Authors often struggle to figure out when to add chapter breaks and how to properly split up their novel or memoir.
A chapter is an intentional division between sections of a book. They help readers work through a story and provide reasonable places to take a break from reading. They can also be used to build suspense or offer structural cues like a change in point of view.
To help you decide how long your chapters should be, let’s dive into the factors that play into that decision. In this article, I’ll discuss what’s necessary for each chapter and how pacing affects your chapter length. Lastly, I’ll give you a Story Weapon to have fun with the process.
How many words in a chapter? Contextualize the nature of a “chapter” in relation to the sum total that comprises your novel. With the tools I equip you with, you should be able to understand how to pace out any kind of novel — whether narrative or experimental — and create a work where no chapter feels out of place.
Each chapter should have a purpose
Chapters aren’t just arbitrary ways to divide your story. They’re the building blocks of your novel and they come together as more than the sum of their individual parts.
Each one is like a point in your argument. When you’re deciding how to split up your chapters, try to identify the purpose each chapter serves. If you’re outlining your book ahead of time (which I highly recommend), you may want to write down a sentence that states what the chapter is about. But, the key here is to hold it loosely. In fact, the goal with the first draft is to simply get the story down, so this will become increasingly useful in the second pass through your manuscript and all subsequent iterations.
Some reasons for a chapter to exist might include: a new character is introduced, someone is betrayed, the protagonist moves into a different environment, or it jumps to the perspective of a different character.
Identifying the purpose of each chapter is also helpful because it ensures that you’re not overloading the reader with information. You don’t want to have too much happening at once. It becomes difficult for the reader to keep track of everything you’ve told them and the story may end up feeling rushed. Each chapter should have one main purpose. This helps your reader remain focused as the plot unfolds.
“Each little chapter has its place.”
– Lillie Langtry
So, how many words are in a chapter?
Well, it depends.
There are no hard and fast rules about specific word counts.
The right word count is the one that delivers the purpose of your chapter. No more, no less.
If it’s meant to be a quick aside from the narrator to the audience, the chapter need only be a few pages or even less. If it’s to deliver a meaty scene between two main characters, odds are you’ll need to dedicate several pages to that conversation.
Once the purpose of your chapter has been fulfilled, try to move on as swiftly as possible. If you’ve not yet reached the intended purpose, the chapter is not yet finished.
In Misery, Stephen King wrote a chapter with only one word: “Rinse.”
Even with this simple word, the chapter still fulfills a purpose. The protagonist, Paul Sheldon, is haunted by the torture from his captor, Annie Wilkes. It’s a symbol of the control she has over him. It also gives an abrupt break in the pacing, which I’ll get into next.
Pacing
The overall pacing of your book also plays a function in the length of your chapters. Taken together, the chapters form a rhythm. You may prefer an even rhythm, where chapters are a reliable length and the book thumps along like a heartbeat. Or maybe your story wants more breathing space where a meaty chapter is followed by a shorter one.
Remember, there are no rules. The pacing you are drawn to is something you’ll discover as you continue writing. The best books, even if they’re incredibly long and the chapters are dense, don’t drag when you read them because the story is building in meaning as it progresses. No matter what style you prefer, a good pace is fast enough to be compelling and slow enough to lose yourself in the characters and the world.
Consider this: each chapter break is a chance for the reader to put down the book. If you’ve kept up the pace and the book feels like it’s moving at a satisfying rhythm, they will be inclined to continue reading.
Your story weapon: Have fun with the framing
Chapters don’t need to be a specific prescribed length or fit into a neat box.
In Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, for example, each of the nine chapters focuses on a different category: Cities & Memory, Cities & Desire, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, etc. The sections on each of the fifty-five cities covered are only a page or two, interspersed with exchanges between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
Marco Polo describes the cities of Khan’s empire to him, as he’s too busy ruling to see them all. Kublai Khan knows the cities are too fantastical to exist, but these exchanges offer a change of pace to the reader and evolve the chapters themselves.
Another great example comes from Frank Herbert’s Dune. The start of each chapter includes an excerpt from a future textbook or other “historical” work discussing the events in this fictional world.
Many of them are written from the perspective of Princess Irulan, a character introduced later in the book. These excerpts offer the reader a sense of the magnitude. They tell us that the events of the story are important enough to justify historical record. They inform us of Princess Irulan’s character. Here’s an example that appears before a chapter involving the protagonist (later played by Timothée Chalamet) and his father (later played by Oscar Isaac):
How do we approach the study of Muad‘Dib’s father? A man of surpassing warmth and surprising coldness was the Duke Leto Atreides. Yet, many facts open the way to this Duke: his abiding love for his Bene Gesserit lady; the dreams he held for his son; the devotion with which men served him. You see him there—a man snared by Destiny, a lonely figure with his light dimmed behind the glory of his son. Still, one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father?
—from “Muad’Dib, Family Commentaries” by the Princess Irulan
When applying this to your own work, let this encourage you to make your chapter breaks an interesting challenge rather than something to stress about.
There’s no secret to how many words your chapter should have. When you submit to the process, your story will tell you how many words your chapter needs.
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