Support for Indie Authors discussion

When plotting out a story I think about word count only in terms of whether my story will make the count to be considered a full blown novel for the genre. After that, I try to end chapters on a page turner moment so the reader wants to keep going. I do pay attention to whether a chapter is stretching out too long because I know some readers prefer to end a reading session at a chapter end. I don't think word count should drive my writing as a 'must do this many' thing.

We don't plan anything. We write and fiddle until we're happy. I've never even checked what the length of our chapters is.

As for book length, we never think about it. We treat our series as one story, which we break up into books. Each book ends where we find it convenient.

I'm very loosey goosey.
I have a very vague aim of 50k words for the total book, and around 2,000 words per chapter.

However, my story dictates how closely I stick to this.
I've just been revising draft 1 of my WIP:
90,334 word count (my longest book to date)
Some chapters have as few as 1500 words, others 4000!
I was starting to worry and found this thread.

I think, reading these comments I won't worry too much.
The chapters break at natural points.

As I go through the editing process further I may well break some of the longer ones up a little.

I do make a point of checking how many exclamation marks I use though. It's a bad habit of mine. 15 in this book; yay.

Some authors like to build episodic novels that are more like a bunch of novellas all woven together. Ken Follett, Vernor Vinge, and Dan Simmons come straight to mind. This works well w/ historical or SFF because of their immersive nature and their generally high word-count. These guys tend to write long-assed chapters punctuated by major POV, location, or time shifts.

On the flip-side, a nice compact page turner like a "Jack Reacher" adventure often gets busted up into tiny little chapters. Lee Child produces some of the shortest print chapters I've seen; going maybe a page-and-a-half sometimes... lotsa white space, a real tree killer, but he sells jillions of 'em.

I like to see a broad spectrum of chapter lengths, like with sentences... varied in size to maintain interest. Nothing wrong w/ a big ol' 15k chapter if it needs to be, and no reason to pad out the narrative just to maintain a minimum chapter length. Tell the flipping story and let your beta/editor/mom/whoever tell you if the pacing doesn't work.

JM(not so)HO

I do an outline, and a chapter by chapter summary/outline. Then I watch it go down in flames as the spirit moves me through the writing. My characters besiege me unmercifully until they feel I have them "right," (they can get quite unruly inside my head).
I pay attention to Bickham's Scene and Structure, and Kress's Beginnings, Middles & Ends, more than any set ideas of chapter number or word length.
And then I edit ruthlessly.

C.B. Matson wrote: "Some authors like to build episodic novels that are more like a bunch of novellas all woven together. Ken Follett, Vernor Vinge, and Dan Simmons come straight to mind. This works well w/ historical..."
Yay to this!
That's exactly how I feel. My chapters are separated naturally, each of them contain different amounts of words - I hate "forcing" more words just to make up a chapter. Some of mine are a page and a half, while others are 5 or six - it depends on what the chapter is about.

C.B. Matson wrote: "I like to see a broad spectrum of chapter lengths, like with sentences... varied in size to maintain interest...."

Or you can have no chapters at all. I just finished reading Dolores Claiborne. I don't think I could attempt that, but King makes it work.

As both moderator C.B., C.B. Matson, and others have noted in this thread, it only makes sense that a well-written narrative of book-length should fall into chapters in a way that feels natural to the writer. Sentence and chapter or sub-chapter length are an important part of pacing your story. But as has been pointed out, a relatively set chapter length, whether short, medium, or long, can provide just as well-paced a story as varying chapter-length can. Or as Ken points out just above me, a novel without any chapter structure at all. I'd call the latter a bit of an outlier though. Most authors use chapters to provide a structure that makes reading their novel easy for the reader.

On the other side of the picture, they also use them to provide structure for themselves in writing, as several responses in this thread illustrate. There are obviously no hard and fast rules, bringing this aspect of authorial process firmly into the "whatever works for you" category. Forcing yourself out of your own comfort zone is antithetical to the process, so if you are just starting out, take all of the comments here with a grain of salt, and take away from them only the elements that make sense and are comfortable for you.

I tend to write long sentences, vary them with shorter ones for a rythm, then edit down the longest to assure things don't get tangled. Often that happens with chapters as well. My preferred average chapter length is around 3000 words, but I have no problem extending that if I feel the narrative needs it. The most important consideration is that the story doesn't bog down in such a long chapter, causing the reader to set it aside. That's a sure sign your reader is losing interest in continuing the narrative as a whole. Similarly, I prefer a "maximum" chapter length that can be read in one sitting, both in my reading and my writing. My sittings range from about 60 to 90 minutes, hence top out around the 15K C.B. Matson cites avove, or the longest Tolkien chapter someone else mentioned. My experience tells me both of these authors are more likely than I to write a chapter of that length which keeps a reader's interest than I am :-)

In any case, you can plan for a certain length chapter or let it conclude more naturally, just as long as the chapter as a unit carries a meaningfully encapsulated piece of your narrative within it. So that's my contribution to the 1,001 ways you can craft your book, with the caveat that if my approach doesn't work for you, practice will help you find your own.

I'm writing my first book, and I think chapters end when you feel it ends. xD The action ends, and you move to the next. I usually change the POV with chapters. But my problem is prologue...it's before my MC hatches (yes), but the egg is there and everything what happens is crucial. I don't want it to be skipped...it's not too long, I am not overly descriptive person, but the visuals are important, so it takes me a lot of effort to polish a paragraph. :P

Those who can make each chapter close to the same length are more structured than I am. Mine vary based on what is happening. I do try to keep it to reasonable length so you can read one or two chapters in a sitting. It is all based on what you are writing and your style. I don't write like Lee Child or Tolkien (both of whom I love). Develop what feels good to you and go for it. If it isn't forced, your readers won't notice the length.

The same goes for the number of chapters. JD Robb has 25 chapters per book. Mine vary widely from 13 to 30. It is dependent on the book and the characters and what is happening.

Like everything else in writing, it is writer driven. I love Michener , Christie, Lee, Patterson and various other famous authors but I don't write like any of them. Write what you are comfortable with and in a manner which makes sense to you.

In general, you don't want a chapter to be less than 250 words, because it takes a reader nearly that to orient and settle. Less and it feels like, "What just happened," unless the action that came before makes it meaningful.

Given the lack of love that publishers have, and the lack of enthusiasm readers show for a prologue, presenting one for informational purposes is a risk. Be certain that it's a real scene, and not just an explanation by the author of what amounts to "Here's what you need to know before going on."

I believe a number of chapters in Cat's Cradle were less than two hundred fifty words. There's a chapter in As I Lay Dying that is only five words. Chapters should be as long as you need them to be to say what needs to be said in the chapter.

I don't think there is a right or wrong way to go about it.

I think a big part of it is whether you want to pants or plot.
My first 3 stories have pretty similar chapter length, I was aiming for consistency and was pantsing.

My last story has a few chapters with less than 3k words, most sitting around the 4k mark, with the odd one up around 6k. It was well planned out, 10 chapters (It was planned to be a short story from the start), with each chapter having a certain theme, beginning, and ending.

It opens with short bursts of action to hook, so shorter chapters early. Later chapters had a lot more that needed to be conveyed, so I had to either split up my chapters, or make them longer. I worked hard to make the chapters end on cliffhangers, so went with the latter.

As I said (and many others are saying) at the beginning there is no correct or incorrect method, figure out what you want and stick with it. You could also aim to mimic those in your genre who are successful.

My novel chapters are titled with the character name of one of the 25 POV characters and run from half a page to 20 pages in length. I started out trying to have equal length chapters, but found that while it worked sometimes, many chapters were padded or abridged.

The end result works fine, which led me to the conclusion that if the finished manuscript works it justifies whatever means you used.

Too much technical planning and I lose interest, fast.

I definitely write by feel. I don't want anything to feel too forced, and there's a natural flow that decides when I end a chapter.

When I write, I first type up a super-loose outline of all the things I need (all the main beats, side beats, settings and the like) that I call the 'trash draft'. These outlines are usually a few pages long and tell the complete story in an extremely truncated fashion. They read sort of like when someone explains a story they read, watched or played in conversation. They're kind of all over the place, but all the important bits are present and accounted for. They just may not be in the correct order.

From that trash draft, I build a more solid, structured outline. I'll think of all the beats I need to hit before moving on to the next chunk of story, and those beats will dictate a chapter break. I set my chapters up sort of like episodes of a TV series, giving each one its own beginning, middle and end in an effort to keep people turning the page.

As such, these outlines tend to be quite lengthy depending on the scope of the story, and are mostly made up of about 10 to 30 bullet points each chapter. They look like this:


From there, since I've already basically written the whole story twice, I'll just start writing a random scene (usually an all-important one) and see how long that turns out to be. That scene will then usually dictate how the rest of the process goes.

Of course, if the story begins to demand changes once I get into the flow of earnestly writing it, I'm happy to jettison or add any and everything I might need (I ended up cutting out the entire second half of my current book just because one beat wasn't properly earned).

Then, it's only after I've finished writing a chapter that I look at page/word counts. I have found that the earlier chapters in my books tend to be more lengthy and that as the stories progress and the pace picks up, the page count per chapter reflects that.

db

I do not allow a number count or length of a chapter to rule my story or message.

I write my story, and then allow the anticipated flow to rule my chapter length.

As long as I am able to deliver a clear message of my story's intention, I never worry about the chapter length.

Every original draft demands some changes, and I just deal with the flow at the end.

That being said, there are still some very great tips in this discussion on how to structure a story, since we all work a bit differently.

I think of it like this.

Something should happen every chapter.

That sounds obvious, but I've seen plenty of books where chapters could be removed and it would remain the same. So I think of a chapter as this. I am going to talk about the lead up to an event, the event itself, and maybe the immediate aftermath.

That helps with pacing and length. I make sure not to summarize anything, instead, I show the leadup to an event (1000-3000 words), the event itself (1000-3000 words), and the immediate aftermath (100-1000 words). Overall, my chapters usually end up at around 6000 words, which I think is the perfect length, it takes about 45 minutes to read.

Basically, make sure by the end of the chapter, something of value changed. The character lost something. They found something. Someone died, etc. If you do that, make sure that something happens every chapter, word count and pacing fall pretty quickly into alignment.

I did it!
I finally did it! :D

*Cheers*
I wrote a chapter that is only a single word! I might even knock it down to an '!' when I am editing.

Aiden wrote: "I think of it like this.

Something should happen every chapter.

That sounds obvious, but I've seen plenty of books where chapters could be removed and it would remain the same. So I think of a c..."
I agree there should be some change in every chapter, but I don't always include the aftermath in the same chapter. My chapters usually run around 10 - 12 pages.

C.B. wrote: "I did it!
I finally did it! :D

*Cheers*
I wrote a chapter that is only a single word! I might even knock it down to an '!' when I am editing."

Nice!

I have a bad habit of trying to make each of my chapters at least 4 typed pages. It's a stupid way to go about it and in truth, when I revise and edit, my chapters often become much longer. But I've read a lot of stories where there is a chapter with one word. Or one sentence. Or one paragraph and sometimes those stick with me way more than the ones that are chocked full of info.

Every writer has their own style. Their own way of doing things. None of it is wrong. If you have confidence in your story and what you're writing, your chapters and their length will come naturally.

At least I hope that's true.

C.B. wrote: "I did it!
I finally did it! :D

*Cheers*
I wrote a chapter that is only a single word! I might even knock it down to an '!' when I am editing."

!

C.B. wrote: "I did it!
I finally did it! :D

*Cheers*
I wrote a chapter that is only a single word! I might even knock it down to an '!' whzen I am editing."

Lol!
I love you. That is all.

C.B. wrote: "I did it!
I finally did it! :D

*Cheers*
I wrote a chapter that is only a single word! I might even knock it down to an '!' when I am editing."

Skill!

Aw! Blush.

C.B. wrote: "Aw! Blush."

Now let's see you do a chapter with a negative number of words. Huh? Huh? I bet you can.

I feel when it comes to a series this is more likely. I know when I start my first ever series I'll plan out chapters and words because It just makes more sense to do so.

I write from a tight outline and detailed character study. I have do many characters and clues (red herrings as well) that I am lost without the outline. Once I've decided the book is complete, I edit it to the number of words I normally use in my books. I think it was Nora Roberts that said that she can't fix a blank page. I totally agree.

C.B. wrote: "I did it!
I finally did it! :D

*Cheers*
I wrote a chapter that is only a single word! I might even knock it down to an '!' when I am editing."

Don't rush or you might lose emphasis. Leave that !!! there for now :)