Chapter Length.

[Cyricus]

I don't have any big reasons for doing that, I'm just curious... and daydreaming.

[WriterDoug]

Keeping any sort of mental guideline about how long a chapter should or should not be is only going to stunt your creative growth at some point down the road, unless you are doing it for a highly stylistic reason.

Having taken a quick glance at the novel I am trying to publish, the shortest chapter appears to be around 900 words whilst the longest (and funny enough, it is also the last chapter) clocks in at around 5,300 words.

Still, these are numbers that mean nothing to me.



Cheers,
WD

[Ursa major]

When I'm reading, I don't like to stop unless I get to a natural break. This doesn't need to be the end of a chapter, though, simply the end of a scene. (Of course, if my scenes regularly ran to 10000+ words, I think I'd be worried.)

[Sephiroth]

This is the thing.


Don't worry about length, worry about content. Most of the time, I find, it's pretty obvious where the breaks should go.

My chapters tend to be between 1000 and 10,000 words.

[power to the J]

The shortest chapter in my current WIP is 5892, and the longest is 18,920, but the long one is near the end with two battles going on at once, so I guess that that has something to do with it.

Originally Posted by Cyricus

I don't have any big reasons for doing that, I'm just curious... and daydreaming.

o0o okay. Then just go for it, I guess. Borders.com has a lot of books where you can not only read an excerpt, but also see how many words are in the book, which can help for what you are doing, and can also help all of us figure out how long a chapter is (if you're still worried about that).

[Lith]

There have been a couple threads around here about word count/page count ratios. I think the average answer was 300-400 words for a printed page. A program like MS Word will do about 500 words/page, TNR, 12pt. Handwritten averages are more like 250 (per side of the page). So if you're writing it all out by hand, be prepared to fill up two or three standard notebooks. Or more.

My chapters currently run just over 2,000 words, very consistently. It's generally a day's work, called a chapter. Initially they were hard breaks, but with practice, I've been able to coincide them much more often with natural breaks in the story. Every story has natural beats to it, often many of them, where it's convenient to break for a chapter. I've also found naming the chapters useful in giving them a topic to work with. But the important thing is to practice different things till you find something that works for you. And there's no real substitute for that practice.

And that practice will also tell you whether your story is too long or short.

[power to the J]

Originally Posted by Lith

My chapters currently run just over 2,000 words, very consistently. It's generally a day's work, called a chapter. Initially they were hard breaks, but with practice, I've been able to coincide them much more often with natural breaks in the story. Every story has natural beats to it, often many of them, where it's convenient to break for a chapter. I've also found naming the chapters useful in giving them a topic to work with.

Chapter names can add a lot to the experience, IMO, and I think that if there are chapters, there should be names, no matter what.

Also, as far as what you said about practice, I want to add that it helps to look at books and pay close attention to where they break and where they begin.

[pyan]

Terry Pratchett doesn't seem to suffer any disadvantage by not actually using chapters....

[Cyricus]

Terry Pratchett writes very modern/avantgarde kind of sub-genre of fiction.
Thank you, power to the J, for sharing with me this link.

I don't do chapter names. I don't know why... maybe I don't want that reader expects something special from my chapter, lol. So I've named 'em: "Prologue; I. Chapter; II. Chapter; ..." But it is off-topic here. :/

[power to the J]

Originally Posted by pyan

Terry Pratchett doesn't seem to suffer any disadvantage by not actually using chapters....

Well, Terry Pratchett is the man so he doesn't count. You do bring up a good point though.

But, with Pratchett as the exception, I'd say that a lack of chapters takes away from the experience. I couldn't get into The Road because of its chapterless approach. Carrie is another book that was annoying to read because it had no chapters.

[Green]

Chapters aren't necessary, as Pyan rightly points out with his Pratchett example. Nothing is necessary, except that whatever you are doing is in service of the greater good.

About chapter names - I always hate them. I hate spoilers, and no matter how tenuous the link between the chapter content and its name, I always feel like its a spoiler. It's a bit weird really, because I love to know where a book got its title from (Memories of Ice being my all time favourite), but I hate to know where a chapter got its title.

Horses for courses and all that.

[Culhwch]

I don't necessarily hate chapter names, but I'm more on Green's side of that argument. Certainly in my own writing I don't use them, and that's probably down to the fact that I can never think of a good title, let only god-knows-how-many chapter titles... At the moment my favoured method is to use un-numbered chapters simply headed with the place name of where the chapter takes place.

[power to the J]

I think chapter names add an extra element to a chapter, even if it's a chapter name that makes no sense. Personally, I take all of my chapter names from dialog in the chapter, so a chapter could be called "The Blinding Sun" but be about a snow storm. That might make me seem weird or odd, but it's just what I do.

[Sapheron]

Chapter names, if anything make a story more memorable, rather than better while you're actually reading. I use them sometimes, but other times I can't really be bothered or can't think of a good one.

[j. d. worthington]

As has been said by others, there really is no hard and fast rule on either chapter length or on using (or not using) chapter titles. Frankly, the best thing is to tailor your practice to fit each tale. Some will have fairly short chapters, others quite long. Moorcock, for instance, has a chapter in The Brothel in Rosenstrasse that comes out at something over 60 pages, iirc; while Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass has one that is only a brief line.

Essentially, when it comes to chapters, a story will normally define a chapter's ending by it being a dramatic pause; sometimes this will be a "cliffhanger" ending that the tale (or chapter) has been building up to at that point; sometimes a transition from one scene of action to another, or one character's POV to another, etc.; but it is usually defined by the internal logic of the tale itself -- so no arbitrary numbers are set as a rule.

On the subject of chapter headings: Again, it should be by the requirements of the story. Some chapter titles are descriptive of the general gist of that chapter; some are a quotation that has been broken into segments, so that the entire quotation is gradually revealed over the course of a subset of chapters (or an entire book or story); sometimes they are statements made in ironic contrast to the text, whether on the level of story, tone, message, etc. And not all stories require such -- in fact, with some, it is a distinct disadvantage, a distraction, and unnecessary. (One note being: if you're going to have chapter titles, it helps if you put as much thought into them as you do into making your text as a whole as good as possible.)

While there are hard-and-fast rules for submitting material, when it comes to actually writing a book (or story, etc.), the "rules" are more "guidelines", and much more flexible, allowing a greater leeway for artistic freedom and self-expression. So the best advice is to not set some such arbitrary rule for yourself as something that can't be broken. At most, set it as a guideline for general practice, but something which is always open to change depending on the needs of whatever story you are telling at the time.....