suzakugaiden

The best chapter ever was only five words long.

Anyway, I don't get why there's an ideal chapter length. A chapter will continue until it no longer needs to continue. Breaking a chapter because of length, and not because of content, is just silly.

Dirkin

hopefully length will coincide with content, content should take precidence, but there are people who don't know how to write proper chapters. Having a guide as to what other authors have done is a good idea I think. They may not realize that their chapter is very short, or very long. And it is an issue. Very rarely is a chapter less then a page exceptable. It can be done, and should be done, but you can't have a novel with 100 600wordcount chapters... well I guess you could, but its better to have 20-40 larger chapters then 200 hundred tiny ones... I really don't know where I'm going with this, I think there's a point in there somewhere.

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"As the celerity took its horrid grip on his body, he turned to the right to see the bullet coming. In his twisted sense of time he had hardly a second to duck out of the way. Before the second bullet could leave the chamber, Saede was feeding.

'How easily your life flows. The adrenaline only serves makes the sensation sweeter,' the assamite said through blood-soaked lips."

Lord Raiden

You guys are going to laugh at this, but my reference I use for determining if a chapter is long enough is the 5 click guide. IE, I start with the chapter title at the top of the screen, then click the scroll bar on MS Word 5 times. Wherever it stops should be where my chapter ends. I obviously don't stick to that 100%, but I do use it as a guide for how long the chapter is, then break it slightly in either direction as need be. But it's a system I came up with a long time ago and it still works pretty good.

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Robgb

Don't worry about chapter length. It REALLY doesn't matter. Some can be short, some can be long. The trick is to break your chapters where it feels right for the story. And it's probably best to break at a point where the reader will feel compelled to keep reading.

The average book is about 80,000 to 150,000 words. How it's broken up into chapters doesn't depend on word count, but on the needs of the story. Use your gut and don't worry about length.

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Robert Gregory Browne
Anatomy of a Book Deal
http://www.robertgregorybrowne.com
A Measure of Darkness
St. Martin's Press, 2007

Stewart

I must admit I'm a little confused by your questions since they imply you don't read any novels. If you don't read then you will not be terribly good at writing.

However, I tend to consider plotting a novel with twenty chapters each at 5,000 words. If I go over, that's fine. If I'm under, that's fine. And, should one chapter need split into two or more then that's not a problem either since it's just a skeleton to put flesh on.

However, I'd like to be very specific about your second question about how long is an average novel. The Da Vinci Code was 560 pages long and that was a distinctly average novel.

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mswietek

You are being far, far too generous with the word average.

Michael

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Stewart

I know.

How about Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, then? That was average.

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mswietek

I actually liked that one, although the middle seemed like it was written by a different person.

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"Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music." - Ezra Pound

Stewart

I thought it started great but then it's clothes fell off and I saw for what it really was: an overglorified moth hunt.

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