Where to break things

I have been thinking in a very gestural and unscientific way about how poems, short stories, and novels are similar and different, both for reader and writer.

Something comes to mind about pacing, tempo, and where to break things.

When working on a novel, finding the right chapter break is crucial. It’s also important to think about where to end paragraphs. Is the question of where to end paragraphs even more important in writing short stories? And decisions about line breaks, even in the very occasional poems I’m working on, seem similarly intuitive and challenging.

I am not claiming that sentences, or words, are not crucial in novels. But there does seem to be a point of comparison among the forms, with the question of chapters, paragraphs, and lines, and where to break them.

Now the question is: how to end this post?