How Long Should A Chapter Be?

abdall

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This is more like...personal preference, I think, but I find that, usually, my chapters are about 10-15 pages long. Sometimes shorter. It really just depends on the chapter. As a writer, or a reader, how long do you think is a good average length for a chapter?
 

Brightdreamer

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Exactly as long as a piece of string: no longer, no shorter.

I've read chapters that were twenty or more pages long. I've read chapters that were one sentence long. I've also read books without chapters at all. (Myself, I like chapters to break the story up a bit; chapters make good places to leave the bookmark when it's time to do something else.)
 

lizmonster

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For me, it depends on the sort of story I'm writing. My series books are space opera, and chapters tend to run 1500-3000. My just-finished book is more character-driven, and has chapters as short as one line.

Brightdreamer touches on it, I think: it's about pacing. You can use chapter length to shape the narrative. It all depends on what your story needs.
 

Woollybear

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Pick up some Matt Haig (The Humans, or The Radleys) for a fun example of how nicely it can work to use very short chapters.

You can also play with scene length, paragraph length, sentence length.

All of it contributes to pacing.

FWIW my chapters range from 1500 to 3000 words and most are two scenes. I'm thinking of trying 500 word chapters. Haig illustrates how well it works.
 

maggiee19

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My current work in progress, all chapters are 4000 words. Right now, I'm 33,700 words in.
 

starrystorm

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I usually wait until I'm done with the first draft to figure that out. With my current WIP I mark how long each chapter was. So far I've noticed a trend. My chapters are either near 3,000 or 6,000, so when I redo it, I think I'll try to make each chapter around 3,000. Of course there are outliers as of now such as my nearly 7,000 word chapter and my 1,700 word chapter. I'll have to cut and reattach if I want this to work.

To me, though it doesn't matter how long chapters are. In my book currently being beta read, I have four page chapters and I have 20 page chapters. I kept it that way because there was 2 POV's and one tended to have short chapters (but more of them) and one tended to have long (but fewer) chapters.
 

Brooklyn_Story_Coach

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Exactly as long as a piece of string: no longer, no shorter.

I've read chapters that were twenty or more pages long. I've read chapters that were one sentence long. I've also read books without chapters at all. (Myself, I like chapters to break the story up a bit; chapters make good places to leave the bookmark when it's time to do something else.)

Pretty much this. There are no rules... only the story and how it feels to you. If you love a chapter that is a sentence... great! If you want a book w/o chapters (saying that made me think of a "Book with No Pictures" which I can recite from memory at this point) that is great as well. You just have to be true to yourself.
 

SwallowFeather

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I'm enjoying doing shorter chapters than previously. Maybe 3000 words or so (like 4-5 single-spaced word-processor pages.) I'm noticing this goes with a shift from covering long time periods (like, three chapters might span as many months) to covering intense action in real time (i.e. each day is described since there's so much going on.) This makes sense, as anyone would assume that shorter chapters give you faster pacing.
 

mafiaking1936

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For the little that I've written, my chapters have also averaged about 3000 words. But I think a better way to think about it is to look at each chapter as a reader, and try to get a feel for when you start to get bored or anxious for something new to happen. That might be sign to cut it down or to move onto to a new chapter. I'm currently reading Josiah Bancroft's Books of Babel series, and I notice a little trick he pulls is to end each chapter on just a little bit of a cliffhanger. Not always a major plot twist or action scene, just some event that makes you want to keep reading the next chapter. Also whenever I feel like the pacing is starting to drag a bit, it's like he uses time travel telepathy to pick just that moment to end the chapter. It's a skill I really wish I had.
 

Ninten

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What people commonly say is "as long as it needs to be", and that's pretty much spot on. However long it takes to complete the mini narrative arc of the chapter, to complete the scene, to resolve that chapter's conflict, or to get you to the next cliffhanger. I'm most comfortable with chapters that are around 2000 words long, but this has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of technique to make the book better--it's actually just because my writing groups usually accept submissions of about 2000-2500 words and I wound up internalizing that. My current WIP has chapters that are sometimes over 4000 words, and it always feels like I'm breaking some sort of rule, so every time I've got to remind myself: chapters can be as long (or short) as you want them to be.
 

PiaSophia

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As a writer I'd say: as long as you want it to be. Period.
But as a reader I'd say: not too long. And "too long" is rather difficult to define, actually. I like to read a chapter in one sitting. Sometimes I have a lot of time to read, and sometimes I feel like reading when I only have 15 or 30 minutes spare time. In the ideal world, I would at least read one chapter in that time. But then, some people obviously read fast and others read slowly, so that's not a good way to measure things. I think as long as your chapter makes sense (by that I mean you don't make it long just to have a long chapter, but also not short just to have a short chapter) and play with white space in your chapters so your reader can stop reading if they want even if they haven't finished the chapter yet.
 

Ninten

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As a writer I'd say: as long as you want it to be. Period.
But as a reader I'd say: not too long. And "too long" is rather difficult to define, actually. I like to read a chapter in one sitting. Sometimes I have a lot of time to read, and sometimes I feel like reading when I only have 15 or 30 minutes spare time. In the ideal world, I would at least read one chapter in that time. But then, some people obviously read fast and others read slowly, so that's not a good way to measure things. I think as long as your chapter makes sense (by that I mean you don't make it long just to have a long chapter, but also not short just to have a short chapter) and play with white space in your chapters so your reader can stop reading if they want even if they haven't finished the chapter yet.

Actually, on that note, from a reader's perspective, what effect do you find scene breaks to have? Scene breaks within a chapter offer fitting places to pause and take a rest, but I think on some level the reader is psychologically prompted to continue reading until the proper chapter break. From that angle, I know I sometimes find excessive amounts of scenes with distinct scene breaks within a chapter to be fatiguing. Especially if each of those scenes has its own little narrative arc--it can feel like you've been reading a lot longer than you actually have, just in terms of the amount of plot you've had to process. But maybe that's just me.
 

PiaSophia

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Actually, on that note, from a reader's perspective, what effect do you find scene breaks to have? Scene breaks within a chapter offer fitting places to pause and take a rest, but I think on some level the reader is psychologically prompted to continue reading until the proper chapter break. From that angle, I know I sometimes find excessive amounts of scenes with distinct scene breaks within a chapter to be fatiguing. Especially if each of those scenes has its own little narrative arc--it can feel like you've been reading a lot longer than you actually have, just in terms of the amount of plot you've had to process. But maybe that's just me.

Well, yeah, the reader is probably psychologically prompted to read until the proper chapter break. But how often does one get to read an entire chapter in one sitting? A person wanting some attention, the phone ringing, someone ringing the doorbell... and how annoying is it if you constantly have to work through a page, unintentionally rereading entire sentences until you find exactly where you was, and then something else disturbs you...

I'm overexaggerating a little, and I'm not saying a chapter should consists of white space after every three sentences, but I honestly do feel white space can give your chapter/book/story just that zest it might need.
 

Woollybear

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I rarely stop at a chapter break and I often stop on a random page. I read until I'm snoozy, put in a book mark and go to sleep.

:Yawn: