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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45143
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I understand you have short and long chapters.

How about splitting the longer ones into several smaller chapters?

The only rules I can come up with for chapters are:

- The reader uses them as a "reading unit" so they should probably be about equal in size and not too long (but I've seen books with basically one chapter per page...)
- The reader might put the book down when having finished one chapter. So you might want to make sure the chapter ends on a point where the story is interesting enough to get the reader to come back the next day.

Apart from that, I don't think anything says a chapter have to look in a special way.

I've seen authors switching POV in the middle of a chapter, or keeping a POV per chapter, or having many chapters in one POV followed by one chapter with many POVs, or jumping back in time in the middle of a chapter, or having a separate chapter for a flashback. The same goes for settings and plots.

The division of a text into chapters is probably one of the things in writing that has least rules of all.

This is especially true with regards to story structure and dramaturgy. Your division of the story into chapters will almost definitely not affect the overall structure and story arc. Unless you move chapters around...

You could almost think of chapters as the packages your new IKEA furniture comes in. You rip it apart and put it together in your living room, regardless of if it comes in one, or five packages.

Your reader will do the same with your chapters and build your story in their mind if it's in one or 50 chapters.

I was about to say, parts have more logic to them, but when I picked an example I wanted to use, it turned out, there wasn't that much logic there. ("The Passage" by Justin Cronin, I thought it was divided into parts separated by time jumps, but I don't think so—if I could just find that book and verify that...)

Or, as in for instance "The Cloud Atlas", where parts are an important element of the structure. Each part contains one half of a completely different type of story in that book.

Parts pretty much follow the same logic, or lack thereof, as chapters. Maybe, because they are optional, a reader might want them to have a more logical reason to be there than chapters.

I've sometimes experimented with putting an act in a part each, but I don't think it's needed. In fact, it could seem blatant and make the reader aware that you are throwing acts at them.

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