Graphic by Elle Carter Neal I’m often asked, “How long should a chapter be?” There is no correct answer to that. I’ve read books that had one-page chapters, books with varied page-count chapters, and one book, Delores Claiborne by Stephen King, had NO chapters. You can be arbitrary and make a chapter break every 10 (or 15 or 25) pages. But you really don’t need to set your book up in chapters to begin with (unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool outliner). Sometimes, it’s easier to write the whole first draft with no chapters, just scene breaks, and do your chapter numbering later. For me, as a writer, a chapter is a feel, a rhythm to a story. A chapter is a story within a story with a beginning, middle and an end. As a reader, I also like scene breaks within a chapter to change up that rhythm, and because we are now a society of short attention spans. We are accustomed to “sound bites”, tweets, and texts. Break your chapter when your story needs a change of place, time, an...