You bet we’ve all experienced our fair share of screaming matches with this sort of ending. Charles Dickens, whose serialized novels got readers in the 1800s coming back every week, was a master at writing cliffhangers — sometimes even in the middle of a fight. Here is an example from Chapter 5 of Great Expectations: But I ran no farther than the house door, for there I ran head-foremost into a party of soldiers with their muskets, one of whom held out a pair of handcuffs to me, saying, “Here you are, look sharp, come on!” — Charles Dickens, Great Expectations This time, the chapter ends mid-scene. In addition, this particular cliffhanger rests on a physical act — the soldiers approaching Pip. But it could just as well be a dawning mental or emotional realization that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. Whatever shape the cliffhanger takes, it’s the anticipation you generate that will keep your audience eagerly flipping those pages. One caveat: you can only use this technique sparingly, or else it’ll start to grow repetitive and lose its impact. 4. The Era or POV Jump If you’re writing a book that uses multiple perspectives or jumps time periods, the chapter break is an obvious opportunity to switch things up. One of the most prominent practitioners is George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which cycles between a total of 31 characters. Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park also uses a break effectively to shift POVs: Park couldn’t think of a way to get rid of her on the bus. Or a way to get rid of himself. So he put his headphones on before the girl sat down and turned the volume all the way up. Thank God she didn’t try to talk to him. — Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park Then the next section segues smoothly into Eleanor’s take on things, keeping readers intrigued by revealing a new angle on previous events. When there are more than two POV characters, you'll need to make sure that you distribute time equitably between them while making each character interesting in their own right, so that one 7,000-word chapter with a boring character doesn't slow the whole story down. That said, there are always exceptions, which takes us to our next important point... Guidelines, not rules As with everything else when it comes to writing a book, these are only guidelines—not rules. Though the average word count of a chapter is around 2,000 – 5,000 words, it all depends on your story. (We can't emphasize this enough.) There are plenty of books that purposefully play with the word counts of their chapters. The Luminaries, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2015, has 12 sections that steadily decrease in word count to mirror the waning of the moon. (The first chapter of The Luminaries is 360 pages, whereas the final is two pages.) Then there’s William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, in which Vardaman’s famous five-word sentence, “My mother is a fish,” is the whole of Chapter 19. Or consider Fahrenheit 451, which contains a Part I and Part II — but no chapters. So, don’t write a chapter with only one eye on your story and the other on your word count. When you're outlining your book and writing your first draft, concentrate on making the content of your story the best it can be. Then you can always circle back to adjust word counts afterward, with pacing and reader experience in mind. NEW REEDSY COURSE NEW REEDSY COURSE How to Write a Novel Enroll in our course and become an author in three months. Enter your email... Googlegoogle-icon Facebookfacebook-icon What do you think about chapter word counts? Have any tips for your fellow writers? Share your thoughts in the comments below! 29 responses Robert Run says: 19/10/2017 – 19:22 In as many as I could, in my book, I wrote the Chapters so they can stand alone as little fables and tales of their own. In hopes one can enjoy the Chapter w/out having to know the entire plot. writerkris says: 19/10/2017 – 20:21 At least ten pages per chapter. No idea how many words that might be, but I might go and check. And always at an interesting point so they'll hopefully keep reading. Not a cliffhanger often, because I find those personally annoying. ↪️ Brittany Myers replied: 27/08/2019 – 12:01 For my book, my goal is to write ten pages per chapter. It'll be 10 10. robert easterbrook says: 19/10/2017 – 20:47 It's all about pacing. Not word count. Scene breaks, yes. And chapter breaks, for sure. Fuck statistics. Stop trying to make novelists confirm to 'formulaic' notions of writing. Your last paragraph is titled Guidelines, not rules, yet you managed to squeeze in a nugget about 'word count'. This is like claiming something is true in research before you've done the research, then doing the research and finding no support for your claim, but then concluding your claim is still true despite the evidence. Contradictory bullshit. ↪️ Reedsy replied: 20/10/2017 – 09:02 You're absolutely right, it's all about pacing. However, word count *does* have an inc