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Craft of Writing

Lon Prater

Miniskirts & Higher Math: Chapter Lengths Revisited

The Conventional Wisdom

Like many writers working on what will hopefully come to be known as their "early work," I've agonized over chapter lengths. How long is too long? If Big Name Author X got away with a one-page chapter, why can't I?

In my search for the secret of the perfect chapter length, I've covered a lot of ground. I've asked at workshops, read dozens of books and articles on the subject, analyzed the work of highly successful authors, googled every conceivable misspelling of "chapter length" just in case I was missing something . . . you get the picture. So what kind of wisdom did I bring down from the mountain for all my trouble? The tongue-in-cheek list below will give you a good taste; afterwards, I'll share my own personal approach to chapter lengths.

• The (early) James Patterson approach: One (or occasionally two) flash fiction scenes per chapter. The short chapter model is very forgiving; it allows a writer plenty of room for plot twists and surprises as needed to punch things up. Beware, though: all that white space at the top and bottom of each of your 114 chapters really adds up. A novel with only about 50,000 actual words can run much longer in terms of manuscript pages and printed length than it has any right to.



• The lit-rary approach: Each chapter should describe a step in the development of your theme, and feel like a complete symphonic movement. What that means: Write until you put yourself to sleep. Next time you're sober and not too depressed about your upbringing/family life to write, start a new chapter picking up from exactly the point where you left off earlier.



• The Hollywood blockbuster approach: each chapter should include scenes of sex, violence and conversation in varied order. You can't cheat and leave out the conversation either; in this model, talky segments are the duct tape that simultaneously binds and justifies your explosions and lingerie being in the same story. Don't forget to end each chapter with a cliffhanger, then fade in to another character as the next chapter begins.

There's the Best Way, and then there's My Way

I learned everything I ever needed to know about chapter lengths from Mr. Stovall, who also taught me social studies and economics in high school. He said, "Long enough to adequately cover the subject, but short enough to keep things interesting."

Of course, he was talking about the proper length for a girl's miniskirt, not a novel chapter; but the guidelines really do provide all that an author needs to know about chapter lengths. So that's the best way to gauge chapter size. Now for the most obsessive way, or as I like to call it: My Way.

1) Grab a book that you think is relatively similar (in genre, audience, voice and style) to what your final product will be. And if you need one, a calculator. This will call for some higher math.

2) Pick a representative page (not the beginning or end of a chapter, and with no special formatting quirks) and find a line with text that stretches from one margin to the other.

3) Count the number of characters and spaces in that line and divide by 6. (Often about 8-11 "words" per line.)

4) Multiply that number by how many lines there are on the selected page. The result is a fair estimate of how many "standard" words per page (SWPP) there are in your sample book.

5) Now pick two or three chapters from your selected book and count every page (including the first and last this time). Add them up and divide by three to get the average number of pages per chapter.

6) Multiply that average number of pages per chapter by the average SWPP and divide by 250 and round appropriately. The result is a pretty good loose guideline for how long (give or take a few pages) most of your chapters should be.

Note that this isn't a hard and fast number, no graven in stone edict I'm offering here. Just a way for other obsessives like me who find the simplicity of the miniskirt analogy too laissez-faire and unrestrictive to be of any real use.

Other Considerations

In many ways, a reader will subconsciously experience the pace of novel as not just the speed of the plot, but how fast they are moving through the pages and chapters, just as a scene with lots of dialogue "reads" faster. And all my earlier kidding about Mr. Patterson's short chapters aside, the man is onto something: when new chapters keep springing up so quickly, it's harder to step away from the excitement of such a fast-feeling read. Some other thoughts on how chapter length can play an unacknowledged part in setting the pace of your novel:

• I personally like the first chapters (and prologue) to be short and punchy. Keeping the page count of your earlier chapters at the lower end of your spectrum forces you to avoid writing (well, at least keeping) those long explanatory passages up front; plus it can help you determine if you're starting where the action is.



• Shorter chapters in the middle of a novel serve to move the action along in what can sometimes be a novel's most difficult section to write and pace. Naturally, shorter chapters are also appropriate at any time the action, stakes or tension is rising.



• There's nothing wrong with longer chapters, so long as there's enough going on to keep the reader's interest. But putting such chapters back to back can be exhausting. If you find yourself stuck in a long chapter with no hunks of exposition left to prune, see if one of those scene breaks would work as the end of the chapter; or in more extreme circumstances, consider rewriting or restructuring that section of your novel.