FifthView
Vala
I stumbled onto these last night as I was bleary-eyed and winding down from my Nano writing. They're about four-and-a-half years old, and the sampling skews to even older novels. But I found them interesting, sometimes surprising, and thought that maybe newer writers could find them helpful:
Paragraph lengths in fantasy fiction – an analysis
Analyzing dialogue lengths in fantasy fiction
Analyzing chapter lengths in fantasy fiction
I feel I must reiterate what the author said when introducing that last analysis. There are no rules. But these are analyses using a Python script to scan ebooks for word counts of a select sampling of fantasy novels just to see what can be seen. It's a smallish sampling of novels, and the sampling skews a little older and adult, I think, and doesn't seem to have a great cross section of all subgenres of fantasy. So, grain of salt.
For me, the biggest surprise was on chapter length. Most quick searches will return a 3000-5000 word average chapter length, with some going more and some being smaller. Of the thirteen books analyzed, 6 fell reasonably in that range for their own average chapter word count, but in 7 the average was above that.
The "Mostly Less Than" chapter word count measurement was even more surprising. In this measurement, if 95% of the chapters in a book fell below a given word count, then that word count would be the "Mostly Less Than" number. It is a kind of upper limit tendency for the given book. These numbers skewed higher than the average chapter length for all samples.
Anyway...How do you do it? Where do you tend to fall in these three areas of paragraph length, dialogue length/density, chapter length? I'm curious.
Paragraph lengths in fantasy fiction – an analysis
Analyzing dialogue lengths in fantasy fiction
Analyzing chapter lengths in fantasy fiction
I feel I must reiterate what the author said when introducing that last analysis. There are no rules. But these are analyses using a Python script to scan ebooks for word counts of a select sampling of fantasy novels just to see what can be seen. It's a smallish sampling of novels, and the sampling skews a little older and adult, I think, and doesn't seem to have a great cross section of all subgenres of fantasy. So, grain of salt.
For me, the biggest surprise was on chapter length. Most quick searches will return a 3000-5000 word average chapter length, with some going more and some being smaller. Of the thirteen books analyzed, 6 fell reasonably in that range for their own average chapter word count, but in 7 the average was above that.
The "Mostly Less Than" chapter word count measurement was even more surprising. In this measurement, if 95% of the chapters in a book fell below a given word count, then that word count would be the "Mostly Less Than" number. It is a kind of upper limit tendency for the given book. These numbers skewed higher than the average chapter length for all samples.
Anyway...How do you do it? Where do you tend to fall in these three areas of paragraph length, dialogue length/density, chapter length? I'm curious.