How to End a Chapter
Approaching how to end a chapter is tricky territory. It’s very easy to lose your reader in the white space and page break there, unless you give them a reason to stay and turn the page. Distractions are always beckoning, and nowhere is your grasp on your audience more tenuous. Check out this video to learn how to end your chapters in a compelling way!
Want even more Good Story Company content? Become a member! Get access to tips, workshops, handouts, resources and videos for writers of all levels—all for less than your Netflix subscription.
How to End a Chapter Video Transcript
Hi, my name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company and I'm here to talk about how to end a chapter. I love this question because it is one of pacing.
Pacing is the reader's perception of how quickly or slowly your action is moving and the plot is moving forward in your piece of writing. So if you are writing something with chapters, you're probably writing chapter book all the way up through novel, memoir, anything with breaks built into the narration. So how do you handle those breaks?
I mean, in picture book, we talk about the page turns, right, that provides a built-in opportunity to take a pause. You have a surprise, you have a cliffhanger, you have some kind of difference between this page and that page where the reader's experience really changes as they flip the pages through. It's not that visceral with novels or memoirs or chapter books. We don't necessarily have a lot of page turns necessarily. Readers aren't as conscious of their act of turning the page. But it's very very important to end a chapter on some kind of hook or some kind of emotion because that white space at the end of your chapter is an opportunity for them to slide in a bookmark and turn on Hulu and you sort of lose them for the night or maybe for longer than that. You could really drop the momentum and your reader there. So my tips for how to really keep your chapters lively, get them moving, would be, you can end on a cliffhanger, absolutely, that is sort of gimmick number one, but it is a bit of a gimmick. I use that term specifically because it does sort of feel a little bit familiar a little bit contrived sometimes especially if you get into a pattern where you're doing it a lot.
For example, you end on the jump scare, "And then the door flew open!" and then we have to flip the page and figure out what, you know, what yeti walked in or whatever. So that you can use sort of—with an asterisk—with caution i would say it's definitely a way to get your reader to turn the page but it can also be read as manipulative. People see what you're doing, they sort of see through you, they may not appreciate it as much.
I do think that at the chapter ending you need to have some kind of situation change or some kind of emotion and you can also work in a loop. When i talk about loops i mean something that creates a mystery, so let's say a letter shows up at the end of a chapter and this character has not been expecting anything and so they are surprised. That opens a loop. What's in the letter? And that's put there and done intentionally to get that page turn, to get that person to find out what's in the letter. And you could even keep it going. You could put off the opening of the letter for a while so that that loop stays open and then by that point when you close that loop you might have opened another loop of mystery or something unresolved, something to keep the reader wondering and feeling a little bit of tension. So if you can open any kind of loop, create a mystery at the end of a chapter, that works really well if you've had a lot of chapters of action, you know, there's a battle, there's all this kind of stuff, it's very easy to sort of keep readers reading when action is strong.
However i would say you don't want to end every single chapter on a cliffhanger, action, an unexpected event, some kind of like big explosion, you know, "And then everything went dark!" If you have too many chapters in a row that end on that note, readers are going to feel kind of a little bit of whiplash. So what i would recommend is every once in a while instead of ending a chapter on something really dire you can end on a quieter emotion, a little bit more introspection, or even a laugh, you know, if you have a really great punch line, you have some witty dialogue going, some banter between characters, you can end on a laugh so that readers feel a little bit well paced in terms of action action action, okay I get a break. And even though that seems like a good place to put in the bookmark they might appreciate the break so much or the insight into character or the emotion that the character sort of puts forth on the page that they might keep reading to see, you know, what what is next for that character.
I wouldn't advise too many cliffhangers, like I said. I wouldn't advise too much fading to black. I think if you're writing like a fantasy, adventure, sci-fi, a book that's action heavy where people tend to get knocked out or drugged or whatever i think you have like one fade to black but i wouldn't do multiple chapters on it. You would not believe how many times i give that note in my editorial practice. I'm like, everybody's fading to black always. And then another thing that I would discourage is the rhetorical question.
I really like characters who are smart and who put together information, and this is sort of a novel-wide note. I discourage rhetorical questions, for example, like "What is grandma doing here?" or "What could he possibly mean by that?" or "I wonder where they're gonna go next?" You know, sometimes those are very appropriate but for chapter ending a question, just like a cliffhanger, feels a little bit cheap. I want to know that the character has put two and two together and is like, "They're getting away and they're racing off to the factory where the hidden rocket is being stored!" Terrible example right off the top of my head but it's sort of like, "What's next?" The end of a chapter should set up what might be happening in the next chapter.
Of course you can subvert that in some way, you can play with reader expectations, but that end of the chapter should have some sense—whether it's quiet or action-packed—of forward momentum also. So if the character ends on, "Where are they going?" it's sort of, it's loosey-goosey, it's open-ended. If the character says, "Oh no, I know they're heading for our target!" That gives a sense of, okay, you're setting reader expectations for what might happen next. Whether it does or not, that's up to you, but these are some examples of how you might want to manipulate, sort of, a reader engagement, reader expectations, and emotions at the end of your chapters.
My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. I am a freelance editor, so come see me if you want custom advice on your project and here's to a good story!
We’ve been helping writers like you for years, and now we’re putting every educational resource we’ve ever made in one spot. Join Good Story Learning to access all of it, plus the materials we’ll make in the future for just $9 a month.
