Harlequin

How long should chapters be? Are a lot of short chapters good, or just just a few twenty page chapters? Longer chapters seem more literary, but they're hard to write. What should I do?

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badwriter1000

I think it makes absolutly no diffrence how long or short a chapter is.

Split it like a scene in a movie. If it is a paragraph, so what. Good writing will keep people if it long or short.

Look at the Da Vinci code. It's a little less than 400 pages and has like 87 chapters. Thats an average of just over four pages a chapter.

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Dookie

I think a chapter is as long as it is. If it's small and you have nothing more to say then don't rant on and ruin your story, just make a short one.

I also have trouble making long chapters. What I try to do though is treat chapters like short stories. Every chapter does in a sort of way tell a short story. Just split your large story into 20 odd small ones and I think that helps.

Have I went off topic a bit?

Gauda

I tend to appreciate longer chapters more. Right now in the book I'm writing, everything is turning out to short. I'm dissatisfied with that because it's getting too choppy. If you've read To Kill a Mockingbird (the purple book version) the chapters are about 10 pages long in a very tiny font.

Maybe about this large

I think that's sufficient. Any length is fine though, as long as the book flows well.

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lisajane

The Bride Stripped Bare - 373 pages, 138 chapters.

From someone who prefers not to write in chapters, I think they should be as long or as short as you think they need to be. Don't write nonsense just to extend the length of a chapter.

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mammamaia

you shouldn't base the length of your book's chapters on how hard or how easy it is to write chapters of any particular length... a chapter's size should depend on what goes on in it... that's what will make sense to the reader...

and a work's being 'literary' doesn't depend on how long its chapters are, but on how well it's written... plus, to some extent, its genre...

there are great books and best-sellers with very short chapters and some with very long ones... what makes them great and/or best-sellers is what's IN the chapters, not how long/short they are...

hugs, maia

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Harlequin

You're right. I just remembered "The Great Gatsby" having rather short chapters. In fact, the whole book was short.

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Oracle

For fantasy, it's nice for each chapter to consist of a mini-climax. For larger climaxes, multiple chapters can be used. As a reader, I prefer fairly short chapters. It gives me a good break point. I'll often tell myself, "I'm going to get up for a snack after this chapter," and then the chapter is so long that all I can think about is how hungry I am.

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Ralizah

Think about the word 'chapter.' We tend to forget its meaning. A chapter - as in, a chapter of the event as a whole. Now, sometimes chapters that are too long can be a nuisance. All the Pretty Horses has a chapter about every 100 pages and a scene change about every twenty. Of course, that's the way it needed to be.

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Manx

Personally I dislike long chapters - makes bedtime reading very difficult! I have to agree to an extent though that when writing what is hopefully going to turn out to be a novel, it's nice to have a bit of depth to a chapter and feel like you've made progression. However, as said, it depends what you're writing and what you want to fit into the chapters - they shouldn't be rushed to make them short but at the same time they shouldn't be stretched out unnecessarily.

An example of a fiction book I especially enjoyed that actually makes a feauture of its incredibly short chapters is 'Suzy, Led Zeppelin And Me' by Martin Millar. I forget the exact words he uses but the first chapter consits of something like: 'My attention span is not what it used to be, and so the chapters of this book will be no more than a few hundred words each. See, this first chapter is just 357 words long!' Or something along those lines, anyway.

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