Appropriate Chapter Breaks

So, the first several drafts of this book didn't actually include chapters.  I had it organized into sections, and then I would give little line breaks in the text.  I'm fairly certain they were random in the first couple of drafts. Then, on the third, I tried to ensure that the breaks were at least logical.

For the fourth draft (the one I was working on back in November), I added chapters.  Given where I added the chapters, they were fairly logical, but my chapters ranged from being three pages long, to ten pages long. Which, is too much of a discrepancy, in my opinion.

Up until now with draft five, the chapter breaks have been fairly easy fixes (mostly just splitting longer chapters into two shorter ones).  Today, however, I ran into two chapters that needed to be three chapters between the original two, so I ended up spending quite a bit of time figuring out where the best (most natural) split was.

Also, now my primary editor is telling me to change up where some chapter breaks are.  I haven't looked too far into her suggestions, but she's probably got a point.  She may be finding more natural breaks where I was looking a lot at word-count and then second at naturalness.

Other big things that I was dealing with today was character motivation.  I have a bit of backstory for one character that I'm thinking of adding, but I'm not sure when to start incorporating it (if I add it at all).  I thought about incorporating it today, in those few chapters I was working on, but decided if I do choose to add it in, I can always do it at a later point because it makes the most sense.  So, things I filed under "I don't have to deal with it now, so I can move on."

Then, I had a moment where one of my characters surprised me.  I can't really say much about this particular instance in which she surprised me.  It would take too much explaining for one line and the significance is lost out of context, anyway.  Granted, Alice is surprising sometimes.  And amusing.  And I love her.

On a completely different note, I'm fairly certain there was more I wanted to say, but I've forgotten by now.  Sometimes, I think about liveblogging my writing, but blogger's not really set up for liveblogging, and besides, if I take the time to blog, I lose the groove of writing.  Le sigh.

That's all for now!