Chapter Length

The obvious answer: A chapter is as long as it needs to be. No longer, no shorter.

The real answer: Mine tend to average about 3,000 words. I apparently think in scenes of that length.

How long is a string?

1000 words (about 3-4 pages) is not that short.


Seriously, read your favorite YA novels. Read any novel. If you find that magic number, let us know.

My chapters tend to be around ten double-spaced pages.

But, as everybody else said, it really depends.

Mine currently tend to be around 1,250. I find them on the short side, but they're just the right places for chapter breaks. I think they'll get longer as I go; I've only got three so far.

If you feel like your chapter's done, then it is.

Good luck!

Jordygirl said:

I write YA and my chapters, much like my novels, are on the short side. Except that my chapters seem really short. They hover around 1,000 words usually and I'm wondering if this is normal. How long do your chapters go, on average? I'm especially interested in this if you write YA also.

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I never planned my chapter lengths but it turned out they were longer at the beginning of the book and shortened up as I neared the end. For me, chapter lengths have to do with pacing. Heightened tensions and action pretty much force me into writing shorter chapters. As for the YA crowd, they are my most avid readers.
Linnea

In my YA work -- somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 words, generally, though some of my chapters are a bit longer or a bit shorter.

In the thriller WIP -- about 1,000 to 1,500 words.

As others have said, end a chapter whenever it "feels" like the end. But if you are an outliner, and you have a sense of how long certain scenes, etc., are going to run, you can structure your chapters to have similar lengths. (I would say that chapters can be any length, but if you have chapters of 900 words and 7,000 words in the same book, without any particular style choices to support the difference in pacing, readers might find it jarring.)

I have some that are 12,000, but the average is arount 8-9,000

For YA, you're right to be conscious of chapter length. These are kids, not word-swallowing adults, and they will often look ahead to see how much more to read before chapter end. Your length of 1,000 is probably fine, and I agree with ClaudiaGray's suggestion of 2,500 to 4,000 as okay. But they are, after all, only suggestions. Keep in mind your story, your pace, and your readers' reading level. A 9,000-12,000 word chapter is not for YA unless you're targeting the big kids.

That said, my first YA reader was eight, a prodigy, and grokked the book so much she enticed her 5th grade class to study the book as a 3-week study in creative writing. As a mystery, it worked with 2,500-word chapters.

I find it easier to write chapters of about 1,000 - 1,500 words. I tend to lengthen them by about 500 words when revisiting & revising.

My WIP is a crime thriller with a little over 70,000 actual words broken into 21 fairly evenly spaced chapters. I sent it out to my beta readers and all of them said it was a very fast read, but I received no comments on chapter length.
I've been going through my post beta revision and it seems that the book should be proken into many more, shorter chapters, several of them would be about 5 double spaced pages, some would be 11 to 15 pages.
Some scenes just don't seem to fit anywhere except in their own chapter and that would make a chapter one paragraph long. I've read books where the author has done this and never gave it a thought when I was reading, so I'm guessing it can be done without jarring the reader out of the story.
I've seen your responses regarding a chapter is as long as it has to be, and after this last revision, I think the story reads better. My question is:

Since it increases the word count using the 250 words per page method what would editors think of short, 5 page chapters ?

When I started writing, my chapters were quite long (14-20 pages) After the editor got a hold of my first draft, I found I was running into all kinds of POV problems. I surveyed a dozen novels I knew were favors of my wife and found the chapters fairly short (4 to 8 pages) but they were crystal clear in terms of the scene breaks and the absence of POV switches. I now try to hit 6-8 pages, but have gone as low as 5. This doesn't seem to bother my publisher (POV switches do). On occasion I have gone up to 18 pages because there was no way to break up the chapter with out it appearing phony.

Just my thoughts.

I agree that most YA novels average between 1,000 and 4,000 words, so I think you're okay.

In my YA novel, each of my chapters fall somewhere between 2,100 to 3,200 words. I have 16 chapters, and around 40,000 words total.

Sounds like you're on the right track. . . .