How long is too long for a chapter?

[FlamingRuby]

I believe we can all agree that a chapter/episode generally should be about 1000 words (give or take a hundred). But what about the other extreme, where a chapter seems to keep going on and on and on? How do you know when it's time to cut a chapter in two (or more)?

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

I actually don't agree! I don't think 1000 words is enough for me to tell a meaningful chunk of a story. 2500 words is the lower limit of my chapters, and about 6000 words is the upper limit at which point I consider splitting it into two. My novel has chapters of around 6000-7000 words, due to the differences in the medium.

 

[Griff4815]

As somebody who has pretty long chapters and routinely has to cut his in two, I'll try to answer this. For me, 20-25 pages is my usual chapter length. I'll sometimes go a bit longer than that, but I usually just end up splitting the chapter into two more manageable chunks. I sometimes worry that this disrupts the flow, but I wouldn't want the audience to feel like the chapter never ends. I think it's important to know your limits and to properly estimate how long each scene might take in advance so that you have natural "cutting off" points should you go over.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

@Griff4815, page count is not the most useful measurement, since a page can have a wildly varying number of words. Any idea how many words that is when using your own text formatting preferences?

I found this, which appears to indicate that 4000 words is very typical in published fiction.

 

[Kutie Pie]

I like my chapters long, tbh, but action-packed, eventful chapters for me typically run over 10,000 words. But anything that's serious to the plot will turn out to be long chapters regardless, I've noticed. I try to have a good idea of what I want in a chapter such as the very beginning and the very ending, and just fill things in as I go along, and that's usually where the big chunk of all those words go lol. Sometimes I've had to cut a chapter into two chapters because I realized it was going longer than intended. I've learned from it that there's a sneaky, easily-overlooked pitfall when it comes to cutting that you could end up making the first chapter end weird/abrupt, and that takes practice to learn where to cut with very little editing afterwards. This still applies to cutting a chapter into two posts, but it's a bit "forgivable" since it's just obvious you ran out of room.

But the thing is that it doesn't matter how long your chapter is, there needs to be a point to be had in every chapter to add to the rising action that will eventually lead to the climax. Writing nothing but fluff can only go so far before it becomes tedious, it's always best to have a goal in mind for how you want to end a chapter and keep your readers interested in reading/waiting for updates. That's the stigma of fan fiction due to lack of control/editing, and it's much more noticeable in romance fics because apparently some shippers have it in their heads the only way you can have an engaging story dedicated to your OTP is nothing but slice-of-life fluff where everything is 10.000+ words of nothing happening but you're still expected to coo over how cute the couple is together and how perfect their love life is. Bleh. You're not writing a visual novel, for Pete's sake.

 

[Dragonfree]

I don't generally use actual length to determine when to end my chapters; rather, each chapter is meant to cover specific events, and it's however long it needs to be for that. On occasion I've discovered that the events I'm writing are taking up way more space than I anticipated and the chapter would be better off split up, but in these cases I've pretty much always discovered that actually some events I imagined being minor actually turned out major and deserve their own chapter - I can't recall ever finding myself splitting a chapter purely for physical length. I basically always split my chapters at a scene change, with either a change in location or a timeskip of at least a few minutes; if there's no appropriate place for that, I have a hard time imagining I'd split the chapter even if it were very long in terms of word count.

My longest chapter was some 12,397 words; other than that one, the longest I've generally written is around 10,000. Interestingly, that longest chapter is mostly that long because it's got a pretty fillery battle in the middle that today I'd probably either cut down a lot or skip entirely - because that battle is of no real importance, it would've been weird to make it the main event in a chapter, but that's exactly why it probably shouldn't be there, or at least not be so long. I think I've got several chapters around 10,000 words where that length is legitimate and I wouldn't want to cut them down, though.

 

[Victorian Rush]

Honestly, for me, it all depends on me. My chapter sizes vary, it all depends on if I feel like the chapter is complete before I post it. I will say, I do have a maximum of 6K words and a minimum of 1K words for one chapter. If I write something that does not reach over a thousand words, I will, most likely, make it a drabble.

 

[RaisingHeartSetUp]

Chapters for me are at least one thousand words, and are often over two. The longest chapters I've ever written are somewhere in the three thousand word range.

 

[shoz999]

Depends on the word count and the overarching plot the chapter is focusing. For example I had this chapter that was a mixture of racing and the disappearance of the person leading to an increasing 8000 word count, so I split the two into separate chapters.

 

[Chibi Pika]

As a reader, chapters over 10,000 words get to the point where I start eyeballing that scroll bar more and more often, unless they happen to be particularly fascinating. On the flip side, chapters under 3000 words tend to leave me feeling a bit unsatisfied, unless the author is concise and good at fitting a lot of stuff into such a small space (System:Reboot is a good example of a fic that got me to appreciate short chapters.)

As a writer, my gold standard to aim for is 7000 words; any lower or higher than that and I start to feel antsy. In practice, my chapters tend to run longer, but I'm working on being more concise. I've always had a fierce distaste for splitting chapters into multiple posts. I feel that the forum is a medium, and I should work within the limitations of the medium to the best of my ability (note: this is a totally arbitrary restriction that I hold myself, and only myself to. No one else should feel obligated to follow it!)

Interestingly, my outline for Book 2 shows that my upcoming chapters will be far shorter than the chapters I've written in the past. A side effect of being better plotted out, perhaps? (I've only slated 2-3 major events per chapter, while in the past, due to poor planning, I've had to cram 4-5 events into a single chapter and constantly feel like it's overstaying its welcome.)

 

[Starlight Aurate]

Good gravy my chapters are longer than what about half of the people who have replied so far said. I usually thought of my stuff on the shorter side, as my chapters as of late have been 6-8k words or so each. I can't really say how much I "feel" chapters should be; 10k words is probably around where I'm tired and want to stop reading/reviewing, whereas I feel that 1k words is too short and doesn't satisfy. Then again, it depends entirely on the story and the author's writing style.

 

[DarkerShining]

Hmm, well, my chapters tend to vary in length. I don't really aim for a particular number of words, I instead go more based off of the number of pages I end up writing in Word. The shortest chapters may be at a minimum six pages in Word, but some of the longer ones tend to be around ten pages or so. I think one of my longest chapters so far ended up being around fourteen pages in Word. I sort of just write and work on the chapter until I feel I've reached a good spot to end it. From what I can tell, though, it seems most of my chapters tend to be somewhere between 3000-6000 words long, with some of the longest ones so far being 7000+ words.

 

[Firaga Metagross]

The longest I've ever written is about 7,000 words but generally I try to stick to around 4000-5000 since anything more is fatiguing and anything less seems too short. Although, my older stories which had less going on in them were fine with 2000 word chapters. Depends on the mood of the series and the role of chapters, I suppose.

 

[lucarioknight56]

Over my years of writing, I've gone up the scale of how many words define a chapter. I started off with 1000, then up to 2000, 3000...until I made the jump to 6000, which is where I am now. Even then, my chapters fluctuate between 5000 to 7000. 10000 words is where I normally split a chapter, but some of the best chapters of my recently completed story, PMD: Unequivocant, happen to be over 10000. Admittedly, it was because of the way I structured that section and the fact there was no good point to split them, but it goes to show that it really varies.

For my personal reading, anything under 4000 words feels short, especially now that I've gotten used to rereading my works to check for errors. That said, once it goes over 10000 words, it is usually an indication that there's too much detail, or it needs to be split somewhere along the line. Just my own thoughts though.

 

[Namohysip]

You guys should see some of the madness that happens in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon's relatively successful fics. Some of the works I've been reading (particularly Gravity of Perspective and Rebirth) have VERY long chapters on average. Particularly Rebirth, which is currently 18 chapters long and 187,479 words long--in other words, an average of 10k. And one chapter is 16k words long, if I remember right.

Anyway, personally? I started off at an average of 3-4k per chapter, but have since grown to going between 4 and 6k for the most part. There was an instance where I nearly published an 8k chapter, but then realized in the editing process that there was a perfect scene break right in the middle, so it became two chapters instead. Convenient!