"Hi Ksenia,
I love everything about the blog and your work, kudos. I am writing my first book (non fiction), and am lost as to how to break the whole thing into chapters.
Mayowa"
Hi Mayowa,
Thank you, darling. Great question. I used to break up my manuscript into chapters as I wrote it every day. In the morning I would start a new chapter, and by the end of the writing day I'd try to finish it. The good part of it was, I completed a chapter a day. The bad part of it was, I have constrained my writing into this one-chapter-per-day schedule, and sometimes I rushed my story to make it happen, and the rushed part almost always had to be rewritten, so I wasted time.
Later I got smarter. I read a lot, as in, A LOT, and I steal chapter structure I like. It struck me to see some chapters very long and others very short in the same book. "How could that be?" I thought. I would imagine what's to follow can apply to any book, fiction or non-fiction.
Instead of focusing on chapters focus on the scenes.
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