapter?

For scene breaks within a chapter, insert one line with three asterisks centered. Don’t use underlines or boldface anywhere in the text of your story. Use italics sparingly.

What are chapter breaks called?

Many books, however, only have chapter headings in the table of contents. While a chapter may be divided by section breaks, a group of chapters is conventionally called a “part”, often identified with a Roman numeral, e.g. “Part II”. Reference material may be divided into sections.

How many scene breaks in a chapter?

Chapters can be long or short

Each of your chapters can have only one scene or multiple scenes. There are no rules you have to follow except for what makes logical sense for your story. You’ll probably want to stay away from having lots of very short chapters unless your story takes many dramatic twists and turns.

How many chapters should a novel have?

As a general rule, novels between 70,000 and 90,000 words will probably have anywhere between 15 and 25 chapters. But in the end, the number of chapters in your book should be secondary to your story.

How many pages should a chapter be?

There are no rules when it comes to chapter length. The important thing is to concentrate on making your chapters fit your story, not on making your story fit your chapters. Many novelists these days prefer chapters that are between 1,500 words—or six book pages— and 8,000 words, or 32 book pages.

Are scene breaks necessary?

Unless a story takes place within a concentrated amount of time—a day or a few hours—there will naturally need to be breaks in the timeline. Apart from using a chapter break to accomplish this, a scene break is a great tool to skip over blocks of time.

What does a scene break look like?

A scene break is when you hit enter (or return) three times, in a double-spaced document, leaving two blank lines between one section of text and the next section of text.

How many scenes is too many for a chapter?

The Scenes per Chapter insight in Fictionary shows the minimum number of scenes in a chapter is 1, and the maximum number of scenes in a chapter is 24. That’s a big range.

How do you organize scenes in chapters?

You can just write each complete scene and move onto the next scene, and then the next scene until you’re finished. Then, when it’s time to break your story into chapters, you can make sure the chapter breaks fall at the most exciting or interesting parts of a scene.

How far down the page should a chapter start?

one-third to halfway

In a published book, chapters generally begin one-third to halfway down the page.

Should chapters always start on the right?

Each section of your book should start on a right-hand page. The title page is always a right-hand page, the table of contents begins on a right-hand page, chapter 1 begins on a right-hand page, and so on.

How long is a normal chapter?

From these numbers, we can establish some guidelines: the average word count of a chapter typically falls somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 words, with 3,000–4,000 being the most common sweet spot.

Do you indent after a scene break?

3b. Don’t indent the first line of the story, or the first line following a chapter break or scene change – anywhere you would expect to see a blank line left in a printed book, or marked with a hash as in (3a) above.

Should each chapter start on a new page?

Now, the standard way to go is to start parts and chapters on a new page, and leave sections running through the pages.

IS indenting paragraphs obsolete?

Many people believe that every single paragraph in a piece of text should be indented. This is actually unnecessary. You should use indentation to indicate a new paragraph. Given the fact that it is pretty obvious that the first paragraph is a new paragraph, there is absolutely no need to indent it at all.