The answers from writers on KBoards are all over the map. But the sweet spot from 53 respondents to a poll seems to be 1,000-3,000 words. Three-fifths of the answers fall into that range. Try clicking or double-clicking or tapping on the image for a better view of the numbers after you open up the full post.
So what are your own thoughts on the chapter length issue? I say it, “It depends.” For a D.C. suspense novel, I used chapters much shorter than I did for some nonfiction books on the computer industry.
Now here’s a related question. Are chapters shorter these days than in the past, because readers’ attention spans aren’t as long? I suspect so.
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There is no “official” length for chapters. Most run around 15-20 manuscript pages in traditionally published popular genre. (At a standard 250 words per typed page, that’s 3750 to 5000 words.) Category romances run a bit shorter.
I have seen chapters comprised of a simple sentence. One Lawrence Bloch mystery novel had one chapter say, “I’m pregnant.” The next chapter was “You’re what!”
The best rule of thumb is to end the chapter at your strongest hook/cliffhanger so the reader can’t resist reading a few more pages to see what happens next.
The worst place to end a chapter is after solutions have been found, and the next disaster hasn’t started happening.
Perhaps next we can consider how many swallows make a summer? 🙂
Great insights, Marilynn. So, as a veteran novelist, what are your thoughts on the average lengths of paragraphs in popular fiction? Literary fiction? As we know, lengths should vary for variety’s sake, and, no, official rules don’t exist and ideally won’t ever. But here I’m talking “average.” Hard to quantify exactly. As with chapter lengths, I suspect that books are shorter in this respect than in the past. These days, Faulkner might find it tough sledding even as a literary writer.
The most correct option on the poll, as I see it, was the last: “too varied for a poll” or something along those lines. Potboiler fiction probably tends to the shorter side than literary or non-fiction books. Overall, I do think chapter length has shortened even when accounting for the rise of low rent fiction.
A more interesting trend, one that fascinates me endlessly, is the popular move to the incredible shrinking English sentence. When I was in school, composition teachers said that on average an an English sentence should be about twenty words. A few decades later I heard a student say the sentence should be around twelve words. Later still, someone said it had become ten words. Wow! Way too short if true.
I’m not sure if I have the ability or knowledge to accurately ascetain the causes, but the end result is that I’ll more often than not dislike books that favor short chapters and sentences. Go figure.
Other examples I’ve seen mentioned include The Brothers Karamazov, As I Lay Dying , The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. A book on writing (I think by Lawrence Block) addressed “How long should a chapter be?” He said “Long enough to get to the next chapter.” (Paraphrasing Lincoln, of course.) For effect, he once had a chapter that was three words long, but of course, most of his chapters were much longer.
Also, for all the literary writers who revel in long sentence, there are also many who are known for using shorter sentences. (Hemingway, of course.) The trick is to vary the sentence length, just as Hemingway did. The best authors know they should vary their sentence length, whatever they writer. “Low-rent fiction” (ugh, that term) or literary fiction. Long sentences can be great, or they can be overly wordy. If they’re not well-written, then they are working against the author. Shorter sentences can suck, too. It depends on context.
I read Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk, an older book that used some sentences so long they could have been used to climb out of a castle tower. (It also used its share of shorter sentences.) The first chapter alone is close to 10,000 words (not counting the poem that precedes the chapters.) But while it is still read today, surely it qualifies as a “potboiler”?
@David
There is no average length of paragraphs, but a really long paragraph is off-putting to the eye on paper and even more off-putting when you are scrolling on a small screen so shorter paragraphs have become the norm for current narrative.
When the average person looks at a page, they want to see some space, not a massive block of text.
The best way to do paragraphs, as a writer, is to vary the paragraph lengths on the page.
I go into much more detail about paragraph lengths is this blog entry.
http://mbyerly.blogspot.com/2014/10/paragraph-lengths.html
The same is true of sentence length.
Both sentence and paragraph length are also influenced by what is being written. A narrative description can have a longer length for both, but an action scene would have a shorter length for both.
One of my interests, over the years, has been the drastic changes in narrative styles. From the first novels to the present, the narrative has continued to simplify, and that simplification has become more drastic in the last ten years as readers have become lazier, the knowledge base of the world has become larger for most individuals, and text has moved from paper to the screen.
By knowledge base, I mean what the reader knows. In Nineteenth Century novels, for example, most readers had never traveled more than a few miles away from home so long descriptive passages were needed, but as the world became smaller with travel, the descriptions didn’t need to be detailed. These days, just a few words will bring the images of far away places directly to mind.
I am always open to craft and writing questions via my blog or website. Just ask.
[Publisher’s note: The spam Dobes ate Marilynn’s note, originally time-stamped around two or three in the afternoon. She alerted me, and I think this reply is valuable enough to move to the top with a fresh stamp. Now—if we can only get her to appreciate Joe Wikert’s P2P insights! – David]
OK, I ate part of my post. The beginning was supposed to point out that there were literary novels known for short chapters. The first example was Anna Karenina. I checked the length of Chapter One, and it came out to just under 1,000 words.
As I Lay Dying has a five word chapter (“My mother is a fish.”) which is very short for Faulkner. But on the whole out of the usual length average.
I write several books a year for various clients, and I really believe that if we’re writing for readers, chapters need to be shorter than the good old days. Readers are far more influenced by movies and TV shows with their shorter scenes. They like the feeling of moving quickly through a book that short chapters give them. I shoot for 3,000 words or so, and shorter if possible. I realize many of the replies here assume that content should dictate form, and that’s true to a point. But I just did a proposal chapter and cut one long conversational scene at a coffee shop into two chapters. I don’t like to do that, but I couldn’t see editors hanging in there for an 8,000 word opening chapter. (The best solution is actually to make it two distinct scenes, two conversations, and build in some variance.) I really believe the age of the lengthy chapter is over in this current quick-gratification culture.
That is pretty funny! This is going to vary depending on the type of book, pacing and content. So the answers, which I see are from people actually writing and I guess for the most part publishing via Kindle, are going to reflect what each writes.
If every chapter is the *same* length then there’s something pretty odd about a book; however, pretty much every chapter in some types of books is under a certain basic level. For example, there are few chapters in James Patterson’s Maximum Ride books that are over 1,000 words and the vast majority are 500 words and under. The writing in these is so fundamental that one would hope people writing for a different audience wouldn’t look at that and try to emulate it.
I can say for commercial fiction that the folks coming in at 8K words per chapter are a little … well …
Look that is the length of one of *my* pieces of commercial short fiction, which will contain at least 3 characters, an “a” plot and a “b” plot. That’s more trash than needs to be stuffed in a novel chapter bag.
I think anybody doing this the other way around (auditing work written by others meeting reasonable standards, taking a good, broad sample) would find 1,000 to 1,500 words at the shorter end to 3,000 to 4,000 words at the upper end. That’s pretty much what the majority on those message boards came up with, isn’t it?