How many chapters in a story is too many?
How many chapters do you think a story should have before ending it and how many is too much?
How many chapters in a story is too many?
How many chapters do you think a story should have before ending it and how many is too much?
I don't think there's a simple answer. The books in my various series range from 40 to 100 chapters. Of course, if you count 'story' chapters, it's around 1700 chapters for AWLL (across the three series).
For my "Knox Family" series, it was in the area of 125 chapters across three stories.
For me, it came down to about 5000 words per chapter, or whatever stopping point felt right around that amount. It is probably different depending on the author you ask.
I think that the total word count is more important than the number of chapters.
Some stories here most chapters have fewer words than would fit on a single page of a paperback book.
For a proper chapter I expect some 3,000 to 5,000 words. 20 to 50 chapters would be about the same as a typical paperback book. (Roughly 80,000 to 150,000 words)
More importantly, have you told a complete story?
A number of the stories I enjoy a lot on SoL, each "book" is a year in the life of the MC. Typically 35 to 50 chapters. The main plot lines are advanced. Several plot lines are completed, and several seeds for future plots are introduced.
For a proper chapter I expect some 3,000 to 5,000 words.
Depends on the author/genre.
My typical chapters (influenced by the thriller genre) are 1,200–3,000 words. Saying that, I've had 800-word chapters and 6,000-word chapters when appropriate.
Chapters are the most arbitrary thing for an author in writing fiction. There are no rules. I once read that a romance author had a goal of n-number of words and n-number of chapters for each of her novels. She divided the words of her current novel by the n-number she had for chapters and, presto, that's where she broke off into a new chapter.
n-number of words per chapter
When I first started posting on SoL, I kept each chapter to less than 25,000 characters (or so), fewer than 5,000 words, because otherwise the system broke your Chapter into pages, sometimes mid-sentance.
Now I am re-writing the entire story. Because the Chapter breaks were arbitrary.
More important than the number of chapters is the chapter length. Chapters should be short enough that they can be read in one sitting, about a couple of hours. Longer chapters don't give a convenient, easily definable, stopping point to come back to.
Chapters should be short enough that they can be read in one sitting, about a couple of hours.
Ouch - I rarely have two consecutive hours free and I wouldn't want to use all that time on a single chapter. Waaaay too long.
AJ
Depends on how quickly you read too. Average reading speed is (according to google) between 200 - 400 words per minute. So a 5000 word chapter will take on average between 10 & 25 minutes.
Some stories on here have chapters that average 15,000 words - then you're looking at up to an hour and half to read a chapter.
It also depends on the content too - how clear and simple is the writing?
I think my speed is above average but I'm not in the league of those who claim they can read two million words in a day. I think I absorb more detail too, so I tend to notice when characters change names or the spellings thereof.
AJ
It also depends on the content too - how clear and simple is the writing?
Also depends on the context of the content. You're going to read a fast paced action scene far quicker than a slow sensual scene or a drawn out piece of dialogue or exposition.
As others have said, it's less about the number of chapters, and more about the chapter length and whether each chapter is coherent and complete in the context of the larger story.
It will also depend very much on that larger story, it's overall word count and, crucially, if it tells a complete story.
Over the years, I've gone from an average chapter length of about 2000 words, to an average of about 5000. That seems, to me, to be a happy medium. On average people are going to take me 10 - 25 mins to read a chapter, nice quick read, but gives me space to really add depth and detail.
That means, though, that although my over all word count has gone up, my chapter count has typically come down.
The dead tree books I read typically run in the range of 18-25 chapters.
Personally I am not as a reader opposed to Epics that go beyond 400K words.
Number of chapters is going to be a function of the over-all story size and average chapter size.
Personally, I would find having all really short chapters annoying (though not necessarily annoying enough to abandon an otherwise good story).
I don't think that there's a good objective standard here, but if you have something under 200k words with more than 100 chapters, that's probably too many chapters.
I don't think that there's a good objective standard here, but if you have something under 200k words with more than 100 chapters, that's probably too many chapters.
On the other extreme, if you have a chapter with over 25k words you might want to consider splitting it up some. There are both single-chapter stories and chapters in multi-chapter stories that exceed that size.
On the other extreme, if you have a chapter with over 25k words you might want to consider splitting it up some.
Again, I think over-all story size matters here. If you have a million+ word epic, I would suggest that 25K word chapters are not necessarily excessively large. On the other hand, if you have a 100K word story with only 4 chapters, that is a problem.
I don't think someone who would abandon a story over long chapters is likely to read a million+ word epic anyway.
Whatever works for you as an author.
Some of my favorite dead tree books have no chapters at all (most of the Discworld books.) Others have fairly short chapters — 2,000 to 3,000 words.
If you use chapters as your primary scene change mechanism, as some do, then how long do you want to spend on that scene, or at least that setting. It's all up to you.
As others have said, 'it depends'. In a way, I would say the number of chapters in 'a story' should be the number it takes to tell that story. Not enough, and the story isn't told.
But that depends on what 'a story' means. Many novel-length works are telling multiple overlapping stories, and most series are telling stories through multiple volumes.
My longest book currently has 159 chapters. Yes, that is a lot of chapters - roughly 2.3 days per chapter on average for a book that covers approximately one year. Chapters are about 4400 words each. I could double the word count per chapter and half the chapter count; the story would be the same length. Or halve the word count per chapter and be almost up to a chapter a day (with some days taking several chapters).
Or I could split the book into Summer/Fall and Winter/Spring and have two books of 71 and 88 chapters respectively. Nothing would be lost - those are decent splitting points. I could potentially split winter/spring again, though the placement would be awkward. Some people do that, particularly for e.g. Bookapy, where selling two or three books for $3 each might be much better than selling one for $5ish (the presumption being that people would balk at a $9 price tag).
Mostly, I don't care. Working in year-long chunks is good for me as long as the characters are tied to school years, which is true through Book 8 at minimum, so they'll stay year-long. But I might split them for Bookapy. Who knows? If I was publishing on Amazon, I might split them there, too.
Basically, there's no good answer. If you're telling a single story, you tell it in the space it takes. If you're telling multiple stories per volume, stories that continue in a series, figure out how you want to break things, then tell the story of each piece in the space it takes.
Thanks for all your replies. Now I have an idea of chapter lengths and how many chapters I can write.
Thanks.