Good aftermorning class. In a sea of lackluster disappointment, you are all among it.

“Professor” Rj Waltz is here to teach you about this fundamentally weird thing that humans do when hallucinating stories we make up that never actually happened. What, don’t look at me like that. You show me on this topographical map of Utah where I can find a talking dog and we’ll make a day of it.

I’m talking about chapters. “What are chapters?” I hear you ask, incredulous to the existence of something so fundamental o the writing process. Worry not, you sweet sweet child, for I will explain to you the long and arduous process involved with separating your story into different sections. You know, that sounded much more impressive in my head.

Despite the romanticization of every single excruciating moment in the novel writing process, the concept of chapters is a mechanical one. Readers who read the reading material are in desperate need of breaks. How else could humanity stop, take a deep breath, and ingest thirteen strawberry milkshakes? Since you have to babysit your widdle biddie teeny reader through your story, you have to give them the ultimate desire that keeps them up for weeks on end with only the sleep between blinks. That, dear viewer, is the phrase, ‘Maybe just one more chapter.’

“My story stands on its own, so I don’t need to put in chapters,” you whine incessantly between huffs of paint grease. Okay, fine, here’s a little test for you. I want you to sit down in your tiny plastic chair and write a novel. Go on, there’s still some daylight left over. Oh, is that too hard? Yeah, that’s what I thought. It’s a monumental task to sit down and write a book in one sitting, right? Well, so is reading that same thing. Shocker, I know. So, in order to write your novel easier, you split that novel into different parts. For fun, I’m going to call them chapters. How many chapters are crammed in each book? Well, it depends on how badly you want to hurt yourself and your audience. Sicko.

The baseline for chapters is around thirty. It’s a decent, round number that makes old people happy. I don’t know the origin of why this is the case; go harass an English major about it next time you need a new patio for your back deck of delusions. You writers can do more or less of that number inorder to create special effects inside your own writing. Say that you decide to do a huge number. A hundred chapters. Seeing as how you have a max word count of around 100k (more on this later) you’d be looking at roughly one thousand words per chapter. I’d show you the math if you didn’t literally carry a calculator with you everywhere. That’s half a short story’s length per chapter. What this means is that your reader can read your chapters fairly quickly, but they also need to read a literal hundred of them for the whole story. Imagine, if you can, someone opening your book and seeing all of those chapters in your table of contents. It takes dedication to keep that little chunk of wood pulp from ending up in the bottom of their fire pit.

Let’s say you’re going the other route and you want to write less chapters. We’ll say half of the original thirty. (that’s fifteen. I know, math is hard.) That will take the word count of a 100k work and bloat the crap out of your chapter length. And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…. Math!

100,000 words / 15 chapters = 6,666.666666666666…etc. words. Many sixes. In order to meet your (somewhat arbitrary) hard word count limit of 100k in fifteen chapters, you need 6,667 average words per chapter. Here’s why that’s a problem; most novels clock in at around 60k words. Your short chaptered fantasy epic is clocking in at over a tenth of that normal novel length. By all means, you can do it. It’s just, well… expect a lot of bored readers. Writers need to find a happy medium between chapter number fatigue and chapter length fatigue. unfortunately for you, this has been decided for you at thirty chapters. Readers have been reading books for a long time. They’re used to reading thirty chapters. You have to get used to writing thirty chapters.

Now that your chapter amount has been decided, I suppose you want me to tell you what to put into these storybook sections. Man, you should crack open a book once in a while. Okay, fine. I hate it when you look at me like I’m supposed to be teaching you something. Inside of each chapter are mini sections called scenes. Sometimes writers break up these scenes with three little stars.

* * *

Kind of like that. Be warned, because that’s not always the case. Personally, I separate scenes with a blank line. You know, the kind where you hit that weird looking key labeled ‘Enter’ twice on the keyboard. Now that you have separated out a scene, what goes into it? Your story, obviously, but I guess I’ll get more specific. A scene incorporates a setting, like a building’s cavities or the harsh cruel outside world. Typically, this is set up with a quick introductory paragraph describing trees, stones, roads, office walls, mummified cats, piles of gold, and so on. After that, the pov character is introduced.

“How does the reader know that the character is the pov character?” You cry, desperate for sensei’s approval. Simple, simple fool. It’s through the use of ‘show, don’t tell.’ This character’s thoughts are given to the reader. After all, you can’t see the bloody pile of skulls in the office break room without something’s eyes seeing them. The reader is literally looking through the character’s eyes. The setting paragraph I mentioned sometimes during my lifetime wold typically be written through the experiences of this character.

Once the pov character is dropped into the scene like a cracked eggshell into a waste bin, the writer sets up an interaction. Boss kicks down the door and a card game duel commences. Three other dragons gather around the water cooler and bitch about their mounds of gold hurting their backs. The death star blows up the parking lot. The possibilities are (probably) endless. When it’s all said and done, pretty much all of the writing of any story boils down to making these scenes. Character interacts with stuff. There ya go. If writing a book was anything like cooking, that’s the recipe. To go a step further, chapters, by extension, are a collection of different scenes in (sometimes) chronological order from beginning of story until end. Also, it’s generally at the end of each chapter that the writer will sneakily add in a compelling cliffhanger to bait the reader to continue on to the next chapter ad infinitum until they’re rendered into a cursed ball of tears and snot.

But this isn’t about cliffhangers. You’ll have to come back later for that. And it’s a good one, too.

Any questions? Okay, very funny. Put your hand down, kid.

Class dismissed!