I’m bad at short chapters. There, I said it.
My problem is that I like stories with large casts, competing motivations, and lots of moving parts. I like writing fights and big group scenes. I want every chapter to hit hard.
So, when I outline a chapter, I’ll put down about a zillion bullet points. Because I’m a fool who never learns. I instinctively feel like every chapter should advance the plot and reveal pieces of the big picture and evolve character relationships and show the protagonist growing from their experiences.
This can be like getting lost in the weeds. Like filming a movie on approximately twenty different cameras, as is normal, but then going, “Aw, shucks! All this footage is great! I want to show everything! Instead of editing, how about we just do a twenty-way split screen?”
To be sure, it’s totally possible to write a chapter that does it all. But sometimes, the camera needs to focus on a close-up.
I’ve been writing middle grade for the past three-ish months, which makes it even more critical that I trim my dang chapters. I consistently hit about 3.3k in drafts. So, in editing, I’ve thrown many, many pages of prose into the compost bin. Including really fun prose that I was attached to, but that didn’t do the right job.
Most recently, I wrote a chapter—the third to last in the manuscript—where two children collude with a giant serpent to thwart their 5th-grade teacher, who’s only trying to keep them safe, because they want to be heroes and fight zombie snakes on the serpent’s behalf. (Whew, that’s kind of a mouthful, and I didn’t mention any of the supporting characters!)
There were two big, important things this chapter needed to accomplish to set the stage for the finale: 1) move the protagonists into place and 2) conclude the hero’s character arc.
In the previous draft, the conclusion of the hero’s character arc went like this:
Skipping ahead, there was a half-page digression where Poal, a minor antagonist, fought with another supporting character.
And later, the final supporting character joins Team Protagonist, uniting against Poal:
Yeah, notice how Poal didn’t merit inclusion in the one-sentence chapter summary, but he’s featured in all of these excerpts? When he’s a minor antagonist who’s going to be shuffled out of the way for the finale?
The scene continues:
This scene isn’t bad. But the framing is all wrong. We hear way too much from the supporting characters. Dylan’s not in focus. It doesn’t feel like a big moment for him. And there’s not enough space left in the book to give him another shot.
I care about Dylan winning Gorm over by standing up to Poal. Gorm, a troll child, was introduced as an antagonist who broke into Dylan’s home repeatedly and stole things from his family. Much later, we learn that he did so because the trolls needed weapons to fight the ash snakes. Then we meet his father, who serves as Dylan’s foil, a man who takes his character flaws to an unthinkable extreme.
The rewrite begins with conflict between Dylan and Deja:
This is so much more coherent. Dylan and Deja, the deuteragonist, are centered. The camera isn’t stuck on Poal. From this angle, what I intended for Dylan’s character arc is a lot more visible.
The new version loses some of the nuance about the supporting characters. Gorm and Red Teeth joining Team Protagonist has less oomph. Dylan and Deja don’t explicitly call out Poal for the way he treats Gorm.
But the beta reader that I showed the new version to didn’t feel like anything was missing. Wrapping up Dylan’s character arc satisfactorily was the most important job for this scene, not showing how Poal poisoned his relationships. Meanwhile, Dylan’s most important relationship is with Deja, who deserved more of the limelight.
This is a case where I had to erase some bullet points off my list that I thought were important. Ultimately, I just couldn’t cram those elements in. This chapter ended up a cool 3.1k, while its predecessor was 4.3k—an absolutely absurd length for middle grade! The art of cutting has been one of the hardest skills for me to learn as a writer, but I feel like I’m getting there.