You’ve Gotten This Far…

…now what?

You’ve gotten your momentum going and you’ve written the first chapter. You’ve started your first book, your 25th, or your 100th. Even if you have an outline you still might wonder, where do I go from here? Can I run with my outlines? What the hell am I doing? Should I even be writing a book?

The first thing to do is take a breath and congratulate yourself. You’ve gotten this far. The first chapter might be a thousand words, five thousand, or somewhere in the middle. There is no perfect word count that has to be in a chapter. (If there is somewhere, please let me know.) My normal word count for a chapter is 2500-3000 words. Sometimes they run shorter or longer. It depends on where I get that happy feeling where the scene should end. But that’s just me. The one rule you do want to follow no matter where the chapter ends, is that you want to have a hook.

The main character could be hanging over a cliff or getting ready to be eaten by demon-possessed zombies. Maybe your hero is Krampus and trying to decide if he wants to save his enemy, Santa Claus. Whatever the hook might be, it is important to keep the reader interested.

Then you get into your second chapter and figure out where to go from there. Some people make writing look easy. I wish I was one of those people. Writing at times is difficult for me. More than lately it’s been hard due to life, hurting fingers, or no motivation. However, I keep doing it because I want to see where the story goes. I try to keep the reader interested. I write what I would like to read.

No matter what you are writing, you’ve gotten this far. Write and don’t stop until the book is done. Then keep on going.

Best wishes on your endeavors.