Chapter Length
How long should a chapter be?
First time novelist always ask this question. I did too. One of the reasons is that novels come with no quick and ready instructions like "take two with water" or "insert tab A into slot B" or "drive 40 minutes on I-279." All our life, things generally come with instructions. Heck, even babies come with countless books on child care. Most "how to write" books, however, rarely address the question of chapter length.
The short and dirty answer is probably the reason why. Chapters can be any length you want to be. They can be one word, one sentence, one paragraph, one scene, or many scenes. So writing books say, "any length" and think that covers it. There's a whole lot more than that.
What is a chapter? It's a method of organizing words in a story. It's in the same category as a sentence, paragraph, and scene. So let's consider them all.
A sentence is a collection of words that are grouped together for an impact. Short, fast sentences read as action. Exciting. Tense. Longer sentences have the feeling of being slow, less action, more thought behind the words and less movement. You can chop sentences up. You can string them out with commas, semi-colons, yadayadayada, until they run forever. Sentences can be one word or a hundred. You go by gut feeling but behind that gut feeling is the knowledge of how sentence length reads. The more aware you are as to how number of words impact the feel of the sentence, the more you do it in your conscious brain and not with that subconscious part that is all mysterious realm of the muse.
A paragraph is a collection of sentences grouped together for impact. You can collect all the sentences together on one thought into one massive paragraph.
Or you can put one sentence by itself to make it stand out, and thus increase the effect it has on the reader.
The problem of doing it often is that it makes the story feel choppy.
So what's a scene? A scene is a collection of paragraphs grouped together for impact. It can be a snapshot of the story. Here is the hero eating breakfast, thinking about life. Here is the heroine running for her life through a graveyard. Snap. You have a piece of the story. It's whole and complete little mini-story within that photograph. The thing is that each scene, by its very nature, has a different level of tension in it because it's just a subset of the greater story. The hero eating breakfast is low tension unless he's trying to decide to go into the bathroom and blow his brains out. Which does he put into his mouth – Cheerios or gun barrel? If he's just thinking about cheerios, then his scene is lower tension then the heroine running for her life. This isn't a bad thing. Both are needed in the overall story. Think about the movie Die Hard, between shoot outs the hero sit panting someplace and considers his situation. You need the little lesser tension scenes between the high tensions scenes or it all becomes too much. It's like constantly screaming – sooner or later the scream loses its effect because it's become the norm.
Snapshot, though, misleading in that a scene can be – like a paragraph or sentence – also something very abbreviated. It can be a single sentence that advances the plot one step forward.
So what is a chapter?
A chapter is a collection of scenes. It can be as short as one paragraph, or one sentence. There's one book that I was blown away by the fact that the author had a series of chapters that were just the name of the months to indicate that time was passing and absolutely nothing of interest had happened during that time.
Some people make chapters only one scene long. This is particularly useful if you're changing POVs often. Chapter start would indicate strongly "new person has control of the story." Even if you're not changing POVs, there is nothing wrong with this method. Unlike making each sentence its own paragraph, most readers won't be aware that this is what you're doing because there's no immediate visual impact of "this chapter is just one scene" except by the fact that the chapter numbers build and build. A typical novel often has over a hundred scenes. Also you tend to have a natural scene length. If your natural length falls under a thousand words per scene, then the story will start to feel choppy to the average reader because they're constantly hitting end of chapter. The impact isn't as bad if your natural length runs toward 2000k or 3000k or if it varies between 1000k to 5000k.
However, making a chapter only one scene long means your throwing away a basic structural unit. Imagine what impact tossing away paragraphs and making every sentence stand alone. Embrace the multiple scene per chapter.
This leads you to the natural question, how many scenes per chapter?
As I discussed above, scenes have a level of tension. Some are low. Some are high. If you can't grasp that in your own work, you might want to try this exercise that I developed for my first few novels. Read over you scenes and assign an arbitrary tension level of 1 to 20. 1 is the character is eating breakfast and thinking of nothing more problematic than doing laundry. 5 is the character discovering that they're late for work and can't find their house keys. 10 is the character getting to work and learning that they're fired. 15 is the character stuck in an elevator and the building's fire alarm goes off. 20 they're standing on a ledge on the 20th floor of a burning building trying to build the courage to leap to the tiny fireman's net blow. Give each scene a number, just rough eyeball it, and chart it on a graph. Ideally the tension of the novel should rise slightly, and fall less. You start at 1 or 3 or 5 and slowly build, so it goes 3, 5, 3, 4, 3,7,9,5,10,8,12 etc.
Once you get a feel of what tension level your scenes are, you can now group them into chapters. Chapters should start at a lower tension. People are willing to ease into the ongoing story at the start of a chapter. As the chapter progresses, though, the tension should rise with each scene. At the point that the tension is going to drop down, that's when you break the chapter and start a new one.
Basically it looks like this:
Chapter One: Tension level 3, 4, 5
Chapter Two: Tension level 3, 5, 6
Chapter Three: Tension level 4, 7
Chapter Four: Tension level 5, 7, 9 10
What this does is give the novel the feeling a ramping feeling even though the scenes themselves don't shift that much between them tension-wise.
First time novelist always ask this question. I did too. One of the reasons is that novels come with no quick and ready instructions like "take two with water" or "insert tab A into slot B" or "drive 40 minutes on I-279." All our life, things generally come with instructions. Heck, even babies come with countless books on child care. Most "how to write" books, however, rarely address the question of chapter length.
The short and dirty answer is probably the reason why. Chapters can be any length you want to be. They can be one word, one sentence, one paragraph, one scene, or many scenes. So writing books say, "any length" and think that covers it. There's a whole lot more than that.
What is a chapter? It's a method of organizing words in a story. It's in the same category as a sentence, paragraph, and scene. So let's consider them all.
A sentence is a collection of words that are grouped together for an impact. Short, fast sentences read as action. Exciting. Tense. Longer sentences have the feeling of being slow, less action, more thought behind the words and less movement. You can chop sentences up. You can string them out with commas, semi-colons, yadayadayada, until they run forever. Sentences can be one word or a hundred. You go by gut feeling but behind that gut feeling is the knowledge of how sentence length reads. The more aware you are as to how number of words impact the feel of the sentence, the more you do it in your conscious brain and not with that subconscious part that is all mysterious realm of the muse.
A paragraph is a collection of sentences grouped together for impact. You can collect all the sentences together on one thought into one massive paragraph.
Or you can put one sentence by itself to make it stand out, and thus increase the effect it has on the reader.
The problem of doing it often is that it makes the story feel choppy.
So what's a scene? A scene is a collection of paragraphs grouped together for impact. It can be a snapshot of the story. Here is the hero eating breakfast, thinking about life. Here is the heroine running for her life through a graveyard. Snap. You have a piece of the story. It's whole and complete little mini-story within that photograph. The thing is that each scene, by its very nature, has a different level of tension in it because it's just a subset of the greater story. The hero eating breakfast is low tension unless he's trying to decide to go into the bathroom and blow his brains out. Which does he put into his mouth – Cheerios or gun barrel? If he's just thinking about cheerios, then his scene is lower tension then the heroine running for her life. This isn't a bad thing. Both are needed in the overall story. Think about the movie Die Hard, between shoot outs the hero sit panting someplace and considers his situation. You need the little lesser tension scenes between the high tensions scenes or it all becomes too much. It's like constantly screaming – sooner or later the scream loses its effect because it's become the norm.
Snapshot, though, misleading in that a scene can be – like a paragraph or sentence – also something very abbreviated. It can be a single sentence that advances the plot one step forward.
So what is a chapter?
A chapter is a collection of scenes. It can be as short as one paragraph, or one sentence. There's one book that I was blown away by the fact that the author had a series of chapters that were just the name of the months to indicate that time was passing and absolutely nothing of interest had happened during that time.
Some people make chapters only one scene long. This is particularly useful if you're changing POVs often. Chapter start would indicate strongly "new person has control of the story." Even if you're not changing POVs, there is nothing wrong with this method. Unlike making each sentence its own paragraph, most readers won't be aware that this is what you're doing because there's no immediate visual impact of "this chapter is just one scene" except by the fact that the chapter numbers build and build. A typical novel often has over a hundred scenes. Also you tend to have a natural scene length. If your natural length falls under a thousand words per scene, then the story will start to feel choppy to the average reader because they're constantly hitting end of chapter. The impact isn't as bad if your natural length runs toward 2000k or 3000k or if it varies between 1000k to 5000k.
However, making a chapter only one scene long means your throwing away a basic structural unit. Imagine what impact tossing away paragraphs and making every sentence stand alone. Embrace the multiple scene per chapter.
This leads you to the natural question, how many scenes per chapter?
As I discussed above, scenes have a level of tension. Some are low. Some are high. If you can't grasp that in your own work, you might want to try this exercise that I developed for my first few novels. Read over you scenes and assign an arbitrary tension level of 1 to 20. 1 is the character is eating breakfast and thinking of nothing more problematic than doing laundry. 5 is the character discovering that they're late for work and can't find their house keys. 10 is the character getting to work and learning that they're fired. 15 is the character stuck in an elevator and the building's fire alarm goes off. 20 they're standing on a ledge on the 20th floor of a burning building trying to build the courage to leap to the tiny fireman's net blow. Give each scene a number, just rough eyeball it, and chart it on a graph. Ideally the tension of the novel should rise slightly, and fall less. You start at 1 or 3 or 5 and slowly build, so it goes 3, 5, 3, 4, 3,7,9,5,10,8,12 etc.
Once you get a feel of what tension level your scenes are, you can now group them into chapters. Chapters should start at a lower tension. People are willing to ease into the ongoing story at the start of a chapter. As the chapter progresses, though, the tension should rise with each scene. At the point that the tension is going to drop down, that's when you break the chapter and start a new one.
Basically it looks like this:
Chapter One: Tension level 3, 4, 5
Chapter Two: Tension level 3, 5, 6
Chapter Three: Tension level 4, 7
Chapter Four: Tension level 5, 7, 9 10
What this does is give the novel the feeling a ramping feeling even though the scenes themselves don't shift that much between them tension-wise.
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