#21 Should You Write Your Middle-Grade Novel in Scenes or Chapters?

Today’s episode on the Middle Grade Made Easy(er) podcast is the first episode in a mini series I’ll be doing on writing scenes. The reason I’m doing this mini series is because scenes are the building blocks of your novel. They’re also mini stories in themselves, and if you can master how to write a compelling mini story in the form of a scene for your middle-grade novel, you can master how to write your whole novel.

So, in this episode, we’ll be covering:

1. the differences between scenes and chapters
2. reasons why you should write your novel as a series of scenes instead of chapters

What’s the difference between a scene and a chapter?

Scenes and chapters are not the same thing, and they both serve very different purposes in a story.

I often spend a lot of time on scenes with some of my coaching clients because, while they know that scenes are important, they’re not really sure what makes a scene, and so they’ll ask questions like:

• Must there be one scene per chapter?
• How long must a scene last?
• What exactly is a scene?
• Are scenes and chapters the same thing?
• Do I have to bother with scenes at all? Can’t I just write in chapters?

So let’s dive in and learn all about scenes and how they differ to chapters…

Scenes are building blocks which contribute to the structure of your story. They are also short stories in their own right with a beginning, middle and end, as well as a clear arc of change. One scene can last one chapter, or a series of scenes can work together to make a point within a chapter, or even over a few chapters. But no matter how you set up your chapters around your scenes, when you sit down to write your first draft, you must link all your scenes together to create a chain that eventually becomes your novel.

Think of scenes like pearls on a string. Each one on its own is a single precious pearl with value, but linked together on a string, they become something new: a necklace.

Chapters, on the other hand, are just markers in a novel that authors use to control how a reader reads their book. Unlike scenes, chapters have nothing to do with story structure, and they don’t necessarily have a beginning, middle or end to them. In fact, a chapter can even be one word or one sentence if you want it to be.

So, as you can see, scenes and chapters are very different one from the other, but they do share one thing in common: both scenes and chapters work together to create the pace in your middle-grade novel. 

For example: a middle-grade novel with very short chapters will feel like it has a quicker pace than a book with longer chapters. Chapters are easy for a reader to actually see in a book, so they’re what readers will normally notice and experience as they’re reading. But, scenes with their mini-arcs of change are actually what drives the story forward and, just like chapters, if they’re short and snappy, your novel will be fast-paced and, if they’re longer, the pacing in your story will slow down.

Now, I want to remind you that this is just the first episode in a mini-series on writing scenes, so I will cover exactly how to write a scene in the next episode but, for now, let’s have a look at some reasons why it’s best to write and revise your middle-grade novel in scenes instead of chapters.

Three reasons to write and revise your middle-grade novel in scenes

There are three important reasons why I advise the authors I work with to write in scenes rather than chapters:

#1: You can use scenes to outline your middle-grade novel

No matter what method you’re using to write your middle-grade novel, I think we can all agree that every story that has ever existed has a beginning, middle, and end, right? Regardless of how many acts you break the story down into, in general, the beginning is made up of 25% of the story, the middle is made up of 50%, and the end is made up of the remaining 25%.

If you’re writing a shorter middle-grade novel of 35,000 words, you can calculate that your:

• Beginning = 8,750 words
• Middle = 17,500 words
• End = 8,750 words

From there, you can calculate approximately how many scenes will make up the beginning, the middle and the end of your novel. In middle-grade novels, scenes are normally between 500 and 1,500 words depending on whether you’re writing for lower or upper middle grade, so let’s use 1,000 words to look at an example of how you’ll break this all down.

If you’re writing scenes of about 1,000 words, your beginning will have between eight and nine scenes, your middle will be made up of between seventeen and eighteen scenes, and your ending will be made up of another eight or nine scenes.

Of course, this isn’t an exact science but using word count and scenes together like this can help you find structure for your middle-grade novel, as well as help you outline your story before you start drafting. Knowing more or less how many scenes you have to tell your story in each act, as well as overall, will help you keep your story tight and on track.

#2: Writing in scenes is easier (and who doesn’t want some ease in the novel-writing process?)

If you’ve found yourself agonizing over how to write the perfect first chapter or whether you should be ending your chapters on cliffhangers, you are going to love writing in scenes! Instead of spending so much time on worries like these, you can actually make progress on your middle-grade novel and finish a first draft once you get into the habit of thinking and writing in scenes rather than chapters.

Not only will you not have to worry about how to start or end each chapter, you also won’t have to think about how the end of your last chapter transitions into the beginning of your next chapter. You can simply write a complete scene with a beginning, middle, end and a mini-arc of change, then link it to the next scene and so on until your novel is done.

Then, once your first draft is finished, you can break your complete story into chapters, making sure that the chapter breaks fall at the most exciting or interesting part of a scene. This is how you create that forward movement that pulls your reader through your book from the first to last pages.

#3. Scenes will help you revise

If you know the elements that need to work together to make a solid scene, it will be much easier for you during revision to spot a scene that isn’t working than to spot a chapter that isn’t working. Why? Because there are no easy-to-check guidelines for writing chapters like there are for writing scenes.

When you can actually see how a scene isn’t contributing to the global story or moving the plot forward, then you can fix it.

For example: for those of you who are writing sci-fi, fantasy or historical fiction and spend a lot of time on world-building, if you spot a scene during revision that is full of exposition but doesn’t have a beginning, middle, end and an arc of change, you don’t have a working scene, you just have an info-dump. So, knowing how to write a solid scene will help you to take that exposition and work it into the scene to make sure that it actually drives the story forward.

Here’s another example: if you’ve used the percentages of 25% of your word count for the beginning and ending of your story, and 50% for the middle to outline your novel, as I talked about before, you can use the total number of scenes you were targeting to help you trim extra scenes your story doesn’t actually need during revision. Likewise, you can use those calculations to decide if you need to flesh out your novel more too.

To sum up…

That’s it for today’s episode, but before I let you go, let me quickly sum up what we’ve covered today:

• Scenes and chapters serve different purposes in your story.
• Scenes are building blocks which contribute toward the structure of your story. They have a beginning, middle and end, as well as an arc of change.
• Chapters are markers that you can use to control how a reader reads your book but have nothing to do with the structure of your story.
• Both scenes and chapters contribute to the pace of your middle-grade novel.
• You can use scenes to outline and revise your novel, and writing in scenes instead of chapters actually makes the drafting and revision process easier and less stressful.

If you want to get a better understanding of scenes, stay tuned to the Middle Grade Easy(er) podcast over the next two months as I’ll be covering how to write a solid scene, the elements that all scenes need to work, and when you should write in scene rather than in summary.