A basic chapter breakdown will help you spot plot holes, loose ends, redundancy, and more. But there are many ways to customize your chapter breakdown to meet your needs. So if you’re just starting revisions or you’ve already inventoried your scenes, consider adding the following columns to make a custom tool.
Wordcounts
Agents, publishers, and editors all have expectations for how long a book should be, and more importantly, so do readers. For this reason alone, you should definitely know the wordcount of your manuscript.
But wordcounts can reveal a lot more, especially if you look at different kinds. In fact, wordcounts are one of the best ways to customize a chapter breakdown options to include after summary and purpose.
Cumulative Wordcount
The cumulative wordcount is how many words have been written up to and including the scene or chapter in question. Recording the cumulative wordcount can be helpful for analyzing the structure of your story and determining if your major plot points are happening at appropriate times.
For example, if your manuscript is 70,000 words long and your inciting incident doesn’t happen until 45,000 words in, your story might not be starting in the right place or it might be ending too soon.
Chapter and Scene Wordcount
Recording the wordcount for each chapter can help you spot chapters that are much shorter or longer than the others in the manuscript. You can then look at your scene summaries and purposes to see if there’s a better way to break up such chapters or if the variation in chapter length is warranted.
If chapter wordcount isn’t enough, you can go even deeper and record the wordcount for each scene. This can help you make decisions about how to break up scenes. For example, if your scene wordcounts reveal multiple short scenes in a row, all with similar purposes, you might consider combining them.
Both chapter and scene wordcounts can provide insight on pacing. If you’ve got a long wordcount for a scene that’s meant to be fast paced, you might want to re-read it to make sure sentences aren’t long-winded and slow. Or if you’ve got a short wordcount for a scene but the purpose statement in your breakdown says that the scene reveals a lot of details about the plot or characters, you might want to double check the manuscript for unintentional infodumping.
Point of View
If your manuscript alternates point of view, I highly recommend recording whose point of view governs each scene. It’ll help you eliminate unintentional head hopping, determine if all points of view are necessary, and if there’s balanced representation of POV characters (or purposely imbalanced, if that’s more your style).
If you’ve recorded wordcounts, you can even do some math and add up words per POV character.
Setting
Even if your story doesn’t take place across a whole country or galaxy, recording setting of each scene can be a useful. It will allow you to ensure each scene is grounded in place and time.
If you find yourself having trouble filling out the setting info as you review your manuscript, you may need to add more description to your manuscript.
Recording setting can also reveal patterns. True story: When doing my own chapter breakdown, I noticed that in the first half of my manuscript, almost every chapter had a scene that took place in a car. I didn’t intend that and it makes my story repetitive, so I’m flagging that to change.
Timeline
Even when you’re writing a chronological narrative, it’s easy to mix up weeks, days, and other markers of time when drafting. Having an easy reference for when different scenes happen can help you spot timeline issues. For example, if characters talk on the phone on Saturday and plan to meet up on Wednesday for coffee and the next chapter says “the next day, they met at the café,” something needs to change.
If your manuscript follows different characters, especially if they’re in different places, recording timeline details can also help you keep track of when storylines overlap.
Characters
Recording point-of-view characters may be enough for some manuscripts, but a large cast may call for recording who is in each scene. This can help you keep track of when characters first appear and who’s met who. It might even help you spot plot holes. For example, if the murderer and the detective in your mystery novel appear in a scene together at the same time the murder happens, you better come up with a good explanation for how the murderer managed to pull off the crime.
Status
Because a chapter breakdown is a tool you can use while revising, a status column can help you track your progress. You can record simple statuses like “to do,” “in progress” and “done.” Or if more detail is helpful, you can write things like “rewriting to fix continuity” or “just needs spell check.”
A status column can help you plan out your revision and changing the status to “done” can be a fun boost to keep you engaged in revisions.
Remember: Customize Your Chapter Breakdown With The Goal of Revision
There are tons of options for customizing your chapter breakdown! So choose what works for you and your manuscript. Just remember that the goal is to revise your manuscript. Don’t let making a super detailed chapter breakdown keep you from getting back to writing and revising.
Instead, experiment to find what works best for you. If that means recording only summary and purpose for the chapters you feel confident about and recording more details for the more troublesome scenes, that is fine! Your chapter breakdown is your tool to use as you please.
That said, if there’s something else you find helpful to record or track while revising, I’d love to hear about it!
