# Chapter Length



## Philip Overby (Jan 13, 2014)

I know this must have been posted somewhere before, but I wanted to start the discussion fresh for newer members and such. 

I know this one of those really subjective topics that depends a lot on style and such, but I was just wondering what is your average chapter length? I find that mine vary from 2,500 words to 5,000. I know some writers prefer longer chapters (especially in fantasy), but I notice a lot of authors I like tend to do shorter ones. My writing isn't always heavily descriptive also, so that may attribute to my shorter chapters. My longer chapters tend to have scene breaks in them.

I get that writing it until it feels finished is the best advice and all, but just wanted to get a general sense from the forum.

Also, when you're reading, do you tend to like longer chapters or shorter ones? I read in short bursts most of the time, so I'd say I probably prefer both writing and reading short chapters, but I don't mind reading a long one if I really like the writer.

Mostly I'd like to get a sense of what your average chapter length is (just an estimate) and what your general feeling is about shorter or longer chapters, both writing and reading.

Thoughts?


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## BWFoster78 (Jan 13, 2014)

I find myself liking shorter chapters more and more.  Of course, I like fast pace without a lot of description, so...

My chapters are averaging in the 1000-2000 word range.


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## Svrtnsse (Jan 13, 2014)

I'm a bit wordy and I like my descriptions and I guess it's reflected in the length of my chapters:

Chapter 1: 7,754
Chapter 2: 4,854
Chapter 3: 6,258
Chapter 4: 9,109
Chapter 5: 5,451


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## T.Allen.Smith (Jan 13, 2014)

As far as reading is concerned, I don't really care as long as it feels right.   

For writing, my chapters tend to range from 2000 to 8000 words, with an average around 5000. I will say though, if they get much over 8000, I look for a way to break the chapter into two.


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## teacup (Jan 13, 2014)

Mine are usually around 4-5k, though at least one has reached 7k words.
I suppose a big reason why I have kinda long chapters are because I usually have 3 POVs split throughout any one chapter (some are just 1 pov, or 2, though.) So naturally, with everything going on with each POV, the word count would probably be expected to go up rather than having just 1 POV per chapter. Though now that I've checked, one of my 7k chapters is just 1 POV, albeit with a lot going on.
Another reason why my chapters are this length is simply because I write until I hit a natural chapter break. If one comes 4k into a chapter, and I've covered everything I wanted to cover, then 4k it shall be. If it's 9k, then 9k it shall be. Part of me does wish that I naturally wrote short chapters, though, but I do like mine as they are.


Short chapters do have their advantages. They are usually faster paced and can keep a reader reading more, especially if used with a hook at the end of each chapter. I think The Hunger Games books are a good example of this. I didn't care much for any of the characters, but the short chapters with the hooks just made me keep reading to see what happened next. 
I do generally prefer shorter chapters, but that's just because I hate stopping mid chapter, so with shorter chapters I can get to the end of one and stop reading easier, say, if I'm tired and am reading before sleeping.


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## Philip Overby (Jan 13, 2014)

I just looked at my WIP and it looks like my average is 4,000-5,000. I only have one that goes over 6,000. This is a first draft though, so there's a chance that some chapters may be extended significantly and some may be the opposite. 

The reason I thought of this question is because I'm doing a 52 First Chapter Challenge. I'm going to try to write several first chapters within the year of potential new projects just to see how many I can get that are interesting. My first two weeks, my first chapters have been 2,500 and 1,500 words. I guess those don't feel too short for me especially as first chapters. I tend to like shorter first chapters myself and then "meatier" ones as I go on. 

In any case, in the interest of pacing I didn't want super short chapters interspersed with super long ones, so I guess it's working out the way I want so far.


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## James G Pearson (Jan 13, 2014)

Mine is around the 1600-2000 mark, though depending on what's happening, it can easily go over 3000. I try not to write long chapters or have too much description. A leave most of it to the imagination of the reader.


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## Steerpike (Jan 13, 2014)

As a reader, I don't really care how long the chapters are or even whether a book has chapters. When writing, I start a chapter when it seems natural to do so, and don't concern myself with the length. Some chapters are relatively short, others fairly long.


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## Ireth (Jan 13, 2014)

Mine tend to average out at about 3500-4000 words. I like keeping them consistent when I can.


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## MVV (Jan 13, 2014)

BWFoster78 said:


> My chapters are averaging in the 1000-2000 word range.



Same here.


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## Penpilot (Jan 13, 2014)

The range of my chapters is 800-4000ish worlds. The 4000 word upper end is an artificial cap I impose on myself. If a chapter exceeds 4000 words, I look to break it into two chapters. Usually my chapters average out to around 2500 words per. For me, that's a nice length were there's enough room to do what you need and not over stay your welcome. 

Personally, I don't have a chapter length preference when reading, because I'm not afraid to put down a book mid-chapter. But I do take into consideration the chapter length before start a chapter. Depending on the time, I might not start the chapter because I know I won't finish.


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## A. E. Lowan (Jan 13, 2014)

I tend to think more in terms of pages rather than words - probably as a result of learning to write on a typewriter, who knows?  My chapters tend to run anywhere from 8 - 25 pages, depending on what's going on and how long they need to be - and the 25 is only so far, I may get longer.  Since our chapters tend to be a bit episodic I go with a natural flow and don't think in terms of "I need to keep this at x length."  I'm a very natural writer and put most of my brain sweat into making sure our world is accurate and realistic while still being entertaining, and not so much into artificially structuring our format.  This means that maybe our hooks are super-gripping (or non-existent) or maybe we don't have thriller-length chapters, but so far it's worked well for us.  No one has yet said, "This was great - you just had too many words in this chapter."


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## Ophiucha (Jan 13, 2014)

I have a dreadfully bad habit of having full-length novels that have like... five or six 'chapters'. One might more accurately call them 'parts'. I would say each scene ranges from 800 words to about 4,000, unless it is a rather climactic scene (which would probably be split in two at a good cliffhanger spot if I _were_ dividing them into chapters).

When I'm reading, I don't tend to notice/care how long a chapter is since I'll stop at any double spaced or *** break provided in the text as I need to, but I admit I'm not keen on _very_ short chapters. Like, those one paragraph ones that take up less than the whole page? Just the formatting of it jars me a little, takes me out of the reading for a moment.


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## Philip Overby (Jan 13, 2014)

Not that this is a super important topic or anything, but just wanted to get a sense of what others were doing. Yeah, sure, it depends on each author, story etc. etc. but I've noticed patterns in my own work that I wondered if others have as well. From a general sense, I find that fantasy chapters tend to be long. For me, I see chapters as a way to say, "OK, time for a break." I'm not a marathon reader so I guess I write for people who aren't the same.

Anyway, thanks for the comments so far!


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## buyjupiter (Jan 13, 2014)

Phil the Drill said:


> I'm not a marathon reader so I guess I write for people who aren't the same.



I am a marathon reader. For example, one of the A Song of Ice and Fire books takes me about three or four days to get through if I really focus. That said, it's much easier to stay sucked in if you're doing short POV chapters and you leave it on a cliff hanger for the best POV and then are an absolute evil [insert your choice curse word here] and don't get back to that POV for fifty pages. There have been lots of times where I'll need to do something and I'll bargain with myself about how much more reading I can do before "x" has to be completed. (Usually, it's sleep that suffers.)

And I suppose that's one of the things about chapter length: how many times does a POV shift within a chapter? If it's more than once, I think it should be broken up into different chapters to convey the shifts more clearly. (I don't know that doing it GRRM style with every POV getting its own chapter is the absolute best way of doing it, but it does work.)

My chapters tend to be in the 3-4k word range, end on cliffhangers, and if they shift POV they only do it once.


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## Svrtnsse (Jan 13, 2014)

Phil the Drill said:


> Not that this is a super important topic or anything, but just wanted to get a sense of what others were doing.



Same. It doesn't all have to be super serious technical stuff all the time. Sometimes it's nice to just show off different things; "this is how I do it".

I don't shift PoV at all in my story and so far I've only started a new chapter where I felt that a significant enough amount of time has passed since the previous scene - like between days or after a long trip or something along those lines.


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## Philip Overby (Jan 13, 2014)

buyjupiter said:


> I am a marathon reader. For example, one of the A Song of Ice and Fire books takes me about three or four days to get through if I really focus. That said, it's much easier to stay sucked in if you're doing short POV chapters and you leave it on a cliff hanger for the best POV and then are an absolute evil [insert your choice curse word here] and don't get back to that POV for fifty pages. There have been lots of times where I'll need to do something and I'll bargain with myself about how much more reading I can do before "x" has to be completed. (Usually, it's sleep that suffers.)
> 
> And I suppose that's one of the things about chapter length: how many times does a POV shift within a chapter? If it's more than once, I think it should be broken up into different chapters to convey the shifts more clearly. (I don't know that doing it GRRM style with every POV getting its own chapter is the absolute best way of doing it, but it does work.)
> 
> My chapters tend to be in the 3-4k word range, end on cliffhangers, and if they shift POV they only do it once.



I grew up reading the Dragonlance books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and they always tended to split the party up and have them doing different things. I always loved that for whatever reason and it _did_ give me more of an incentive to keep reading to see what was going to happen next. Not sure that method works for everyone, but it certainly did for me. The same goes for Martin's works.

However, as of late, I'm not able to do that as much. Maybe it has something to do with not having a comfortable place to read for a long period of time. Most of my reading is not done in hour intervals or anything. In the case of Martin, I could read for hours in some cases, but other books I tend to inch through more often than not.


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## wordwalker (Jan 13, 2014)

I do 4-6K chapters, but differently. I only do one POV, but I divide my story up so that most chapters have a major event of one kind or another, and then construct each around buildup to that. I've found it's a great length for sweeping readers in.

I have a lot of faith in the idea that readers average 7.5K-15K reading at a sitting, so I like to think my chapters are perfect for encouraging them to hand on through a second one, and then either follow the thrill ride for a third or put the book down another would be too much of a good thing for now. There's more than one way to be evil.


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## stephenspower (Jan 13, 2014)

When I started writing the novel that I should be polishing instead of reading this forum, I was also curious how long other authors' chapters were to gauge my own. So while in the library one day I grabbed 8 books from the near-at-hand new release shelf and paperback stacks: a James Patterson, a Janet Evanovich, Da Vinci Code, The Shining, a technothriller, a woman's historical, Redshirts and one I can't remember. Patterson had the shortest chapters at around 520 words. Evanovich had the longest at around 3100. King's chapters were broken into subchapters that came out at around 2500 words. Overall average: 2106. Da Vinci Code nearly hit the nail on the head at 2104. 

Of course only after I finished my first draft did I see my error. Those are 2100 estimated words. An actual word count, like your computer gives you, would be 16% less, I figured out. So a better count for bestseller chapters would be 1750 actual words per chapter. 

With this in mind, I'm doing what King does in The Shining: Chapters made up of 2100 (plus or minus 400) word subchapters, which are then broken into several to many pov sections to keep things rolling for both the reader and for me while writing. Essentially I applied a game design theory my chapters: a series of small challenges (finishing sections) leading to a boss (finishing the subchapter) leading to a big boss (finishing the overall chapter). My subchapters are all over the range I set for myself, which is probably good, but on average across whole chapters they're coming in between 1900 and 2100 words. 

Hopefully this will all have the effect I felt while reading the Da Vinci Code: the story will move so fast readers won't be able to slow down and consider how much of it's nonsense. Personally I like the limit because then I can't ramble on. I have to be concise.


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## JRFLynn (Jan 13, 2014)

Goodness, my chapters range from 15-25 pages more of less. The last one I finished was 16.5k, with usually 2-3 POV changes. I have no idea if that's reasonable, just going with it, and it's probably going be edited down in later drafts. 

Yet, in other projects it's around 2k. 

So it varies depending on the story.


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## Malik (Jan 13, 2014)

I change my chapter lengths as the action increases. Toward the end, as many things are happening simultaneously in different places, I have some chapters that are less than a hundred words long.


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## BWFoster78 (Jan 15, 2014)

> I don't shift PoV at all in my story and so far I've only started a new chapter where I felt that a significant enough amount of time has passed since the previous scene - like between days or after a long trip or something along those lines.



Every thread about chapters on this site that I've read basically states that you can break up chapters however you like.  My editor, interestingly enough, has a different opinion.  She says that, "a chapter is a single unit of tension."


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## Steerpike (Jan 15, 2014)

BWFoster78 said:


> Every thread about chapters on this site that I've read basically states that you can break up chapters however you like.  My editor, interestingly enough, has a different opinion.  She says that, "a chapter is a single unit of tension."



All you have to do is look through any number of published books, whether in fantasy or otherwise, to see that your editor's definition is too restrictive. Some authors take the approach your editor suggests; many others do not. I see more of your editor's approach outside of fantasy than within it.


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## Philip Overby (Jan 15, 2014)

Maybe I haven't paid enough attention to every single novel I read, but I find the books I enjoy the most end chapters with some sort of built up of tension so the reader will want to read the next chapter. A hook or tease of some sort. If every chapter just ends with nothing of major significance happening, or just abruptly ends, it may lead me to go read something else. I've had to work on this myself in my writing as I've heard in some of my chapters it feels like nothing is happening. I know not every chapter has to be super action packed, but I do believe it needs to have tension that builds throughout. This is in my own case. I'm not suggesting every novel should follow this standard.

I tend to think that genre fiction often follows certain conventions because readers like to have something somewhat familiar in the format and structure of what they're reading. Sure, it can veer off the path sometimes, but I'm struggling to think of a novel that I enjoyed that just ended chapters whenever the writer felt like it.


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## BWFoster78 (Jan 15, 2014)

Steerpike said:


> All you have to do is look through any number of published books, whether in fantasy or otherwise, to see that your editor's definition is too restrictive. Some authors take the approach your editor suggests; many others do not. I see more of your editor's approach outside of fantasy than within it.



You know me - I've never met a rule I didn't like 

Speaking of which, I went back and found her actual quote, and it was, "a single unit of conflict," not tension as I originally wrote.  I don't think that matters a whole heckavalot, but I wanted to be accurate.

Seriously, though, I've found that the advice caused me to focus each chapter around a central theme of a particular conflict.  Not saying that everyone should do so, but I like, so far, how it has transformed the way I'm telling my story.


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## Steerpike (Jan 15, 2014)

BWFoster78 said:


> You know me - I've never met a rule I didn't like
> 
> Speaking of which, I went back and found her actual quote, and it was, "a single unit of conflict," not tension as I originally wrote.  I don't think that matters a whole heckavalot, but I wanted to be accurate.
> 
> Seriously, though, I've found that the advice caused me to focus each chapter around a central theme of a particular conflict.  Not saying that everyone should do so, but I like, so far, how it has transformed the way I'm telling my story.



I don't think it is a bad approach at all. I see more of it in thrillers than in fantasy. In a way, it's too bad you don't like detective-type novels, because with respect to this approach to chapters and a lot of the others approaches to writing you advocate, two of my favorite authors - Michael Connelly and Robert Crais - have pretty much perfected it and hit it out of the park time and again.

I think the approach would also work well with fantasy, or really with any genre, but I don't see it that often in fantasy works.


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## Caged Maiden (Jan 15, 2014)

In first drafts, chapters are whenever I feel the story calls for it, for example, when a scene ends or a new one begins.  In my current novel, though, I make each chapter a day.  A day may have one POV or it may have three, but it's a given amount of time, from wherever the first event of a day begins, to the end of that last scene (sometimes stretching a little after midnight).  I actually enjoy how it turns out that a lot of the tense scenes occur at night, therefore, I have a great opportunity to close in the middle of  a scene and finish the scene (beginning at midnight) in the next chapter.

I keep my chapters as close to 3000-3500 words as possible, because I thought it was important to keep some kind of consistency.  That being said, there are some which naturally fell outside my aim, and I left them as I needed them to be written.  Chapter title list:


Vendetta (Revenge)  4128 
Dono del Cielo (Gift of the Sky) 2941 
Inchiostro e Ceneri  (Ink and Ash) 3605 
Marchio del Tradimento (Marks of Betrayal) 3390 
Odore di Ratto (Smells Like a Rat) 3925 
Lettera senza Firma (Letter with no Signature) 3147 
Pallido Corvo (Pale Ravens) 3060 
Morte nella Notte (Death in the Night) 3242 
Il Casetta con una Fregatura (Cottage with a Catch) 3625 
Anime Inquiete (Restless Souls) 2989 
Seconda Impressione (Second Impression) 3422 
Una Rosa Legata in Ferro (A Rose Bound in Iron) 3523 
InvisibilitÃ  (Invisibility) 3055 
Il Anatra Deludente (The Disappointing Duck) 3532 
Una Gabbia Lussuosa (A Lavish Cage)  3153 
Rivelazioni Ubriaco (Drunken Revelations)  2939 
GenerositÃ  (Generosity)  3567 
Anticipazione (Anticipation)  3191 
Dono Inestimabili (Priceless Gifts)  3885 
Delusione (Disappointment)  3844 
Sospetto (Suspicion)  2975 
Il Cacciatore (The Hunter)  3488 
Prove Inconfutabili (Irrefutable Proof)  2814 
Il Battesimo del Fuoco (Baptism by Fire)  3589 
Bei sogni  (Beautiful Dreams)  3290 
NobiltÃ  (Nobility)  3231 
Ballo Formale (Ball)  4243 
Dolorosa OnestÃ   (Painful Honesty)  3973 
Macchia di Sangue  (Bloodstains)  3325


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## AnneL (Jan 15, 2014)

In my WIP, my shortest chapters are about 4 K and my longest clocks in at over 9K, but I think I average about 6-7 K. I generally try to keep them consistent with each other in length and to not have more than 3 or 4 scenes in each chapter. They get shorter toward the end. I switch POV at chapter breaks, and I try to mix up the order of the POV a little so it doesn't get too predictable as to who's up next. However, I find that I sometimes force myself to write stuff to get a consistent chapter, which is not helpful, and in my next project I'm going to try using more short chapters. I do like to end the early ones as more complete rather than total cliffhanger, and then move toward cliffhangers as the book progresses. 

What I really struggle with is ending scenes, chapter ending or not, with something more interesting than someone leaving the room, arriving somewhere, going to bed, etc -- in othere words, not with the things that are natural transitions in our daily lives.


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## Xitra_Blud (Jan 22, 2014)

My chapter lengths vary too much. Most of my chapter are short though I guess around 3,000 words. I definitely like reading short chapters, too. It's the only thing my attention span will allow.


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## HUnewearl Shiro (Jan 23, 2014)

My current piece is holding around 2400-2500 per chapter, though some of my other, less important pieces are 1500 per chapter or thereabouts.


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## Legendary Sidekick (Jan 26, 2014)

BWFoster78 said:


> I find myself liking shorter chapters more and more.  Of course, I like fast pace without a lot of description, so...
> 
> My chapters are averaging in the 1000-2000 word range.


Glad I'm not the only one.

My prologue is 1300 words and my first chapter is 2000. I thought I'd aim for 3500-word chapters, but as I was writing I asked myself, "Am I setting the scene, or delaying the action for the sake of word-count?" I'm writing in first-person present, so there really can't be too much description if the character narrates what she is thinking. I think I did a decent job building to the action with the length I ended up with, but if I make a significant revision, the chapter will likely become shorter.

It's likely that my chapters will average 1500 words. Maybe some will be over 2000 later in the story, but I won't panic if I remain in the 1-2K range.


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## wordwalker (Jan 26, 2014)

Another advantage of short chapters is that longer scenes can become multiple chapters, with a chapter break for punctuation.

Which means if you have an extended scene, the reader starts to see that chapter length gives him no clue how soon the scene is going to resolve. It could just keep chaining chapters together and pile twist on top of twist until the reader's so keyed up that--

Well, my writing's all about suspense, but I've never been *that* ruthless.


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