How to Rise From the Dead on Wattpad - A practical guide to getting noticed

Tip 10: Write Shorter Chapters

This is a straight-up numbers strategy. Let's say you have a chapter consisting of 4000 words. When someone visits and votes on it, you get one read and one vote. What if that was broken up into four chapters of 1000 words each? That would result in four reads and four votes. That's four times as much fuel going into your trending machine.

I'm not suggesting you start breaking your story into nonsensical pieces. Where you end your "story part" (since Wattpad calls them parts) should still be at a place with a natural pause in it. When I wrote Siena, it was long before I discovered Wattpad. My chapters were sometimes around 1000, but sometimes 2000 or more. When I began posting here, I broke up the chapters into 1a, 2a, etc. but I made sure to do it either at a change of scene, a dialogue bomb (I'll explain this in a bit), or a slowdown in the flow. Never break up a scene that has great flow (unless it's a cliffhanger) for the sake of numbers.

WHEN TO END/BREAK YOUR CHAPTER

Scene Changes

If there's ever a passage of time, that's a great place to either break or end your chapter. Instead of using *** to indicate time passing, you can end or break the chapter there. (I'm distinguishing between "break" and "end" because some writers really like long chapters simply because they organize stories in their heads differently. Breaking a chapter means spreading it across multiple parts. Ending a chapter means starting a new one in the next part. It's all a matter of preference.)

Dialogue Bomb

Ending a chapter in the middle of a conversation may seem odd, but it often acts as a cliffhanger. For example, two people are having a discussion, and then one of them says, "I killed someone." The conversation is obviously not over, but when that person drops the bomb, like BOOM I KILLED SOMEONE, it makes sense to pause to allow the reader to react. The pause gives readers time to speculate, wondering what the other person's reaction is going to be or who they could have possibly killed. It's a serious turn in the conversation, and such cliffhangers are page-turners.

Slow Flow

Although it's not an ideal place to break a chapter, it'll be less disruptive to the reading experience if you break it where the pace is slow. The reason it's less ideal is because it's not a page-turner, and could increase the chance of the reader putting the book down to go do something else. But if you really want to break it, a pause in the scene would work.

There's no right or wrong length for a chapter. It's purely up to personal preference. This is just an additional strategy to increase your numbers if you decide to play the game.