gr8writer

I'd like to know the minimum amount of chapters to make a good book. I'm sure you can't make a book with only four or five chapters but I have no idea what amount you need. Can someone help me out?

__________________
Healing

Be gentle, it's my baby.
j/k have fun you won't hurt my feelings.

Tiamat10

I don't believe there's a set number, especially since it's not so much the number of chapters that makes a good book, but rather the content of said chapters. I guess the average novel is about 80,000 - 100,000 words, and the average chapter is 3,000 - 7,000 words. You do the math for how many chapters that works out to, if you really want.

Look at it this way, you need only as many chapters as it takes to tell your story. No more, no less.

__________________
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." --Red Smith

Foxee

gr8writer, I moved this thread to 'Tips & Advice'. Questions don't belong in 'Writers' Workshop' as that is a protected critique forum.

~Foxee

__________________

CroZ

As many as you need, but there are a few catches.

It might help to think of chapters like paragraphs in how they change according to subject. So ...

Chapter 1: Joe looks for and finds cave of ordeals
Chapter 2: Joe goes into the cave and has ordeals
Chapter 3: Joe overcomes ordeals

Chapters provide rest stops for the readers. They can also be useful tools of suspense - adds a sort of to be continued effect (I forgot the word). They can also prevent the reader from feeling stupid for being a slow reader. Then there's the change in perspective reason.

Some writers consider chapters as too childish for an adult audience.

gr8writer

Thank you, the reason I asked was someone here suggested that I could make my short story into a book by expanding on the characters but after thinking it over I could only come up with subjects for about 5 or 6 chapters.

__________________
Healing

Be gentle, it's my baby.
j/k have fun you won't hurt my feelings.

RomanticRose

I never use chapters on the first draft. The chapter breaks will usually be obvious on the first editing pass.

__________________

Sam Winchester

You make the choice. There is no set amount of chapters that you have to adhere to for every different kind of novel.

Tiamat - there is no average for a chapter. It can be as long as you want it (well, okay, not two hundred pages, but anywhere between five to thirty pages; I've seen Clancy novels with chapters that run for forty pages).

Romantic Rose - how do you do without chapters on the first draft? That seems a very odd way of writing.

Sam.

__________________

RomanticRose

Sam,

I just have scene breaks. Where one scene ends, I hit enter, type *****, hit enter again and start typing the next scene. Lots of things I do may seem odd, but as long as they work for me, I don't worry about how they seem to anyone else.

RR

__________________

Sam Winchester

I suppose that's a good attitude. Yeah, I would imagine using ***** would be okay. Still, good writer's intuition will tell a writer when to take a new chapter, so that's why I do it on the first draft.

Sam.

__________________

RomanticRose

Sometimes, though, what made a place good for a chapter break might not survive the first editing pass, or may need to be changed as the plot moves forward. Been there, done that. Once the first draft is in the can, on the edit the chapter breaks jump out.

Chapters aren't a hard and fast requirement anyway. Their placement has always felt more like an intellectual decision than an intuitive one.

Just my tuppence,
RR

__________________

lin

You don't need chapters are all if you don't want. The book I'm writing right now will have none, just page breaks and double spaces.

There is not number for chapters. A book might have 15 or 100. This is part of the design of your book. Nobody can really tell you what it needs to have.

If somebody wants to represent it or publish it, their ideas on the subject take on validity.

__________________

RebelGoddess

It's all up to you.

There is no specific number of chapters that makes a book good, just like there is no specific number of pages.

The chapters in your novel, if you even decide to have them, should correspond to where YOU feel is a good place to break or have a cliff-hanger.

You could have 100 chapters, each one 3 pages, or you could have 10, where each one is 50 pages.

Some Examples:

DaVinci Code by Dan Brown:

-488 Pages
-136 Chapters

Ulysses by James Joyce

-1,078 Pages
-18 Chapters

Basically, you can do whatever you want.

Heck, you could even make each page a new chapter or omit chapters entirely (though the result would certainly be interesting!)!

It's your decision.

Racheal

__________________
Writing is life.

Writers' block doesn't exist. It's actually called work avoidance procrastination.
-Jasper Fforde

SAHMAuthor

I am not writing by chapter either. I will draft the chapter breaks in when I write the second draft. It's just because of flow when I am writing. I don't want to have to worry about where the chapter breaks go until the story is on the page.

As to the number of chapters, I think it will naturally fall into place with the path your story takes and where your peaks and valleys are.

lin

My favorite chapter is in an old book by H. Allen Smith.

It's chapter 15 or something and has one line in the chapter.

"To hell with it. Every damned book you pick up has a Chapter Fifteen."

__________________

SAHMAuthor

I love that!