How long is your average chapter?
59 posts in this topic.
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Mine is around 4000 words on average, although it varies. What about you?
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To post on yws, I try to keep it around 1000 or 1500 words because it's more manageable to read. If it were to be printed, however, I would think about including a few of those sections in the same chapter because they're a continuation of the same subplot.
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Mine is around 1500 to 2000. I don't want them too long 'cause I, personally, hate reading long chapters. Short chapters can get real annoying. 2000 is more my average word count.
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Usually it's around 4-4500, but never less than 3000.
Less than that for me and it feels far too short. I try to aim for about four, and it usually ends up a few hundred words under or over by the time I've edited and cut loads out and put other bits in.
Some do run away with me a bit though and end up being nearly six thousand, and that's way too long and I end up having to restructure everything so it's more manageable.
I read something which said that something like 14 double spaced pages is probably about right per chapter, and any more than 17 is too long. And someone else once told me about 4500-5000 per chapter, and that equals roughly the same.
2000 seems far too short to me. That's only five double spaced pages.
Then again, some books have really short chapters of only a few book pages. It probably depends on your individual novel. -
You know, with Honor, I don't have any chapters. When there's a scene change, I just hit enter twice and move on. I suppose partitioning chapters is just too cumbersome for me since I write short scenes as well as long ones and it's too much work to decide when one chapter starts and another ends.
During the editing process, I'll probably divvy it up, though...
-Kylan -
I usually aim for around 4000-5000 words.
I agree, anything less than around 3000 would be far too short.
I like to be pretty descriptive, so longer chapters are better for me. -
Every four to seven pages, single-spaced. That's...around 3000 words, maybe a little less. I prefer shorter chapters, myself.
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For Death Machine my chapters had to be about 2,000 words or more. They could be under 2,000 but I preferred them to be longer. I'm hoping to make them even longer when I rewrite it, because 54k is not long enough for the kind of book I want! Haha. Of course it would help if I added more to the actual plot, hm?
Party Killers chapters are short bursts by nature. I was thinking about style, and how perhaps I could start my chapters being 1k and then have them grow in length, then eventually shorten again until they're back around 1k near the end, to create a kind of flow in the novel. 1,000 words is abrupt for a chapter, but it is how they come out! Haha. I'm not real far in that, so nothing exactly counts anyway. -
I'm with Kylan--my chapters tend to go with scene breaks. For Sparrows, this ranges from one hundred to five thousand words (I'm insane, I know). D tends to go about four thousand. Certain characters tend to be more exciting than others, and their scenes reflect that. XD
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I'm not even particularly sure. With my NaNo, I remember pounding out a 10,000 word chapter in a day, and then feeling exhausted. However, that might just be a figment, because I was pretty sleep deprived the whole way through.
And with my new one, I'm not even very far into it yet. I've had too much homework to stay on top of everything, so my writing has suffered. But, I'd say that 2-3000 words would be close to an average for me. -
Kylan wrote:You know, with Honor, I don't have any chapters. When there's a scene change, I just hit enter twice and move on. I suppose partitioning chapters is just too cumbersome for me since I write short scenes as well as long ones and it's too much work to decide when one chapter starts and another ends.
During the editing process, I'll probably divvy it up, though...
-Kylan
One thing you could do instead of using regular chapters is take the main plot points and just divide it into three or four acts.
Personally, I'm a fan of short chapters. I do my best to have scenes that are at least 1000 words, but if I do, I'll just put that one with the next scene in one chapater if it makes sence. -
I don't have chapters, really, at least not for WoaS. I have Years, which are divided up into segments. xD
Er... I suppose the segments are psuedo-chapters? If you want to think of them that way, then they're usually anywhere from a third of a page (a couple hundred words) to several pages (in the vicinity of 3,000). It depends on what I feel is right. ^^
I'm not sure whether CM is going to have chapters or not. Right now I'd say it's pretty likely, but I can't say how long they are because I don't have a whole one yet. xD
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Hi,
I just did a word count on mine and it's around 784. It will be longer though, considering I still have more to write.
Love,
N -
I like reading really short chapters, so I usually tend to write chapters of 300-1000 words. Somethins, though, I'll have really long chapters. It really depends on what I'm wrting.
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That's great! I thought I was a disaster cos most of my chapters are 300-1000 words. Good to know I'm not the only one. I tend to stop when I come to the end of one train of thought, and then I start a fresh chapter.
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