Speaking of Chapters

This is a question that plagues many authors, including me. It's one of the things that really irks me, and I have come to a simple conclusion.


You can decide how long you chapters are!
Yeah, I get it, you want people to be happy with how long your chapters are, but its your book. You are writing what you want, how you want, when you want. The characters are named what you want and the setting and genre are all up to who? YOU. It is the same matter with chapters.

For younger kids books, you might want to make them shorter. I would say from 4-8 pages. For teens, I think any length is fine. Look at Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, he chapters start out be about two pages, and they never end up as a 30 page chapter. Then look at Eragon, (informed by my sister, I haven't read these yet) the chapters are LONG. But that doesn't mean that either of them are bad books because of the length of the chapter.

I don't know about you, but I don't usually end my reading session at the end of a chapter. This is because I will end up reading longer then I wanted to because I want to see what happens next. So, if you think that someone is going to do that, then I would say that it completely doesn't matter how long your chapter is.

What should my Chapter include? 

Your chapter is like a paragraph, it should only tell about a certain part of a story. You don't want to put your entire book in one chapter, but you shouldn't only put a very little, insignificant portion in a chapter. In a chapter, I would say that you shouldn't talk about a lot of little things, you should focus on one more significant event.

A paragraph is supposed to tell you one thing, give you a substantial amount of info about one thing, a chapter should be similar.

A good rule to go by while writing a chapter, is that you don't want your readers to fall asleep. You want to only add the information that is necessary. If you go into detail about dumb things that people won't really care about, then they might think that your just trying to stretch your chapter out. I'm not saying don't add detail, I'm saying don't over-add details.



The Mean Chapter

Hehe, I had fun thinking of that.

What I mean, is you should probably have an average length for your chapters. Not from book to book, but from chapter to chapter. It's not like every book that you ever write has to be a certain length, but I think that the chapters in one book should be.

If one of your chapters is only a page (and it's not the introduction or the prologue or epilogue) then the next one shouldn't be 30 pages. See what I mean? (no pun intended, okay, okay, there was a pun intended.)