it's completely up to you. How many scenes you would like to include in a chapter? Here you're crafting the reading experience. You want your readers to have essentially you're designing how you want to pace them through your story. Welcome to your next draft. Today, I'm answering a listener question about scenes versus chapters. This is something I touched on briefly in episode eight. What is the scene? But there is so much more to explore here.
So I'm going to do a bit of a deep dive into it today. Because there are a whole lot of ways that authors organize their scenes into chapters. I'm not even going to pretend to cover all of them here. If you start studying your favorite books, you'll find so many creative ways that authors arrange them. There are chapters, and sometimes there are parts and sometimes there are line breaks between scenes and sometimes there aren't any line breaks between scenes and I could go on.
There are just so many options here. So this isn't going to be a comprehensive list of all the ways you can organize scenes into chapters. Instead. What I'm going to do is give you three common ways that you'll often see scenes organized into chapters. And they'll also give you a couple of principles to consider. To help you decide how to organize your own chapters. And I'll give you a quick heads-up that I am going to use a lot of examples from published books.
In this episode, I've linked to all those books in the show notes so that you can go use the look inside, feature on Amazon to see how their opening chapters work. Now, I did reference some chapters deeper in the books this time. So you won't be able to see all of those things for free, but personally, I think all of these books that I'm going to mention are fantastic reads and it would be well worth your time to buy them at a bookstore.
More or check them out from the library and enjoy reading any of them. And like I said, this episode is inspired by a listener question, which was sent to me by Kathy. So thank you, Kathy, for sharing your question. And if you have a question about scenes or editing a novel or anything you hear on the podcast, feel free to share it with me. I would love to hear. Send me an email at Alice at Alice lowe.com with the subject line podcast question. And I'll save your question for a future episode.
All right, let's get into Kathy's question. Kathy asks. With the scene being one thing at one place where one overall thing happens, how does this relate to chapters? Is there a usual comfortable number of scenes that will fit into a chapter? Or is it best to go with what fits into a reasonable chapter size? So the first thing I'll say here is it's completely up to you. How many scenes you would like to include in a chapter? Here you're crafting the reading experience.
You want your readers to have essentially you're designing how you want to pace them through your story. Sometimes. Writers decide to have one scene in every chapter. When a new scene begins, a new chapter begins. These are sometimes called potato chip chapters because they're easy to consume and hard to put down like potato chips. You can always read just one more because they're short and fun and suddenly it's three hours past your bedtime and you're about to finish the book.
And how did that happen? Is that just me? That happens to me. Way more than I'd like to admit. An example of a book where every chapter is a new scene is pride and prejudice. There are 61 chapters in pride and prejudice and 62 scenes. The scenes are an average about 2000 words with occasional outliers. The shortest scene is about 800 words and the longest is over 4,000. So every chapter is a short, easy to consume unit.
The chapter opens one story of it happens, the scene ends and we're on to the next chapter. A few modern examples of this one scene per chapter structure. Include Seafire by Natalie C. Parker. And radio silence by Alice Ozmen. Both of these are young adult novels. Seafire is a fantasy adventure novel and radio silence is a contemporary realism, novel, a friendship story. And both of them begin with many short single scene chapters.
I'd have to read them both again to confirm whether all of the chapters are just one scene. It's been a few months since I've read them both, but certainly they definitely begin with a consistent structure of just one scene per chapter. In fact C fire is a particularly interesting example here, because you could make the argument that the first three chapters are all part of the same scene.
One long scene where our protagonists, the crew of an all-girls pirate ship come across an enemy barge and battle it. That scene is broken up into three chapters short. Intense moments that keep you turning the pages. Each chapter has complete scene structure of its own. But they're also short and tight and keep the pacing moving quickly and they flow right into the next chapter without a moment's pause. So, if you're wondering how to divide your book into chapters.
You can always look at where your scenes end and begin, and then create a new chapter for each scene. But this isn't the only way to structure your chapters. I also want to show you two other ways that writers organize their scenes into chapters. The next way is to include several scenes in a chapter and separate them with line breaks, visible markers that were moving from one scene to the next. I have a few examples for you here. First step fan girl by rainbow rowel.
This is a new adult contemporary realism romance novel about a girl navigating her first year of college. The first chapter is eight pages long and has four scenes. These scenes are pretty short. I don't have word counts for them, but they're all between one and three pages long. So very quick reads. There are line breaks between each one. So it's clear to see how rainbow rattle is dividing them up. Why are these scenes all in the same chapter?
Why didn't she split them up into their own chapters? Because the scenes are all very closely connected. They all occur on the same day. The day our protagonist cath moves into her college dorm room. In the first scene, she walks into her room and she meets her new roommate. In the second scene. She decides to go get pizza with her dad. Rather than go meet new people at the freshmen. Barbecue. In the third scene, she and her dad walked to the pizza place and have dinner.
And in the fourth scene, cath returns to her room alone and starts decorating her walls with familiar things. Notice how all of these scenes are connected to a larger story event. Kath separating from her family and moving into college. This is called a sequence. A collection of scenes that build towards one larger story event. Essentially. Rainbow Raul is determining how to break up her chapters. Uh, not by individual scenes. But by larger story events that take several scenes to develop.
Another example of this is red, white, and Royal blue by Casey McQuiston. This is another new adult contemporary realism romance novel in which the son of the precedent of the United States falls for the prince of England. Again, I'm working with page numbers rather than word counts here, but I can tell you that these chapters and scenes are much longer than those in fan-girl. The first chapter of red, white, and Royal blue is 20 pages long and it contains three scenes. The first is eight pages.
The second is four pages and the third is eight pages long. In the first scene Alex's sister, June reminds him that they're flying to London tomorrow to attend the Royal wedding of prince Henry's older brother. And the second scene. The first family is on the plane over the Atlantic, arguing over whether Alex has a rivalry or in Mitzi with prince Henry.
And then the third scene there at the Royal wedding reception, where Alex gets tipsy and accidentally knocks Henry into the $75,000 wedding cake. Now these three scenes don't all occur on the same day. Of course. But they do all focus on one specific movements of story. Introducing with tension between Alex and Henry. And building up to their international scandal at the wedding. Once again. We're grouping events by sequence.
A series of scenes that all focus on a specific event, a single arc of story. So we've seen some books that have one scene per chapter, and we've seen some books with several scenes per chapter. I also want to show you a third approach. This is where writers mix it up. Some chapters have one scene and some chapters have several scenes. And the example I'm going to pull from here. Is an absolutely remarkable thing by Hank green.
This is a new adult scifi novel where April, may our protagonist discovers a robot that might be an alien and then becomes very famous. So she's both trying to solve this mystery surrounding potential first contact. And she's also trying to navigate all the pressures of fame. Chapter one of an absolutely remarkable thing is one scene. Chapter 10 is one scene. Chapter 13 is also one scene. And there are a few more single scene chapters later in the book. The chapters in between.
Have more than one scene. Most have two scenes, but some have as many as five. So how did Hank green group scenes into chapters? How did he decide how many scenes to put into a specific chapter? He used the same two principles as all the other ideas we've looked at so far, the idea of sequences. And the idea of pacing. For instance, let's take a look at chapter four, which includes four scenes for context.
By this point, April has discovered this giant robot, and now she's starting to receive media attention about it. Here are the four scenes in chapter four. In the first scene. Uh, April is interviewed on television for the first time. She absolutely bombs it. And she also discovers that people are impersonating her on social media. And so she reluctantly creates a Twitter account. In the second scene, she's flown out to another television interview in LA.
And she's pretty overwhelmed by the luxury and all the attention that she receives. In the third scene, she has a more successful TV interview and she's getting used to all the attention and realizing that her life is never going to be the same. And in the fourth scene. She's feeling the power of having all this attention. And she decides to engage with fame on her own terms and make YouTube videos so that she can contribute to the narrative.
So all these scenes are connected by one specific arc of story. April's introduction to media attention, where she goes from initial reluctance and incompetence about being in front of the camera. To wanting to continue to engage on her own terms. I remember what I said earlier. This is about breaking up chapters, not by individual scenes, but by larger story events that take several scenes to develop. What about those chapters that are just one scene chapter one, chapter 10, chapter 13.
The scenes that Hank green chooses to separate out into their own chapters. Are really, really important scenes. Chapter one is the discovery of the robot. And chapter 10 April gets a phone call from the president of the United States. In chapter 13, there's a major attack and an attempt on April's life. In short. All of these events are a really, really big deal. And so Hank green separates them to stand alone. Which really highlights their intensity. This goes back to that idea of pacing.
When you want to increase the intensity to keep readers turning pages quickly, or to emphasize how monumental something is, you can use your chapter structure to do that. Remember, Seafire that? Why a fantasy novel about the all-girls pirate ship that I mentioned earlier? This is exactly what that book does. Single scene chapters that keep the pace moving quickly and the reader turning pages. So there you have it three different ways that you can organize scenes into chapters.
The first way is to make every scene its own chapter. The second way is to group several scenes into chapters by zooming out and looking at how they're connected are they all associated with one larger story event, one arc of change, then it might be useful to put them together into one chapter. And the third way is to shake it up so that some of your chapters are one scene long and some of your chapters include several scenes. Are there other ways to do this? Absolutely.
This is not a comprehensive study of all the ways that writers can organize their books by chapters. If you're doing something that I haven't listed here. Or you can think of books that you've read that organized their chapters differently. That's awesome. There are so many creative and innovative ways to organize the chapters of a novel ways that emphasize what you want to communicate to the reader and to help pace the reader through the story.
But I hope this gets you some helpful pointers to consider Cathy when you're sorting through the scenes and the chapters of your book, look at where your scenes begin and end. Look for sequences of scenes that build towards larger events and consider the pacing that you want to create for the reader. And that's it for this listener mail episode of your next draft. Thank you, Kathy, for sharing your question with me, I hope that my answers gave you some helpful pointers to work with.
And if you have more questions about scenes or about editing a novel in general, I would love to hear from you. You can send me an email@aliceatalicesubtler.com with the subject line podcast question, and I'll keep it in mind for future podcast episodes as well. Now, before we wrap up, I do want to leave you with an assignment for your editing today. Here it is. I want you to take a look at the first few scenes of your book. Let's say the first five or six scenes. I want you to consider.
How are these scenes connected? R several in a row focused on building to a unified purpose. In other words, is there a sequence of scenes somewhere in there? And how would you like to present those scenes to your readers? Imagine if you separated each scene out into its own chapter. How would that impact the pacing of your story? Or imagine if you put all of those scenes into one chapter. How would that impact the pacing of your story?
There's no right or wrong answer here, but you might start to notice that one way or another it's more effective at creating the reading experience that you want to design for your reader. So give that exercise to try and see where it takes you. And until next time. Happy editing.