Chapter is a Seven Letter Word · 5:32pm Feb 10th, 2016
YEEEEAH, MUH BRONCOS, ORANGE CRUSH 2.0, SUPER BOWL 50 CHAMPIONS, THIS IS BRONCOS COUNTR—
*looks up, coughs, stuffs assorted Broncos merchandise under the couch*
…Howdy! Didn’t see you there.
So a perennial topic of awkward self-conversation I have (sometimes with others when they’ll listen) is the idea of chapter length. It comes up quite a bit around fimfic, probably more than it would in most other writing circles, since the digital, serialized format of writing and releasing that the site encourages makes it a bigger consideration. A lot of writers chase and/or cultivate a word count sweet spot for their stories.
I’m aware that a subset of people hear a comment like that and jump to ‘horse word famous selling out’ notions on the subject, and while site visibility is a piece of that equation, it does go beyond that element as well. Updating an ongoing story that has an audience on fimfic means something different than a reader coming across a story on the site that’s finished, or picking up a book. A chapter, as a result, tends to need to feel substantial. It needs to tell its own sort of arc and have a bit of a payoff, for the sake of the readers who are keeping up as it comes out piecemeal. Presentation is part of the art creation process, and the incentives are built into the system to release long-form fiction on the site in the form of the Serialized Novel.
The conversation even extends to oneshots, which sometimes warrant being broken up into parts even if all parts are released at once. I personally am fond of the three act structure, so I’ve released oneshots divided into acts, but other times have released stories with the same length or longer as single chapters. I’ve dithered on these each time, thinking from an angle of accessibility. Part of that does in fact have to do with site trends, as there’s a lower threshold of interest on a first chapter that’s a couple thousand words than a single chapter over ten thousand, but also just from a reader experience perspective.
That doesn’t even take into consideration the type of story being told. For an adventure story, I aimed for a sweet spot right around 7000 words, while more slice of life and/or romance I’ve gone for 5000, or 3000 a chapter. What qualifies as substantial can vary wildly.
So, having been thinking about all this in the context of fimfic, I had certain preconceptions when I started writing an original fiction novel: a chapter on fimfic is artificially longer than a book chapter, readability is less of an issue because an abrupt and unsatisfying on its own chapter is presented in the immediate context of the chapters preceding and following it rather than as a discrete unit, and the necessity of a chapter having an ‘arc’ is greatly reduced.
So, as I start to scrape 40k words on my current project, drafted out as sixteen chapters, I find myself thinking I’ve been approaching the notion wrong. Not to say I had incorrect preconceptions, but that I was thinking perpendicular to the subject compared to how I should be thinking.
First off, those preconceptions were right on the money in some regards. Of the twenty-four stories I’ve published on fimfic (which factors out a scrap odds and ends fic and an anthology by multiple writers), only one story has over sixteen chapters, sitting at seventeen chapters plus an epilogue. That story is also almost exactly twice as long as my current project in word count. The longest story I’ve written, which is sitting at a little over 94k words and thus almost two and a half times longer, has three chapters less. Considering the seventeen-plus-epilogue story is one of the stories with a sweet spot on the shorter end of the spectrum, these comparisons are rather revealing. Clearly the chapters in the non-serialized novel are shorter. I’ve also been placing less mental stock in the idea of each chapter being perfectly satisfying on its own, at least as far as how I’ve approached planning.
It does, however, start to break down after that point. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve organized my current writing schedule into an off and on routine between working on original fiction and horse words, alternating between each for the time it takes to draft a single chapter. It has thus far proven relatively successful, as I’m comfortably on pace to produce 150k+ words of stuff between multiple projects this year, which is effectively 2.5 times more writing than last year, though it’s still early going and my brain might prove less cooperative over time. I have thus far made the switch off between an original fiction novel and a pony story three times.
Which has put me in a position where I’m staring at the notion of a chapter as a defined unit quite clearly in the face. The thought crossed my mind as I started this arrangement that I was ultimately giving more than half of my time to horse words, as the preconception about length had largely proven true as I floundered my way up to the 32k odd words of the original fiction without the context of fanfiction writing in between. Non-serialized novel chapters are shorter than serialized ones. What would be a chapter in the former might just be half a chapter in the latter.
This is all dancing around a specific idea I haven’t directly stated yet, but that’s probably apparent reading between the lines. When writing the serialized novel-styled fanfiction, each ‘chapter’ is actually multiple chapters released simultaneously and presented as a single chapter, done so for ease of consumption and readability, where such things are not applicable in a non-serialized format. Two chapters released as one chapter in fanfic could be laid out as two separate chapters in a print novel and not have to worry about them not being satisfying on their own because a reader could just jump on to the next if they were so inclined.
But…as I’ve switched back and forth between the two projects, I’m not actually finding that to be true. Thinking back on the pone novels I’ve written, it isn’t true there, either. It’s flirting with the truth, and it fits well enough with those preconceptions that if I wasn’t the overanalytic, neurotic weirdo that I am, it probably would have been a good enough explanation. But I am, so here we are.
Despite the surface details holding true, there was one thing that’s been sticking out at me like a sore thumb, and that’s that I write chapters for fanfic and original fic the exact same way. Individual considerations vary from project to project, which much like the 3k word/7k word sweet spot decision transcends being just a fan vs. original thing. The novel’s chapters are written to be shorter, are preconceived and designed to be single scene chapters, all of which have an arc to the scene itself and are intended to be some combination of wholly satisfying and/or page turn-inducing for the next part. The pony novels, on the other hand, have been designed for each chapter to have one or more scenes that encompass an arc, with the same intended conclusions.
Based on the preconceptions, one could arrive at the conclusion that the difference between a serialized and a non-serialized novel is that the latter’s chapters are only a single scene long. I think it’s pretty clear then that the preconceptions don’t tell the whole story, because that conclusion is patently wrong; we’ve all read plenty of novels out in the world that have tons more chapters than you’d see in a serialized novel and also have multiple scenes per chapter. There’s simply something else at play in construction than the preconceptions would suggest.
Sure, those preconceptions informed how the original fiction novel’s chapters were planned since consideration of being ‘long enough to be a satisfying update’ wasn’t applicable, but the actual monkeying of writing has played out largely the same. Thinking back on finished fanfic projects, were I to take them and lay them out for print publication, they probably wouldn’t see much in the way of alterations for how the chapters are defined. A few of them might have some changes, but in a way that wouldn’t actually mess with how they’re separated now.
There’s this old yarn about the question of how long to make chapters, that says a chapter needs to be as long as it needs to be, and it usually gives the example of some books having chapters that are only a sentence long. I always thought when I came across chapters like that in books that they were kinda twee and pretentious, and I’ve never really thought of them as ‘chapters.’ They’re the writer being self-important for a sentence in between two real chapters. It’s easy to then just sort of dismiss it entirely out of hand.
Besides, that yarn doesn’t really offer much to say in the way of actual information. A chapter is long as it needs to be. Well…how long does it need to be? That advice has a more concrete application for writing a scene, or a work as a whole. A novel is as long as it needs to be to tell the story it’s telling, and a scene is as long as it needs to be to detail all pieces of the scene in question. These specific discrete units we’re talking about have a more definitive concept to them, and a scene that drags on with extraneous details might be too long and need to be tightened up/ended earlier/begun later, while one that’s clipped and abrupt might be too short and need to be expanded/starter earlier/ended later. How long that ends up being can vary wildly and giving a specific word range is asking to be buried in exceptions. I’ve personally found, based on my decisions and style choices as a writer, that scenes end up being anywhere between 1200 and 6000 words, but I break outside that barrier with some regularity anyway. Another writer could approach scene construction differently and have a much smaller window on either end of mine, or be completely outside of my window in either direction, but those personal tastes aside, there is still a fairly concrete notion to what goes into a scene.
A chapter on the other hand, looks at that range of versatility and scoffs, as far as I can see. A scene’s length is confined to the events that need to occur in a scene, while a chapter’s length isn’t confined at all. It’s defined after the fact by the number of scenes in it and the length of those scenes, but as a singular unit, it’s not based off of a specific number of scenes or a personal style choice on how much or how little to show in those scenes. Those things influence that length and only impact it retrospectively.
Instead, it’s been my experience that the defining marker on chapter length is the ‘arc.’ Chapter arcs come in a variety of shapes and start out kind of nebulous to begin with. What they look like varies a lot depending on genre, and how satisfying or not they are is dependent on a ton of factors, too, but they seem to be the fundamental structuring block of a chapter. They decide how many scenes go into a chapter and set the general pacing for a story. Something with longer arcs will have a naturally slower pace for the most part, as each arc will end up feeling more substantial and it will be more likely for the arc to conclude as a cohesive unit. Shorter arcs, on the other hand, will naturally bleed into each other more readily and keep a faster clip going.
This is hardly universal, as a sadistic enough writer (read: me) might intentionally design long arcs that conclude slightly before the chapter actually ends and then begin the subsequent arc to end on a cliffhanger and increase the speed of the pacing, whereas lots of very complete short arcs could feel sedate and peaceful to read. Similar statements could be made about scene construction in general.
The point being ultimately that when comparing the two forms of novel writing in such a side by side way, it’s become clear that even if having a satisfying arc was less of a priority in the original fiction, it still was an integral part of the writing process. Serialized novel chapters might be longer, but they’re not artificially longer. They’re exactly as long as they need to be.
This might seem obvious to some, looking at it from a distance. Because duh, right, chapter lengths are highly variant in novels already. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Sorceror’s Stone has a close to identical word count as the seventeen chapter ponyfic I referenced earlier and had—wait for it—seventeen chapters. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a word count just 2000 odd words higher than my original fiction novel’s current draft and had thirty-five chapters. There is no right word count length for a chapter. So why even think about it?
The more I’ve considered it, the more meaningless the idea of a ‘chapter’ has become to me. Not to say they’re pointless; there are several real reasons to have them that I can see. There’s a certain sense of ‘ethical treatment of a reader’ that I consider. I know I prefer taking a break from reading something at the end of a chapter (or a scene break in a pinch) than I do in the middle of a scene, and having built in breaks a reader can choose to stop or keep going at is like designing a video game to allow a player easy access out of the game without ramifications. They’re also a good organization tool, if not just for pretty tables of contents, then for the reader with the spatial reasoning ability to remember where in a book they are in case they lose their place (hint: people other than me; thank god kindles just remember for you nowadays). And the lastly for things I concern myself with at any real depth, a chapter break is just ever-so-slightly stronger than a scene break. Completely shifting perspective and/or jumping forward in time is more immediately accepted by a reader on a new chapter than it might be between scene breaks in the same chapter.
Because the bald truth is that the ‘chapter arc’ exists with or without the chapter breaks if you get right down to it. Maybe they’re just inside a single scene, maybe they span multiple scenes, they’re still there as a meta function of how stories work. Traditional stories are made up of a concentric ring of arcs, from the widest sweeping plot arc encompassing the entire work diving inward. Plots are made up of ‘chapters,’ are made up of scenes, are made up of paragraphs, are made up of sentences, each a smaller building block of presenting a single idea of varying complexity.
And the thing with chapter arcs is that for all that can be said of them as a discrete unit, they are by necessity rather messy. For every chapter that’s self-contained in the idea it’s following, there are plenty more that start an idea and leave it open, only to have it closed in a later chapter. Arcs can start and end abruptly regardless of what point in a scene or in a ‘chapter’ they are, to jerk around reader expectations and build drama or emotion. Chapters in serialized novels might be designed to follow a larger arc to result in a more satisfying amount of material for a reader, but those arcs remain finicky and aloof anyway, often entirely by design.
As a result, ultimately anything I’ve written could be presented without any chapter breaks at all, just scene breaks, and still read pretty much the same. Many would be absolutely worse for the change, but they’d be worse for reasons other than the chapter arc not being spelled out; just having scene breaks would be fatiguing to read for most folks, and some transitions between one chapter and another have been greatly benefitted by that hard stop (especially cliffhangers). Still they’d all end up intact from a storytelling perspective. Which leaves me at a point where the only conclusion I can draw is that a chapter really isn’t a discrete unit. It’s a mechanical one, closer in relation to layout choices like carriage returns in blogs, pages in a book, or separating different speakers’ dialogue in separate paragraphs. They’re a mechanical unit solely designed to assist in the readability of fiction, rather than with the content of it.
Nothing particularly earth-shattering, but I’ve found myself thinking about chapters a whole lot differently lately. The writing process and end result for chapters I produce hasn’t changed in any tangible way, but I feel like I have a more complete answer for a question I wasn’t sure I asked. That has to count for something, right?
That’s enough armchair ruminating for this one, I think. Now if you’ll excuse me, back to writing a chapter of pony. TTFN.
In terms of print fiction, I would say that chapter length is far more flexible as something you can mess with. I've read books by Pratchett with no chapter divisions at all, just scenes, and it really worked just the same. I can also pinpoint one particular big fantasy tome I've read that (like 14 books in) had a hundred plus page chapter comprising the Final Battle sort of event.
That said, chapter length on Fimfiction is something I have some strong opinions on, largely based on the tendency for people to publish 10-15k plus word chapters. IMO, that's a fairly inconvenient length for the format of reading something online, and is really more of a novella than a chapter.
The importance some people place on chapter lengths has always been something that has mystified me as a reader.
Personally, I have always paid little attention to their length, as you commented, viewing them as purely mechanical units, assisting either readability, or the authors story planning. Now, if all the chapters of a story are really short, around 500 words, I usually take that as a sign of beginner author that just tells everything. I can also see why really long chapters can be annoying for readers who have limited time available and still want to be able to stop in a convenient chapter break.
But acknowledging that there are some cases where these concerns are valid, I still feel that a lot of people place too much weight on purely the lengths of chapters. For example, I have read quite many comments about too short chapters about Imploding Colon's series. Who is basically writing a daily updating Web serial, and the chapter lengths are just an artifact of the publishing schedule. Those comments just baffle me. Of all the possible criticism, why would that one be important?
Are maybe writing classes putting more emphasis on chapter lengths that I think is warranted or something?
Almost everything I write ends up with around 3, 9, 12, or 15 chapters, because I'm married to three act structure, and when I'm outlining I really, really like keeping things even. I will deviate from that, but it makes me sigh (like admitting that the first act of Lost Time was only three chapters, so I ended up with eleven chapters!)
I also tend to have an "ideal chapter length" for each story, usually set by the first few chapters . I end a chapter at the closest available point to the ideal chapter length. This sometimes results in chapters I don't like; there are a few chapters in Lost Time I'd divide into two chapters if it wouldn't make them way too far off my chapter target for that fic. I've also been known to add things if otherwise a chapter would be either way too long (if I included the next planned scene) or short (I think I did that a few times in Best Young Flyer to pad shorter chapters-- Scootaloo's visit to Rarity to get her Gala dress comes to mind.)
Now, if I decide from the outset of a story I'm doing something different, I'm okay with that. Maidens Day has a prologue, two different first acts, then the second and third and an epilogue.
But I guess what it comes down to is that I'm a really structured writer, and I like knowing what I'm looking for. It's weird, but it works for me.
Some interesting ideas here.
Maybe chapters are just a meaningless construct that are intrinsic to the act of writing? Then again, there may be some all-purpose perfect chapter length depending on format that everyone could strive for, that'd make readability amazing and help condense ideas into a perfect form... that'd be nice but we kinda live in the real world.
Still, I don't think the "idea" of a chapter could ever be dismissed. For all the reasons that you gave to help the reader, it helps the writer just as much, in my opinion. The "chapter" may be somewhat arbitrary as a designation of length, but it forces the writer to visualize the bounds of... something, be it a single bit of narration, a scene, or even an arc. Constraints are a good thing, they help to focus ideas, keep them from forming into a snarled web of thoughts and patterns that are impossible to keep track of. You kinda hinted at this there too, but they can be useful as dramatic devices. Even if you're not setting up a cliff-hanger (BATS!), chapter breaks can be used to increase tension, highlight the importance of a statement/action, or even bring extra attention to something that needs it.
I know I could never write without using chapters, and I probably wouldn't want to read something that didn't have chapter breaks... but I haven't tried so I can't say for sure.
On chapter length, specifically, I think it's always going to come down to the author's style and the story they are writing. I can't remember what the darn thing was but I know there's a Man Booker Prize winning novel that has a 2-page chapter and an 80-something-page chapter. It was just the author's style to fit the chapter length to exactly what was going on at the time.
Personally, I like writing in play format, breaking things down into Scenes and Acts, because it fits my creative background of play-writing, editing and directing, so it's how I think when formulating a story. Because of that, most of my chapters are one or two scenes, and it's honestly kind of arbitrary which one I go with. Is it a few short scenes back to back? Sure they'll be in one chapter. One medium scene? Well the end of that one's important, so I'll give it its own chapter. Stuff like that, but it's just me.
...Gah, right now I'm only writing D&D, but just talking about this on here makes me want to go work on some horse-word ideas I've had ruminating for a while.
Anyway, interesting ideas here Bats, I don't think I'd ever given the chapter, as a concept, much thought before, yet here I've been sitting, sipping some coffee, and contemplating the "idea" of a chapter like some sort of writing hipster.
Already looking forward to the new story! Spellbound Fireflies is easily one of my favorite FimFics ever, so the fact that you even laterally compared it with what you're working on has me excited.
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I can't really speak to Imploding Colon's work on account of not reading it, but just on the surface, in my personal tastes as a reader and a writer, the chapters are too short. I understand why they need to be that way and I acknowledge the differences in form between Austraeoh and, say, Crime and Punishment, which have similar word counts but the former has 200 chapters while the latter has 21. They're not written to the same guidelines and as a result have different forms.
That said, having lots of short chapters by necessity does alter the energy of a story that just might not jive with people regardless of whether or not they understand and appreciate the form it's under. Scenes always must be relatively short, which to my tastes is fine for some scenes, but I so often write stuff in the 3000-5000 word range that having to keep things 1000 words or lower would result in me feeling like the majority of scenes are clipped and shallow. It's either that or breaking a scene up into pieces and spacing those pieces out across multiple days, which has its own negative consequences. There are valid complaints to be had about the form as a reader, even if those complaints have more to do with the form chosen than the actual content. After all, IC didn't have to write it as a daily update serial, and while it's good to appreciate it for what it is, not liking what it is for valid reasons is still a fair criticism.
That doesn't even touch on the idea of updates in a serialized format that are individually satisfying. As IC's daily serial has, well, daily updates, there is definitely less of a need for that consideration, but it is still a factor and could easily annoy a subset of readers. If every update is kinda unsatisfying and it updates every day, a reader could feel like the frequency makes up for it and it's satisfying by the end of a week, but they could just as easily feel like they've been unsatisfied seven days in a row. I'm sure as a result a great amount of IC's audience saves up a week (or whatever) chunk of updates before catching up to mitigate that feeling.
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I think part of why I think about this a lot is because I'm very much like you in how I approach planning and have similar annoyances over chapter evenness and the like. And while my conclusions end up being totally in support of monkeying around those specific places where chapters end and keeping what maybe should be two chapters together for the sake of that evenness, etc., because what a chapter is doesn't really matter in regards to anything aside from those reasons, that's more of a bonus than the intention of the thinking process.
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Hmm, true. And it probably doesn't help that a lot of readers can't really articulate their exact complaint, the "chapters are too short" being just shorthand for "there is something I dislike in the pacing or formatting that is somehow tied to the short chapters".
Of course, there is the other form of that complaint, which is "I don't want to start reading this story because the chapters are too short". Which to me sounds suspiciously like "The author did something different, so it's not good". I mean, fair enough, everyone decides themself what to read, but why comment on it then.
Heh, I generally "save" like 50+ chapters, which translates to more than 100k words with IC's current chapter lengths. That's more because I don't like stopping after I start, I read almost everything in one sitting, than anything to do with chapter lengths. But that's just it. When the solution is as simple as "Don't read every day", I don't really see what the big deal is.
Maybe I should have stated from the beginning that I don't really notice chapters at all. Chapter breaks have generally the effect of "I have to change page", with similar importance. I mean, I have read stories where the author has used the chapters as a good means of emphasis(IC or maybe I should say shortskirtsandexplosions among them), but generally speaking they just seem to act as form of scene break.
One thing I will note:
Having read the Discworld novels, and Terry Pratchett's love of NO CHAPTER BREAKS AT ALL, I have to say that reading those novels feels like a bit of a chore. And frankly, the novels feel kind of messy as a result; the lack of clearly delineated chapters removes a lot of mental chunking that I think chapters assist with, and make it harder to see where one thing ends and another begins at times.
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I think that's a totally valid response to have. The point of my thinking on the subject was of course never to declare chapters negative and go all 'burn the pants' on them, because they are helpful keeping things readable and organized for a reader.
Something I didn't touch on but was reminded of was a tangent that came up on an older blog I wrote about contextualizing word counts by comparing a whole bunch of different works that had similar word counts, specifically the weird gray area separating short stories, novellas, and novels from each other. There were two, as I recall... yeah, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, which had less than a 1k word difference in lengths but felt way different to read because the former offered no chapter breaks and the latter was broken into three parts. Readership experience of a story is influenced by the existence of chapters more than just by the aforementioned readability and mental processing ease that they help facilitate.
That's quite a blog post you have there.
I've always been of the mindset that chapters should be as long as they're supposed to be (dictated by the content), and that they're the organizational unit after scene:
Sentence
Paragraph
Scene
Chapter
Furthermore, a chapter break is a like a rest stop on the highway. The reader doesn't have to pull over and take a breather, but they know that this is a good stopping point where they won't be leaving off somewhere inconvenient (like the middle of a conversation full of important plot points). Granted, just like all the other organizational units, the writer can use them to control the story pacing (and thereby invite the reader to blow past those rest stops at top speed to resolve a cliffhanger). Chapters become akin to TV episodes, except with no built in 'previously on X' segment.
Having said all that, as a reader I really don't care for giant chapters. Yes, there are times when a story needs a whopper chapter, but I'm put off by seeing a story split into 10k+ chunks. Sometimes I have a couple hours on hand and can devour a big chunk of text, but more often I have a shorter window of reading time and want to be able to reach a good stopping place in 15 minutes or less.
As a writer, I find myself churning out chapters that are 1-4K in length, with the average being around 2k in my estimation. Again, it's just how long I feel they need to be. Sometimes people complain that I'm too concise, that they want story X to be longer. I shrug and think of all the fluff I intentionally left out that... If I only have a 20k story to tell, I'm not going to inflate it. I could give a much more concrete example with the story I'm posting now, but that belongs elsewhere.