The design and length of your story’s chapters will impact the overall pacing and rhythm of the narrative, in addition to the degree to which the reader remains interested and engaged.  While there is no right or wrong answer to how long a chapter should be, or what should be included within it, there is a general guideline to consider, while keeping genre differences in mind.

Children’s stories, thrillers, young adult, and mysteries in general, typically have shorter chapters to uphold a quicker momentum, whereas non-fiction and literary stories tend to contain longer chapters to provide more information and world-building.  While one purpose of dividing the story into chapters is to create pause for the reader, another is to allow the story to change direction, reduce confusion and highlight the theme that binds the chapters together.

To this point, Author Harry Bingham explains in his Novel Writing Article; “any story has beats in it, or punctuation marks, in effect. Moments when the story- and the reader- want a moment’s pause”. (See my archived blog titled White Space for more on this).  Therefore, providing the appropriate amount of text for the audience is an important component in the writing process.  Accordingly, Bingham defines the typical suggested chapter lengths as the following:

1000 words or less= too short

2000-4000 words= standard

5000 words or more = very long

While this is only a rough guideline, it does provide a good idea of where the writer should attempt to end up. Seemingly in agreement with Bingham and further emphasizing the significance in the chapter size development, Ghost Writer and Editor Pamela Koehne-Drube notes, in her NOVLR article:  Finding the Ideal Chapter Length for your Story, “the average length of a story should target between 1,500- 8,000 words”.

Similarly, in our real lives we could divide our own life stories into separate stages or time periods, like the chapters in fiction.  Only, we can’t freeze our favorite scenes the way the reader can.  To the contrary, we often rush into our next chapter before we realize, prepare for, or want the current chapter to end.  I know this is the way I feel when I think back to the earlier chapters of my own life when I was happily married, raising my four children in our first and second homes with fenced in back yards, while my dad was still alive to spend precious time there with us and the beloved yorkshire terrier we adored.  One minute I was living in that special chapter and the next minute I drifted into a new one, minus the marriage, the young children, the yard, my dad, and the dog.  Just like that… it was all gone.  The page turned without providing opportunity to fold its corner to hold my place.

Consequently, the varying lengths and design of the chapters helps the writer to control the flow between her story’s noise and the story’s silence, the contrast between the suspenseful moments of activity when outcomes are still a mystery and the quiet time to reflect on associated consequences, with the forewarning to prepare for what is yet up ahead, before shifting gears. In knowing how to design individual chapters, the author can manipulate her storyline’s pacing and changes in point of view, as well as switch locations and create time jumps, or do what she needs to do to achieve success or failure for her characters and the plot line.  In essence, the writer controls the fictional story the way we wish we could in our real lives.

To illustrate one of these techniques, to control time in the narrative, Pamela Koehne-Drube describes “Time Jumps” as the following: A new chapter for a time jump provides a clear demarcation between the different time periods, making it easier for the reader to understand the significance of the jump and how it relates to the overall story, as well as generally maintaining continuity and narrative coherence.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could control our own time jumps in real life, if we could hold our place to freeze time when we want to stay in a favorite scene just a little while longer or even if we could at least recognize the value of the present moment while we are still there.  Or if we could decide which chapters should be shorter and which should be longer or if we could hit the delete button for the ones that just don’t work at all for our story.

If only we could be like the reader, fully present to embrace the important moments before they fall away from us like autumn leaves spinning out of control toward their finish.  All stories, whether in our fictional narratives or in our real lives, have beginnings and endings, with middles between (see the dash we discussed in my last blog for more on this), but along the way it’s the separate chapters we create that connect the pieces of our story together.  It is the scene, pacing and rhythm changes, the new characters to whom we are introduced and with whom we form and preserve relationships, the time jumps and the blank pause pages between that complete and enrich our story, making the time we spend there immeasurable.