How Long is a Chapter?
How long is a chapter? This is a question I get all the time from writers. In this video, I'll ask you some leading questions that will allow you to figure out that ideal chapter count or chapter-length for yourself in your particular project.
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How Long is a Chapter Video Transcript
Hello, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Here I am going to talk about the length of a chapter in a manuscript. This is a question I get all the time. "How long should my chapters be?" They want word count, they want page count. And I'm here not to give you necessarily a hard and fast number but to ask you some leading questions which will allow you to figure out that ideal chapter count or chapter-length for yourself in your particular project. Now, obviously this has to do with the reading level of your audience. That is a big consideration. And I would say if you are writing a chapter book, for example, you want to keep your chapters very, very short.
Chapter books are intended for newly independent readers as they sort of ascend the ladder of reading confidence and reading mastery. And then you want to keep your chapters very short. I would say 250 to 500 words. That seems short but it would not be outside the bounds of what you might want to shoot for because the whole point of a chapter book and an early reader before it is that you want to give your readers that sense of accomplishment. They finished a chapter, they finished two chapters. "Look, mom, I'm getting it." I would say since a chapter book is maybe 3,000, 5,000, 7,000 words, 10,000 words is getting up into the longer side of things.
I would maybe aim for your chapters to be 10% or 12% of your total word count, or maybe even 8%. So use that as a rule of thumb. If you were to aim for 10 chapters within your word count, what would that look like? If you were to aim for 8 chapters or 12 chapters. As we get into novels for older readers, like middle grade and young adult, the range of normal completely stretches out. You could have chapters that are a sentence or two. If you really want to call attention to something, this is a stylistic choice that you can make. Your chapters can be 2,000, 3,000 words. I would say that's about a middle ground. If your chapter is very focused on a scene, it could be maybe 700 to 1,500 words to really zero in.
When we start getting into longer chapters, maybe 10 pages, 15 pages, 20 pages, that is when you have to start battling the perception of the action slowing down the reader. It needs a break. They've been reading for a while. They need something like a pattern interrupt. And I would say if you're dealing with a chapter of that length, you may want to either chop it up, leave it at a cliffhanger, and then continue the rest of the chapter afterward or do something else to address that pacing because longer chapters do tend to drag.
If you look at, let's say a book everybody knows Dan Brown, "The Da Vinci Code" the chapters there are super short. And one thing he does really masterfully is he plays with a lot of different narrative perspectives. So he will pick up a thread, do it for maybe a page and then drop that thread, pick up another thread, do a really short chapter or section within a chapter in that thread, drop it, pick up again somewhere else. And this is a really great technique for keeping readers reading because they want to start closing the loops on all of the sort of narratives that he currently has open at a time. And, of course, because he is so good at what he does there, he doesn't end up closing those loops until the very end of the story. So conceivably the effect could be that your reader is galvanized to keep reading all the way through.
So chapter length really does play into that. I would really keep an eye on that pacing, especially if you have a chapter where you're dropping a lot of information. Now, information tends to be very dense on the page. It tends to read slowly as opposed to action, which is fast on the page, tends to read quickly. There's a lot of white space usually, if you have scene work. If you have dialogue, there's just, it doesn't look as dense to the reader. So that's also something to think about. So I would say if your chapters are running long or if you have a lot of information that you need to give in a chapter, make those particular chapters shorter, make the information-dense chapters shorter so that they have a better sense of pacing overall.
And one of the things that I always recommend is intercutting your information-dense sections with action sequences so that, you know, we get some information, the pacing maybe slows down, things get a little bit more dense and then boom, we're in a scene that has a lot of dialogue, that has a lot of movement or action, then maybe you can do more information. What I would really discourage you from doing is having a lot of sort of dense, long chapters, information-rich chapters in a row. Because that can also affect what you're doing and what your reader feels like you're doing. It's not just an arbitrary number of a chapter must be 2000 words long. It's the perception of how long that chapter is. That's actually sometimes more important.
So that's why I hesitate to give you just a number for you to shoot for because it does vary with your intended audience. It does vary with their age if that is a factor in what you're writing. And it also varies depending on what is actually in the chapter...cat alert...because different chapters read at different speeds. So this is my collaborator here Kitty Luna. The perception of how long a chapter is can vary sometimes from the word count. I hope you found this helpful. This has been Mary Kole with Good Story Company. And here's to a good story.
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