Young Writers Society

What do you think is the optimal chapter length for a novel? I have a tendency to write a lot of short chapters at about one thousand words per chapter, give or take a couple hundred. What chapter range do you usually write in if you write novels?

I have another, fairly unrelated question. When I write, I seem to automatically revert to first person past tense point of view, and when I write in another point of view, I have to look it over more closely because I might switch from third person to first. Do you have a point of view that you tend to switch to without noticing?

Chapter lengths are about as varied as the novels they're written for. I have read chapters that were a page or two in length, even shorter, while I personally write chapters that are between 7 to 12 thousand words.

Don't worry about their length while you're writing. Worry about the chapter content.

As for persons, the only one I tend to slip with is second. Both adding it into first and slipping into either first or third when I write it. When it comes to second slipping into first, that's the narrative structure which I will probably change later on. When it comes to first or third slipping into second, it's because I hardly ever write in second.

I'd suggest you figure out why you're switching to third. Is it because you want to show something from outside of the narrator's head? Do you temporarily switch PoVs there?

It might be best for you to switch to third if that's the case.

No, I don't end up switching to third. I tend to slip into first person, past tense. I honestly think it's just because it's the form I use the most often and am most comfortable with, though, since this has happened in every story I've written.

I always switch to first person from a characters perspective, and if I don't have a character to write from first person then I accidentally create a narrator and use that to smash down the fourth wall.

Personally I tend not to worry about chapter length until I'm done with the novel. I'll label things as 'part one... two... three...' and each of those is about a thousand words long. That's mainly because I write and edit better in smaller chunks. (YWS likes to review in shorter chunks too.)

Then once my novel is written I'll go back and start tweaking and splicing and moving them all about. The end result is to have chapters that vary hugely in length.

Practically, though, there are things to consider.

Chapters serve different purposes. Some people use them to separate one scene from another, or one day from another, or one series of events from another. They could also be used to separate ongoing themes, or merely as a way of saying 'take a deep breath here.'

Target audience:
Younger audiences cope better with shorter chapters, because it takes them longer to read, and because they retain less information in their minds at any one time, so the sooner you can put brackets around a scene the sooner they can add it to their repitoire of 'stuff that happens in this book.' For pre-teens I'd say 500 - 1500 words is manageable.

Genre:
Fantasy books tend to have longer chapters. Quite often fantasy readers are faster readers (maybe because fantasy novels are chunky pieces of work, I don't know,) but they can generally clear a novel in a day or two. For this reason, fantasy novels can afford to add in a lot more buff.
Detective novels however have shorter chapters. These are the ones that are read slowly and chewed over in great detail. The chapters are short to create frequent breaks to think 'oh, so that wasn't the murder weapon after all... but what made the stab wound then?'
Think about your genre and how it's read, to see what length chapters would be most appropriate.

I also have five POV characters, so I make a new chapter every time I switch point of view. That might be why I lean towards shorter chapters even though I write in the fantasy genre.