length question (again)

What kind of book? What genre?

Chapters are as long or as short as they need to be. It's a good idea to provide a couple of breaks in a longer chapter, so the reader can have a good place to pause if she wants--other than that, don't worry about it. The overall word count of your manuscript is what's important, not chapter length.

- Victoria

Your chapter lengths can be whatever you would like, especially however long you feel it takes for a nice, clean and appropriate break. However, many readers don't like extremely long chapters because they don't like to stop reading in the middle of one and 10,000 words is on the lengthy side.

The writer in me agrees completely with the sentiment that a chapter should be as long as it needs to be. Some of my chapters are two or three pages, while others run more than fifteen. I think varying the length can affect the pacing of the story, but my genre is horror/suspense, so that may not always apply.

But I must say that the reader in me doesn't like terribly long chapters. I like shorter chapters because I'm more likely to read a book in between other projects that I'm working on. I HATE to stop reading a book in mid-chapter, so I tend to avoid books written with long chapters because I just don't always have the time to get into them.

My best advice would be to look at what is happening within those chapters: is there no natural break that might be a little easier on the reader? If not, or if you feel like the chapter must be that long, then go for it and see what your agent or editor will eventually advise you.

How long is too long?

I've been writing a crime thriller and thinking about this. I've tried to keep my chapters at between 5000 and 6000 words max, on the assumption that the average person can read 100 words of polished prose per minute. Thus, one chapter equals one hour. This leads to the question of, well, when and where do people read. Six hours straight on the plane or an hour before they go to bed every night?

So basicly, the only conclusion I've reached is that I've managed to myself even more baffled than I was before I tried this new-fangled "thinking..."

The last thing you want to do is restrict yourself of "Oh, this chapter has to be this short/long." Just let it flow, is all I have to say. And if it looks really long, just put breaks inbetween places that can have breaks.

My gut reaction is that that's a really long chapter, and surely there must be natural breaks in it anyway? In which case why NOT divide it up? Or if you want it all one chapter, could there be sections to it?

Is there some kind of "chapter theory"? And I'm asking this more for myself than anything else... what makes a chapter a chapter? Why do they end where they do? I find myself putting breaks in the middle of chapters all the time, and wondering why I'm not starting a new chapter. I usually draw the actual chapter line at a moment of suspense, but I also used to write comic books which are serialized and need a little something to keep people eager for the next one.

My understanding is that chapters are a relic of the serialized novels that used to appear in newspapers. Readers are used to them, certainly, but what are they FOR anymore? Do they make a work more digestible? Could breaks serve the same purpose?

I write chapters the same way I write paragraphs. For paragraphs, I write a topic sentence and support it with as many sentences as necessary. For chapters I write a topic paragraph and support it with as many paragraphs as necessary. To me, a complete chapter is very nearly like a short story. And, as matter of fact, I have excerpted chapters out of novels I have been working on and submitted them to short-story contests.

I believe as some have suggested that it is necessary to give the reader a break from time to time. Most exceptionally long chapters have natural breaks.

breaks vs. chapters

In a well written work (and here I'm thinking more about commercial fiction, which lends itself to being tightly structured), breaks and new chapters should probably be there to help the rhythm of the story more than anything else.

I don't know.... A break would be the equivalent of a caesura in poetry or one beat of silence in a score? And a chapter break would be a pause, as well signaling the start of a new movement?

I think one of the easiest solutions to this (since there really is no right and wrong, technically) is to get ahold of several novels similar to the one you're writing (similar in genre, tone, etc.), take a look at how they did it and average it out. But even then, I'd still just use it as a guideline. As others have said, chapters can be as short as one word or as long as the entire book. Last year I read Whiskey Sour by J.A. Konrath and while most of his chapters were fairly uniform in length, he had one that was about a paragraph long. As it turned out, that "little" chapter was the most powerful one in the book.

I generally keep my chapters at 2,000 words and only use more words if I can't break from the scene.

But then, right now I write young adult. I've seen really long chapters in books before though so it is all a matter of what the book is about.

Would make for a pain in the *** though when agents ask for the first three chapters and it's 30,000 words.

ButtonTheCat said:

I generally keep my chapters at 2,000 words and only use more words if I can't break from the scene.

But then, right now I write young adult. I've seen really long chapters in books before though so it is all a matter of what the book is about.

Would make for a pain in the *** though when agents ask for the first three chapters and it's 30,000 words.

Click to expand...

That's why MOST agents typically ask for the first three chapters OR the first 50/60 pages. Perhaps not all, but most.