Chapter length and starting new novel. I think a lot of writers do conceive of a chapter as being a single scene, and certainly if you think of the basic nature of fiction as being character in action, then you could think of a scene as a unit of action: an event by the end of which things are different from how they were at the beginning.
Of course, though, you have to link the scenes together, and those links can also be a chance to show the new state of affairs after that change, before you set about changing things yet again. For me, a chapter is a set of such scenes, and from more than one narrative, which belong together and add up to a bigger unit of the shape of the novel as a whole. Sometimes I'll work my way out of a scene and into the next one with continuous narrative, but other times I'll do the equivalent of 'Cut' at the end of a scene, with a double line space, or a *** to mark a really big jump in time or space.
Emma It sound like a really crap book, doesn't it. Average Word Length Per Chapter And Average Chapters Per Novel.