Dividing a novel into chapters

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Hi

I've been doing a lot of rewriting of my novel and am trying to divide it up into chapters again. It is proving to be a bit tricky and I feel uncomfortable doing it, though I know it needs to be done. I am trying to make them more or less the same length and also try to have them end in a way that will make the reader curious about the next chapter.

Do any other writers have issues with doing this?

BTW I am unpublished and this is my first proper attempt at writing a novel with a view to sending it to an editor.

A novel doesn't necessarily need chapters. Plenty of novels are just one long chapter and they work fine. But if you feel that you need chapters, try to make every chapter a self-contained short story that can be understood without reading the other chapters.

A chapter could be defined as a small theme of the overall story; something that carries the story forward. There should be a point to the chapter. When your story has successfully told this point you can then define the section of pages as a chapter. For example a chapter could deal with everything the character did in relation to waking up for work. The chapter ends when the character gets into their car. Hopefully an interesting plot point happened to your character between waking up and leaving the house. Perhaps they were promoted, their spouse was recently admitted into a hospital, or they were told they would need to move to a foreign land. Such plot points could pique the reader's interest as they go into the next chapter.

If you want to keep the reader interested, you should end each chapter on a cliffhanger. But I would suggest you not try to make each chapter the same length. Doing that is unnecessary, and my detract from the overall quality of your novel. Chapters only need to be as long as they need to be. I've read books where the shortest chapter is just half a page, and the longest is over seventy.