On chapter length

I'm currently playing around with the lengths of my chapters. Or, as I call it, re-chaptering my chapters. After some feedback from a CP about a particularly long chapter, I decided to take a good hard look at the entire WIP.

I've always been of the mindset that a chapter should end wherever the chapter should end. In other words, there should be action happening in the chapter. That action should come to some sort of climax. At or after the climax, depending on whether you're trying to drag your reader into the next chapter or give them a break, is when the chapter should logically end. Sometimes that may be 10 pages. Sometimes it may be 5 pages. Sometimes 20. While I was writing my current WIP, this made sense to me because, assuming the story is well written, the chapter should hold the reader's interest even if it's long and if it's short and ending on an action or intrigue note, then the reader should just be turning the page anyway. Right? Hmm. As it turns out, maybe not.

There are certainly other schools of thought out there, including the nice and neat "100,000 words divided by 20 chapters equals 5,000 words per chapter!" school of thought. Cue dusting off of hands. I've never been a fan of this method, personally. I can't imagine how I would plan for such a neat and clean division of my manuscript. But maybe that's my inexperience as a writer or my misunderstanding of the method.

In any case, after receiving the feedback on this particularly lengthy chapter, I thought a lot about chapter length and realized I'd only been approaching the topic as a writer and not a reader. It only took me 10 seconds of thought to realize what I like as a reader: short chapters.

I split my time 100 different ways each week, so if I'm reading a book, I'm usually stealing time to do it from some other activity: twenty minutes on the bus, five minutes at the bus stop, seven minutes in the waiting room of a doctor's office, ten minutes before I go to sleep at night. And I hate to stop reading in the middle of a chapter. So I much prefer short chapters because I can fit whole chapters into my stolen reading times.

So, I made an Excel spreadsheet with all my chapters, their word counts, approximate page counts and major events. Whoa, nelly! What an eye-opening experience. My chapters ranged from 4 pages to 23 pages. Granted, the majority of them were in a much tighter range, but still... Not good. So, over the last week, I've been smoothing out the chapter lengths, evening them out and cutting them down so that they're closer to 10 page chapters.

Lesson learned. :)

*glances up at post* Damn. Maybe this should have been on post length! ;)