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The Cost of Chapter Length

Someone proposed a question to me earlier. Let's say you were writing a 200,000 word book. That's a little on the long side for what would be considered the standard novel, but for the sake of this argument, let's ignore what publisher's allegedly prefer (specifically on first-time publishers, they say to get a novel published it needs to be right in that 80-120k sweet spot). Let's just say you're not going to chop out 80k words, this book is your masterpiece.

So, you start thinking about how you want to structure the book, and you can either write 100 chapters with around 2,000 words each, or 50 chapters around 4,000 words each. Which size is better? With 3,000 words being sort of the gold-standard on chapter size, either word count could be considered fair game. Four thousand words sits right over that 3,000 word reader fatigue barrier, while many would consider 2,000 word chapters to be rather short. While thinking over this question, it got me contemplating the implications of chapter sizes and how it affects your book as a whole. I'm now going to pass those brain-thoughts on to you.

First things first, there is no reason a book should be limited where every chapter is 2,000 words or 4,000 words or whatever. You can have lax goals to shoot for, but you don't need to stress out to make any given chapter reach a word count. It's completely reasonable to see a 4,000 word chapter in a book that averages 2,000 word chapters. And averages are just that, averages, which means a 1,500 word chapter followed by a 2,500 word chapter followed by a 4,000 word chapter back to a 2,000 word chapter is not that disagreeable.

In a previous chapter, I said that you rarely want to jump from 500 words to 3,000 and back. I think some people may have misunderstood my intentions when I said it. The point I was trying to make is that when considering chapter sizes, you need to consider pacing. 3,000 to 500 words is a pretty ludicrous jump, and it'll almost certainly lead to a book with uneven pacing. Unless you have a strong reason for selecting those chapter sizes, don't do it.

As you write your book, you're going to create the story the way you want it to look. Once you've already finished the book, your decision has already been set. It would be incredibly difficult to chop up a book into more or less chapters without the book feeling like that's what you're doing. Usually, your first instinct is the right one, and a scene should end when the scene ends. This isn't to say you shouldn't think about when chapters end, and when you feel like the story would be better if a certain scene ended earlier or later is just all part of the editing process. Still, I need to assert that in general, how long you want your chapters to be is a decision you shouldn't be making after you've already written most of the book.

I described books once like you'd describe a play. A word conjures up a single still image. You hear 'dog' and you can come up with an image. A sentence ascribes a single action, description, or detail to that image. That image is the subject, and the rest of the sentence is there to add a detail to that subject. The subject is either doing something, saying something, or being described.

Paragraphs are an idea. It's a grouping of still images detailed to the point that you can imagine something happening. A paragraph might be the description of a house, the act of a boy catching a Frisbee, or a girl eyeing the hot bad boy in her life. Combine all of these ideas (paragraphs) and you end up with a scene. A scene is a chapter. The chapter is a scene.

All of the scenes together make up your story, but likewise, that entire story is made of scenes. Have you ever watched a fight scene in some crappy action movie? Do you notice all the cuts the movie makes during a fight? You may be surprised how many times the camera jumps. In a single throw, you can have 4-5 cuts just for your hero to flip someone over. Then take a movie like John Wick, where the camera doesn't cut away. Isn't the feel of those scenes different? One might feel frantic and nerve wracking when the camera is wobbling and jumping. One might feel calm and professional like an assassin when the camera and people move smoothly.