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DesertRoseFallen Vice Captain
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 Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 3:41 am
Well this is something I always get stuck on and is my main weak point...
So what is everyone's chapter length? How many words or pages?
I kinda get stuck on this so I don't know the average length it should be. I've tried to cut it off for cliff hangers or when a 'big something different' comes to play.
But then I get really short or really long chapters. Sometimes it feels like I'm cramming too much into one chapter. It sucks....
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Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 9:05 pm
I get my worries about this too.
However, it isn't the length of the chapters that matters so much as what's in them. Chapters are really only separating certain events or blocks of time, as well as creating stopping points in the story. So it's forgivable to have long or short chapters.
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Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 10:19 pm
My chapters end when they end; I'd say my average is about eight pages.
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Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2008 10:25 pm
I also do intuitive chapter breaks. The breaks will come in where they need to be.
I want to write a long story with no chapters sometime though!
Yeah, I'm kind of a jerk like that...
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 7:05 pm
My chapter length differs. For my fanfiction stuff I usually like to churn out 20+ pages, but that's because I take so long in between updates that I like to give my readers a good amount to mull over while they wait another six months. sweatdrop
For my originals, however, my chapters are usually between eight to ten pages long on word.
It doesn't really matter, though. Stop at a good stopping point.
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Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 10:02 am
I'm so glad to hear someone else saying they end their chapters when it feels right. That's all I've ever done, yet it seemed I was always one of the very few.
My shortest chapter has something like six paragraphs; my longest isn't too bad though, it's something like ten pages on Word.
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Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 1:57 am
I always fret about this @__@
I sometimes think that if I end a chapter, I'm skipping scenes too quickly like a badly-written-OC filled-clich- ridden-fanfiction.
More or less, its just paranoia.
I think it really doesn't matter.
Quality, not quantity. Keh.
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Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2008 3:32 pm
I let my chapters end themselves. Mostly they end when I feel it's time to switch to a different viewpoint character, since I hate, hate, hate books where it's not clear whose viewpoint you're supposed to be 'looking' through.
I'm not sure how things will work in my current NaNo, since I seem to have started writing it in the first person. (Something I haven't done since I was a kid)
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Posted: Fri Nov 07, 2008 4:16 pm
I don't really stress over length, the way I see it, chapters will end when they end. But, my average chapter length is about three to four pages, although my longest are ten. usually, I break between major events, whenever my MC is KO'd, or when I want to give the reader a moment like "WTF? This is a the end of the chapter?!" cliff-hanger ending. Other than that... they end themselves.
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Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2008 4:57 am
A chapter is over when it's over. There is no length or word requirement. I recall, for instance, in the book Holes Where a single paragraph equated to a chapter.
I've seen them shorter than that. I myself tend to write in formula or in patterns, which leads to more uniform chapters. However, when not writing in such a way, my chapters just end when they end. Although I'd say anything over thirty pages or so can make a reader feel as though they aren't getting anywhere in the book.
But that's an audience issue, and if a reader is feeling as though the experience is tedious, there's usually another issue with the writing.
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 9:55 am
Um... anywhere between 1500 and 2500 words.
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Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 10:19 am
I am of the mind of content over page and word number, it only matters what is in the chapter, if you have a comfortable about of events in the chapter, and it ends the way you want it to. Then that's a good chapter length. My first chapter of my book is ten pages, which I think they all may be about that length, because that's what I find comfortable.
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Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 8:20 am
I make a chapter when I feel the action has ended for the previous one. There is no real average for how long they are.
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Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 6:03 am
I was just trying to ask my friends about this same thing, and they had no clue what I even meant. I never got a straightforward answer. I was going to ask this question, but well... You beat me to it! smile Haha.
It's good to know there isn't a certain chapter length that books need to be. I know when I'm doing fanfiction, a chapter used to be about 1500-2000 words (I know, tiny). But now I've been trying to make longer ones, around 4500-5000 words. Sometimes I fall short of that goal, though.
With the book, it's way different.
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Posted: Thu Dec 31, 2009 9:22 am
My chapters are like five pages on Word...Sometimes I think that is a little short.
In some of my stories I have more than one first person pov and I go back and forth between the characters. Therefore not needing any chapters...
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