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What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)
- jayski 2y ago20
- novosel 2y agoI bid you 21 good Sir.
- gandalfgreybeer 2y agoAssuming all chapters are the same length, I think 10-20 is the sweet spot where I can randomly pick up the book
- beAbU 2y agoLong enough that when I'm reading at night and I'm getting sleepy, that the chapter end is always a reasonable amount of pages away.
- dehrmann 2y ago> There is no magic button when it comes to chapter length: the 'right' one is a blend for each novel being written. There's no point in worrying about the length of your piece of string if the string itself isn't useful or compelling.
- Conscat 2y agoSlightly tangential, the longest single chapter of anything I've read so far is Fallout: Equestria chapter 37, at 51.5k words. Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons is the longest single novel, at 1.8m words, but in terms of chapter count (which seems to be what the article means by "length"), I doubt either of those come close, since they merely have 50-odd chapters. Counting the number of chapters seems like a strange measurement to me, in light of that.
- 082349872349872 2y agoWhy does clover keep on growing Why are there flies in my hay Don't they know it's the end of the world It ended when you clopped away -- "Horsefly" Davis (as heard on DCR)
- captn3m0 2y agoA Memory of Light (last book in Wheel of Time) has a single chapter at 79000 words. Quote from the author about the chapter: > The chapter is just shy of 79,000 words. It contains (by my quick count) 72 scenes–but only 31 distinct viewpoints, as numerous ones repeat.
- BeFlatXIII 2y agoYou could fit an entire novel in that chapter.
- trescenzi 2y agoI need to actually finish these. Robert Jordan passing and, at the time, me having no clue who Brandon Sanderson was, meant I stalled out. But now that I know how incredible Sanderson is, and the TV show seems like it’s actually solid I’ve recently been toying with the idea of reading them all through. I love the insanity of that quote. Sanderson has an awesome ability to write things like a chapter with a dozen viewpoints that still flow so incredibly well.
- ryanar 2y agoI read through the wheel of time last year and enjoyed it. It is a commitment, I think the series slows down a ton and then Sanderson comes in and it picks up, and it was amazing to see all the building of plots see their conclusions. So it is well worth the journey.
- taneq 2y agoI waited eagerly for Crossroads of Twilight, read it, found that it STILL didn't address the events at the end of book 8, at ALL, closed it and never went back. I've heard the new ones started advancing the story again but I just... couldn't.
- amateurCoder5 2y agoChapter 11 in the book Gremlins was just (spoiler) "Pete forgot."
- jb1991 2y agoThe larger question for me is the long-term effect of rapidly vanishing attention spans in our population. The short-form format across tweets, tiktok, much on youtube, instagram, SMS vs. voicemail -- even email is often considered "too long" for newer generations -- what is the likely consequence of this? It seems dangerous in the long-term, but maybe not. Is it just a temporary cultural shift, or is it resulting in a permanent shift to humanity's ability to concentrate?
- rvba 2y agoThere are much more things to consume. There were of course books and newspapers in the past (in fact even more press and higher quality than now), but I think for average person there was much less of everything - you had one book, one newspaper, few tv channels to choose from. So people want the essence. Also the quality of modern writing is often poor - you dont learn much from articles, since the people who write them must pump few per day
- jb1991 2y agoThat's an interesting observation -- perhaps the proliferation of quantity is encouraging audiences to care less about engagement time so they can maximize exploration of all that is available. The ability to speed up the playback speed of Netflix content would be an example of this.
- lumb63 2y agoI worry about the same thing. I will say, however, that I worry more about this in the context of news articles, conversation, and other shorter-duration activities. Books are a big commitment, and it is highly disappointing to find out someone stretched a 50 page book into 250 pages to get it published. Sometimes it helps to instill the idea, or provides useful elaboration, but sometimes it is filler with no discernible benefit to the reader. Our time is important and as such, I think there ought to be a referendum against wasting it. That is not to say all content should be short, but that it should be no longer than it needs to be, and that information density should be as high as is tolerable.
- jll29 2y agoI was hoping for some statistics about avg. (mean, mode) chapter length, and changes over time, given that this post comes from Penguin, who have plenty of data at their fingertips. Still, an interesting blog post.
- passion__desire 2y agoHumanities department generally / traditionally haven't believed in insights that come from mathematics.
- keiferski 2y agoDepends on what you mean by traditionally. This division is largely a consequence of the battle between scientific-technical education and classics/Latin-Greek education in the 19th century. Prior to that, there was definitely a ton of overlap between humanities and mathematics - consider Leibniz as a prime example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
- passion__desire 2y agoConside the "Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis" theory. It is nothing but Synthesis = λ × Antithesis + (1 - λ) × Thesis
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y agoI wouldn't say "believe" is the most accurate way to describe it. They're just very skeptical of the insights from statistical analysis of works in the mediums because there usually aren't very good large data sources. Cinemetrics.lv was amazing before the domain was stolen and had a large community of film academics using it. In literature, a big problem has been the way that publishers do not allow access to any of their data, some public access programs are starting to try to overcome that though. In general, though, most humanities academics aren't interested in statistical analysis or its insights, not because they don't believe in them, but because the insights generally aren't that useful or likely so general as to be not that useful for very specific research programs.
- asplake 2y ago(In fiction)
- camel-cdr 2y agoFor me 10k-15k words is roughly the optimum, where it isn't to short, but you still have ampel oportunity to stop at a chapter break. Although for serial works it's generally the longer the better.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoI like it best when a chapter takes between 10 minutes and a half hour to read through. Textbooks you're surely going to focus on one chapter at at time and you don't want it to take very long to re-read, which most students will likely be doing, especially when you may have hours of problems to solve for a single chapter. You want to be able to re-read without a lengthy commitment compared to the problem-solving. Regular non-fiction may not be as universally re-read but it would be more often than with fiction. With fiction or storytelling a half hour is a good max so there will always be a stopping point within reach, with two chapters not being out of the question lots of times. People may not re-read a fiction chapter as they go along very much, but why not make it easier anyway. Then again people probably like a chapter that takes whole hour or more but is such a page-turner that it seems like a half-hour or less :)
- sambeau 2y agoI am writing children's books. One mantra I try to keep to is to make my chapters ~15 minutes long when read aloud by a parent at bed time. This gives them the ability to be consistent in their bedtime routine. This way children don't get short-changed and adults don't find they have committed to something they can't get out of. It also allows them to easily give in and do another chapter — after all, it's only 15 minutes. 30 mins reading out loud is about 4,500 words, so 15 minute half-chapters are 2,250 words. A 2,250 word chapter is also very manageable by a child.
- ComputerGuru 2y agoAs a parent that’s grappled with this: thank you!
- sien 2y agoI read mostly on the Kindle and appreciate shorter chapters just for general reading. If you read before bed it's handy to know that a chapter has, say 8 minutes to go.
- thih9 2y ago> there is no magic button when it comes to chapter length: the 'right' one is a blend for each novel being written
- sebastiennight 2y agoWhen I was re-writing one of my books in 2016, I spent the whole summer asking successful entrepreneurs (my reader audience) what was their favorite business book, and why. It turned out that the "favorite book" answer was fairly varied (aside from a couple of big-name bestsellers), but the "why" answer almost always revolved around: - "bite-size chapters" - "really quick read" - "short and to the point" - "one idea, one example for proof, and that's it, go to next chapter" My book went from ~120 pages to ~150 during that rewrite, but also went from ~10 chapters to ~80. Not only did the new version outsell the original by a 10x factor, but I'd estimate the completion rate also shot up considerably (based on reader comments about the final chapters).
- qingcharles 2y agoJames Patterson's books are generally the worst I've ever read, but his short 2-3 page chapters are surely one of the reasons for his success. They're like popping M&M's -- you're thinking, "I can just do one more."
- treetalker 2y agoRenowned author Dan Brown, who walks with his feet while not writing renowned books as the author of them, has renowned books that (quite successfully) fall in this same category of books with short chapters with short sentences that read quickly because they are all short, not to mention renowned. https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-fun-of-renowned-dan-brown/ https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-f...
- GeoAtreides 2y agohappy for you you got that bag, but oh my god do I weep for mankind tiktok and its ilk surely did a number on our collective attention spans (and along with it the capability for nuanced and complex reasoning)
- SllX 2y agoNah, most business books or “ideas” books really are too long. Something I used to do when I was interested in a book is I would go to the local book store, skim the introduction and chapter listings to get a feel for the book, find the chapter that had the same name of the book and just read that. Never walked away feeling like I didn’t get the author’s main idea, and usually most of the rest of the book is trying to pre-sell it and examples of where to apply their idea. Maybe some anecdotes about how it helped them in their life or how other people do it too.
- dark__paladin 2y agoFor me personally 5k-10k / chapter and 20-30 chapters per book is optimal.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoI'm 2/3rd of the way through Love in Time of Cholera and it's only chapter four (@200+pages, so far)... otherwise, an absolutely beautiful story of unrequited/parasocial love. By far the worst chapter structure (and "book") is The Sound and The Fury. It seems like an exercise in-the-second-person, gone wrong. Sensorial overload... and isn't the point of a good story <TO MAKE SENSE>?
- Yawrehto 2y ago1. I wonder how much of the reason people seem to like shorter chapters is because shorter-chapter books tend to have quicker pacing. Would there be some way of controlling for pacing? 2. The title is a bit misleading. I went in assuming it would be some sort of analysis - average chapter length vs number of copies sold, for instance. It's certainly a lovely read and decent history, but it doesn't answer the central question. 3. The username of the poster (samclemens) is a fitting username for a post about books with a particular focus on older 'classics'.