Don’t start a chapter without these six essential elements

Writers don’t often pay enough attention to how they start new chapters, as well as scenes after section breaks.

For a reader, starting a new chapter has the potential to be disorienting. Readers know that some time has likely elapsed since the end of the previous chapter (but not always!), we might also be shifting to a new physical location (but not always!), and we might be shifting to a different character’s POV (but not always!). It can be tricky to get our bearings if the author isn’t giving us the information we need to re-orient ourselves in the story.

More than that, since each chapter is (ideally) almost like a mini-novel unto itself with a beginning, middle, and end, it’s helpful to prime the reader around what the protagonist is going to try to accomplish and why it matters.

There are six magical elements that are incredibly useful to deploy at the start of every chapter to keep the reader smoothly immersed within the story. If you make sure these six elements are present at the start of every chapter, you almost can’t help but write a good one.

1) Connective tissue

When you start writing a new chapter, you know where the characters are and how much time has elapsed since the last one. The reader does not unless you put it on the page or it’s readily apparent from context.

This is one of the easiest things to lose sight of, and it’s super simple: How much time has elapsed since the last scene? And have we picked up in a new location? Bridge the gap between the previous chapter and the new one.

Seconds or centuries can pass between chapters. Crisply establish when and where we are. It can be as simple as just starting off with “The next morning,” or highlighting details in the opening paragraph that accomplish the same thing. (For instance, if we last see the characters setting up camp and the next scene starts with the moon over the camp, we can easily infer it’s later on that night).

And particularly if you’re shifting POVs to a different character, establish that as quickly as possible so the reader can contextualize the start of the scene appropriately.

For further reading:

• Show characters getting from Point A to Point B

2) Physical description

Poor, neglected physical description! Too many writers start a chapter off by trying to grab the reader with the most exciting thing that’s going to happen in the chapter. This can be made to work, but it can also make the start of the chapter really confusing. The reader might be thinking: Um, okay, cool, but where are we entirely?

Physical description helps the reader get their bearings so they can imagine the scene to come, and it can be an indispensable tone-setter that establishes the overall mood. Even if it’s a place that’s already familiar to the reader because you’ve already described it thoroughly, like the protagonist’s breakfast nook, help us understand what it looks like right now. An odd color streaming through the lace curtains can do a lot to prime the reader that something’s off.

For further reading:

• How to write clear physical description

3) The protagonist’s mindset

In order to prime the reader around where the protagonist is going to go in this chapter, it’s helpful to understand the protagonist’s mindset. Help us understand what’s on their mind and where their head is at.

What mood are they in? How were they left feeling after the last chapter? How is it coalescing into what they might want to do next?

There are two main ways to show a protagonist’s mindset:

• Physical gestures. You can show them doing things that can evoke their mood, but whatever you do, steer clear of generic gestures like sighing and eye rolls and hearts beating wildly. Particularly at the start of chapters it’s helpful to be more specific to evoke the mood with precision and show more individuality.
• Showing their thought processes. Don’t just diagnose the character’s mood in an abstract way like saying “Nathan woke up frustrated.” Show it. Reveal the precise things that are frustrating him by delving into your protagonist’s thought processes.

Mood does a whole lot to contextualize the protagonist’s actions in a scene. If we know that a character woke up super cranky, we’re going to make more allowances for their behavior than if we think it’s just a normal day and they’re acting like a jerk.

For further reading:

• What is the “narrative voice?”

4) The protagonist’s motivation

What is motivating your protagonist in this moment? What do they want to do next?

Motivation is everything in a novel, and it’s crucial to keep orienting the reader around what your protagonist wants to do, both for the novel as a whole and within every individual scene. Readers really internalize this motivation. We tend to want what the protagonist wants on their behalf, so understanding the motivation primes the reader to invest in the story.

Motivation is also the basis for good mysteries. We want to read on to see if the protagonist is going to get the thing they want.

Sometimes a character’s motivation is implicit (if they’re being lowered into a vat of boiling oil we’ll presume they want to escape), but other times you need to make it explicit via the narrative voice.

A character’s motivation is so important that I even weave it into my chapter outlines. I really believe this is a crucial building block for every chapter. Help us understand what they want.

For further reading:

• What do your characters want?

5) The protagonist’s plan

So the protagonist is in a mood. They have a motivation. Now: what’s the plan? What are they actually going to do about what’s motivating them?

Establishing a plan is another way of orienting the reader and giving them an anchor point. These plans will almost never come to fruition in the way the protagonist desires. But it’s still helpful to see these plans so we can orient ourselves around what the character is going to try to do. The more vivid and specific the better because we learn so much about a character by the way they articulate their hopes and dreams.

Seeing the plans before the protagonist gets going on their way makes it more satisfying if they end up succeeding and more poignant if they fail. Readers judge the end of the scene and feel successes and failures based on how they’ve been primed at the start of the scene.

If we know at the start of the scene that the protagonist plans to march straight into the principal’s office to beg for mercy so they can get out of detention to work on their spaceship, and instead the protagonist winds up with an extra two weeks of detention, we’re going to feel that gap much more acutely than if we had no idea why the character was going to the principal’s office entirely.

For further reading:

• How to use hopes and dreams to make a character come alive

6) The stakes

The “stakes” are another way of establishing why what the protagonist wants is important to them, and they boil down to two questions:

• What does the protagonist think will happen if they succeed?
• What do they fear will happen if they fail?

As you establish the stakes, try to crystalize them and make them very tangible. Don’t stop at the level of “fearing failure” or something abstract. Zero in on the specific mental images the protagonist is imagining as their best and worst case scenarios. Again, the more vivid the better, all the way down to the ticker tape falling from the sky during the character’s victory parade or the precise horror of seeing their childhood home being burned by invading soldiers.

If you articulate specific hopes and fears, the reader will understand why what’s happening matters to the protagonist and will feel more invested in the outcome. We’ll know precisely why the scene matters.

For further reading:

• How to raise the stakes in a novel
• How to crystalize the stakes

What comes next

After you’ve established these six elements, it’s so important that the protagonist then actively tries to go after their plan. Then they inevitably encounter obstacles and have to navigate and work and expend effort to get the things they want. They either do and don’t accomplish what they set out to do, the chapter arrives at a point of punctuation, and we do it all over again in the next chapter.

But with these six elements in place, the reader will feel well-oriented within the scene and will care much more about whether the protagonist will succeed or fail.

Do you have any tips or tricks for starting chapters? Let me know in the comments!

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Originally published as “Don’t start a scene without these four essential elements” on May 24, 2021

Art: Artus Wolffort – The Four Elements