chapters
Other people dislike really long paragraphs full of description and internal monologue. This kind of thing doesn't bother me as much, but I do sometimes have the urge to speed read through such a paragraph if the author hasn't really won me over by the time I hit one.
Now, chapters are quite a different animal.
Once upon a time I had a collection of short rules-of-thumb about writing fiction. It's long gone, lost in one move or another, or in some long ago computer migration. I remember a few of them, although I don't remember who said them. Here's one that has always stuck in my mind: Strongest word at the end of the sentence. Strongest sentence at the end of the paragraph. Strong paragraph at the end of the chapter. Sounds good, but it's like all generalizations: true, except when it isn't. The first problem is defining and identifying strong, something I'm not going to try to do here.
You could look at a wide range of authors and try to get a feel for how chapters work, and you would find similarities. A natural break in the rhythm of the story is the most common place to end one chapter and start another. Some authors do the exact opposite, and break a chapter at the high point in the action. This is a matter of personal taste, I think. The right rule of thumb here might be: you can do anything, if you do it well enough to take the reader along for the ride. Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant takes the huge step of not using chapter breaks at all. The reason I know this works (for me, at least) is that I didn't even notice. I was so caught up in the story that I had read the novel twice before somebody pointed it out to me: no chapter breaks. Can everybody pull this off? I would guess the answer is, no. I don't think I could.
The hardest part might not be deciding where to break the chapter, but what the last note of the movement should be. There's a particular kind of ringing tone that I reach for at the end of a chapter, whether it's dialogue or narration. An awkwardly ended paragraph can work just like that heavy foot on the brake, and jar you out of the story. I'm going to go looking for sentences that end chapters well, and I'll try to get back here with some samples tomorrow.
