Now What…

by

Crymsyn Hart

…do you do after you’ve gotten your momentum going and you’ve come to the end of your first chapter?  Questions run through the author’s mind. Where do I go from here? Where are the characters going to take me? Can I run with them? What the hell am I doing? Why did I ever think I could write a book? Should I continue writing?

The first thing to do is take a breath and congratulate yourself. You’ve gotten this far. The first chapter might be a thousand words, five thousand, or somewhere in the middle. There is no perfect word count that has to be in a chapter. (If there is somewhere, please let me know.) My normal word count for a chapter is 2500-3000 words. Sometimes they run shorter or longer. It depends on where I get that happy feeling where the scene should end. But that is just me. The one rule you do want to follow no matter where the chapter ends is that you want to have a hook.

The main character could be hanging over a cliff, getting ready to be eaten by demon-possessed zombies, or maybe they were getting ready to eat a piece of cheesecake and you don’t know what flavor it is.

Whatever the hook might be, it is important to keep the reader interested.

Then you get into your second chapter and figure out where to go from there. Some people make writing look easy. I love it because I escape from reality, but over the years I have learned through trial and error the work behind the writing. And I’m still not an expert, but I hope my perspective helps.

 

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