When to break chapters

Taejang said:

Running some numbers, I counted 332 words on a page of a published book. At 391 pages and 18 chapters, that's roughly 130k words in the book and 7.2k words a chapter.

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Fiction pages are typically calculated in 250 words or around, but it's useless hanging on how many pages a book has when word count only matters. Don't calculate how many word there are in your book. Look at how many words there are through your word processor.

I know there are no hard rules on chapter lengths, and some will vary drastically, but my chapter 2 seems "long" to me when I read it.

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Did it seem long before you roughly calculated how many words there are? I bet not. But now it does, right?

If you want to cut it up, go ahead. Find someplace that feels you can sink a knife through. There are no decent guidelines for this. Feel for it.

Otherwise, I see no use in worrying about chapter length. What matters more is the content of that chapter and if you're able to carry the reader through it. No matter what the size of the chapter is, if you fail on those two regards, your story has failed for the reader.

Osulagh said:

Fiction pages are typically calculated in 250 words or around, but it's useless hanging on how many pages a book has when word count only matters. Don't calculate how many word there are in your book. Look at how many words there are through your word processor.

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In SF/F, the average is at least 300 words per page. 250 is more common for YA SF/F, and the font is huge in those.

Seconding what Osu said - it's about content, not word length.

I've seen bestsellers that have some long chapters and some short ones. It's about plot-related or style-related artistic separation in the right places, not splitting off chunks based on size. Like if you're an artist, you pick your paintbrush size based on the type of stroke that's best for your work (and probably different sized strokes in the same painting), not based on what Picasso used, you know?

Osulagh said:

Fiction pages are typically calculated in 250 words or around.

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Only in standard double-spaced Courier 12-point manuscript format. Which is not a bad thing, but becoming obsolete, in the days of the word-processor, which gives you a ~exact word count. Agents/editors today understand this word-processor word count, and what it means for the size of a book.

Published books commonly run ~300 words per page, up or down a bit. But word count is really all that matters. And words per chapter matter next to nothing at all.

caw

If your first two chapters are all you have so far, it might be worth waiting until you've finished your entire draft before going back and thinking about re-splitting chapters.

FWIW, 15k does seem on the long side to me, so if there's a good point half way through that chapter you could split it, then I'd consider it - but if there's a good artistic reason why the 15k chapter should stay as a coherent whole then that's more important than word count. Also, this could just be my personal preference for short chapters.

When you are done with the entire manuscript, make a list of scenes. Often, I find a group of scenes that focus on the same theme or events. Those are a chapter. My chapter titles come from the theme for the group.

This is not something to focus on in early drafts. You're likely to cut and move scenes around or combine scenes as you revise. You may even add a scene or two. Save worrying about this until the third draft, when the work has more focus and the path of the story is clear.

Also, consider that there are books with half page chapters and books with no chapters. Do what the story needs. Feeling your way will be easier when you reach this point.

15K does seems like a long chapter to me. Are there scene breaks within the chapter? If not, that's a lot to read at once.

My chapters tend to be between 2,000 and 4,000 words.

Interesting question. I never considered the word count. I always ended the chapter when it felt right (hard to gauge, I know). For me that's when the scene concluded but left enough questions for the reader to want to continue.

I've also broken my book into 6 parts ('Before the Quest', 'Quest for the First Item,' 'Quest for the Second Item', etc.) with each part broken up into maybe 7-8 chapters each. Most of those chapters focus on a particular character. Towards the end when I'm switching between antag and protag's POV, I combine them into the same chapters mostly to keep the chapter length consistent with the previous chapters, but also because a lot of time it's the same thing happening from a different POV.

Taejang said:

There are currently 14 scenes inside that chapter, so... yep. But even that seems like a lot for one chapter. I'm going to have to find some way to break it up.

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When you say 'scenes' do you mean parts told from different character POVs? 14 seems like an awful lot for one chapter. Reminds me of the Dan Brown or James Patterson way of making each one of those a separate chapter. Sometimes their chapters are only half a page long before they jump to another chapter in another character's POV for half a page (yeah, yeah, I know that's not scifi/fantasy. Well, a different kind of fantasy. ).

My quick & dirty method in Word: I hit a point where I think I might have a chapter break, drop three spaces, type 'Chapter', drop another three spaces, and go to the next scene. I don't bother to number them until later drafts. And I tend to keep chapters within 1200 to 3000 words, but with more focus on scenes than arbitrary word or page count.

Word counts vary hugely per page, depending on style of book (trade pb, mm pb, or hardcover), and of course font size, margins, spacing etc. It ranges from less than 250 per page to over 400, with an average for adult SF/F being somewhere around 300 or so.

I remember reading somewhere that a typical chapter is around 3700 words in adult fiction, but there is no set in stone number, and chapter lengths can vary greatly between books, or even within the same book.

I'm also a fan of the short chapter used sparingly for dramatic effect: a few paragraphs, maybe a page. It can set off the surrounding plot, give breathing space for readers, and let them know 'this is important'.

Just follow two rules:
1. Don't let a chapter drag on and be boring
2. Don't end a chapter at a point where the person doesn't care to read about that particular viewpoint again.

In other words, chapter length doesn't matter a damn bit. What's in the chapters is what is vitally important.

It is purely up to you how long you make chapters. They are more of a book-keeping tool for writers than anything meaningful for readers. To them if you make your story really engaging, the end of a chapter is just another unnoticed page turn as they eagerly continue reading. Or it can serve as a useful place to dog-ear a page while they rush to the bathroom to take care of urgent business.

The basic unit of a story is the scene, a series of connected events with a definite beginning and ending in time and space. The time scale might range from microseconds to millennia, the space might be a long path or a small area.

Some scenes are short: only a few events. Some are very long: many events. We may put one scene per chapter. More often we'd put several short scenes into one chapter. Or we might split a long scene over several chapters.

If a scene is long, we might end a chapter when an important event takes place. Such as a character exiting or entering a scene, or the main character changes their course, maybe reversing it (the chased becomes the chaser) or taking a side path.

Basically, chapters (and scenes) are literary tools for us to make creative use of, rather than follow any formula for their use.

Chapters are like paragraphs. They should have one basic theme.

So, if that long chapter is all on the same theme or scene, keep it. But if it goes something like "My characters are at the inn, arguing over the next step. They decide, then leave the inn and take that step," you might be able to break it at the point of the decision into two chapters.

If you can find a point that serves as a bit of a cliff-hanger in the middle, that's a good stopping point.

Chapter splitting

I think of chapters in terms of what I want to be accomplished by the characters. If they need to travel a great distance to find an artifact, then the travelling is one chapter and the search is another. If the searching has many obstacles involved then it could take more chapters.

Once I know what needs to happen, then I write if a chapter is longer than another its okay, some things take more time than others, readers know this. I am up to chapter five in writing the sequel to my first novel. Chapters average 5000 words, however chapter 1 is 7000 word and chapter 2 is 3000.
If you want to adjust the number of words in a chapter you can change the difficulty of whatever happens on the chapter or use random events, that do not affect the main story, to alter a chapters length. Most books have chapters that are widely different than most of the others, the same way some events in a person's life get more time than others (planning a wedding vs planning a birthday party). Hope this helps.

Taejang said:

This makes sense, but how then do you get feedback as you write? I suppose I can just give people scenes instead of chapters...

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I rarely seek opinions without a completed draft.

I put in arbitrary chapter breaks where I think they might be. I look at the theme and action in each scene and group accordingly. They change though. Chapters get combined as part of tightening up the story and breaks move because scenes have been moved, deleted, or added.

In fact, I may end up going through my steps more than once. My betas will tell me if the chapter end doesn't work too.