How Long Should A Chapter Be • The Master Guide To Chapter Length

How Long Should A Chapter Be The Master Guide To Chapter Length Chapter Length Matters. Here's Why Stop us if you’ve experienced this before: the clock strikes 8pm and you realize that you really need to pick up your drycleaning. But you’re right in the middle of your book! Well, you’ll put the book down when you get to the end of this chapter, you reason.30 minutes afterward, you can’t resist taking a quick peek to see where you are. That’s when you discover: you’re only a quarter of the way through.ï » ¿From these numbers, we can establish some guidelines: the average word count of a chapter typically falls somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 words, with 3,000–4,000 being the most common sweet spot.Does this mean that every chapter must end up somewhere in this range? Heck no. Books with much shorter sections become bestsellers all the time. (Kurt Vonnegut or Dan Brown, for instance.) And are there books with chapters that consistently score above 5,000 words? Of course! May we introduce you to J.R.R. Tolkien?But it's safe to say t hat 1,500-5,000 is the normal range for most books. In any case, to see how authors use this tactic to set their pacing, we also mapped out the word count of every chapter in four famous books:- Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor ParkThen the next section segues smoothly into Eleanor’s take on things, keeping readers intrigued by revealing a new angle on previous events. When there are more than two POV characters, you'll need to make sure that you distribute time equitably between them while making each character interesting in their own right, so that one 7,000-word chapter with a boring character doesn't slow the whole story down.That said, there are always exceptions, which takes us to our next important point...Guidelines, not rulesAs with everything else when it comes to writing a book, these are only guidelines- not rules. Though the average word count of a chapter is around 2,000 – 5,000 words, it all depends on your story. (We can't emphasize this enough.)There are ple nty of books that purposefully play with the word counts of their chapters. The Luminaries, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2015, has 12 sections that steadily decrease in word count to mirror the waning of the moon. (The first chapter of The Luminaries is 360 pages, whereas the final is two pages.) Then there’s William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, in which Vardaman’s famous five-word sentence, â€Å"My mother is a fish,† is the whole of Chapter 19. Or consider Fahrenheit 451, which contains a Part I and Part II - but no chapters.So, don’t write a chapter with only one eye on your story and the other on your word count. When you're outlining your book and writing your first draft, concentrate on making the content of your story the best it can be. Then you can always circle back to adjust word counts afterward, with pacing and reader experience in mind.What do you think about chapter word counts? Have any tips for your fellow writers? Share your t houghts in the comments below!