One of the best writing tips that I received came from James Patterson. He recommends that when you are writing scenes, you have one scene per chapter. Each of your chapters should be a single scene, and when you are planning out your book, you should be able to outline your book easily.
The downside to this is that if you have many scenes, you will have many chapters. However, organizing your book this way means that you can create an outline that specifically states the scene, so if you become lost on what you need to write, you can refer to your outline and know exactly what you are writing about at the time. This also provides you a way to jump around in your book and write various scenes if you know what you want to write about for a particular scene.
Another technique is to write about a specific event per chapter. Think of this much like J.K. Rowling’s style of titling the chapter and ending the chapter with that event. By doing it this way, you can include several scenes that lead up to the big event of the chapter.
Either way that you choose to write out your chapters, make sure that you are consistent throughout the book. If you name your chapter by the big Ah-Ha within the chapter, your reader will expect that each time they come to a new chapter in your book. They will begin to anticipate what will come next and question why the chapter is titled as such. When writing Young Adult and Middle Grader novels, this is an excellent way to provide them with a purpose for reading the next chapter. They have a question in their mind as to why they are reading. They want to know what is going to happen next, or what the author means by “X” when they haven’t mentioned it before.
Play around with the ideas above. Try out the two and tell me what you think in the comments below. Out of the two different methods above, I do prefer Patterson’s method over Rowling’s. Writing in the smaller chunks of scenes per chapter gives me a sense of accomplishment when I finish a scene, even if the scene is a small one.
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