Long Versus Short Chapters, a Question of Pacing · 3:09pm Feb 20th, 2016
I have noticed that I tend to pace different stories differently, and one of the tools I use for this is control of chapter length. On one extreme, I wrote His Recipe For Love (NSFW, it's an erotic horror story with both sex and gore, set two and a half centuries before the series) as a single 11,334 word long chapter, something I did intentionally so that the reader would not break at any point, but instead absorb the entire novelette in one sitting. I believe very much that a horror story should suck the reader along toward the inexorable, terrifying climax. Also, it's supposed to be from the journal entries of Aventurine Miter, rather than an actual story intended for publication.
On the other extreme, my current most active story, Before Nightfall: Barely Rescued is a multi-chapter tale, with every chapter so far under 2000 words. Barely Rescued is an adventure story about Big Mac pursuing a bear, and his actions are very strongly divisible into short sections -- encountering the bear, returning home to the Acres, consulting with his grandparents, going out after the bear, tracking the bear, etc.
More normally, I tend to write multi-chapter novellas with each chapter ranging between 2000 and 6000 words. Each chapter touches upon multiple topics -- there is usually at least one protracted action sequence or conversation involving two or more characters -- and the work as a whole is complex and multi-thematic. Good examples of my more normal pacing style are Dragonshyness ("Dragonshy" from mostly Fluttershy's POV) or Collateral Damage (set two decades before the series, involving a covert action by Hive Chrysalis against Equesria). Dragonshyness has 12 chapters of 2011 to 5,015 words; Collateral Damage has 6 chapters of 3788 to 8980 words.
The advantages of short chapters is that they tend to be more pithy, less padded, and are more likely to be read by readers who have little time to spare. They also make it easier to find a story by parts -- for instance, I can quickly find you the chapters where Twilight personally confronts Red Haze in Dragonshyness. The disadvantages of short chapters are that if the events are complex and protracted, one has to write an absurd number of short chapters to cover them, making it difficult to find anything.
The advantages of long chapters is that they allow the combination of more events into a single chapter, which works well if there is a long sequence of closely-related events, such as one might see in a combat scene (it's not an accident that Collateral Damage, which contains a fight to the death over the Everfree and its aftermath in one of the chapters, has long chapters) or detailed ritual and conversation (Collateral Damage has one of those too). The disadvantage is that events can be buried in a long chapter (it's hard to find specific parts of His Recipe For Love if you're not very familiar with the tale) and that long chapters may be left incomplete by a reader with little time, and then be hard to pick up again.
What do you think? When are short or long chapters most effective? And how have I handled them in my work?
You've nailed the pros and cons of different chapter lengths and have done a good job of using them to supplment story pacing. Barely Rescued is doing an especially good job of building up the tension with the frequent, punchy updates.
Well, as long as each scene is important in some way (whether it be moving the plot forward or getting to know characters better), any length of a chapter is fine. After all, you should only type as many words as you need for the chapter.
(Which is one of the reasons why I'm angry at myself over Brotherly Bonding Time--writing too long chapters with a little too much unimportant nothing! Serves me right for condensing each 'episode' which would need ten or fifteen chapters into less than that (because I wanted as few chapters as possible for the entire series).)
I unfortunately seem stuck with long chapters in my own writing, but then I just plain have a wordy style period. They seem to work for a lot of people but I assume they're chasing some readers away. I think that shorter chapters work best for very dramatic or action-filled scenes, and that longer ones are best for times when you need to do exposition.
Exit, pursued by Big Mac -- A Winter's Tale, probably
This blog came at a good time for me. The next chapter for my latest novel is almost as long as the longest one-shot I've written, and I was trying to increase word count by adding a few words here and there. Perhaps the previous chapter being 26 words short of being longer than its prequel had something to do with it, but I shouldn't be too concerned about it. I do, however, have a personal rule of not letting any chapter be shorter than 1667 words, and I blame NaNoWriMo for that.
As for chapter length overall, it really depends on what's important. The oneshot I mentioned, "The Cutie Cult" was based around the idea that the cutie pox from the Paleopony period was directly connected to the cutie unmarking spell used by Starlight Glimmer, which didn't need to be multiple chapters. Others like Scribbler's Love Letters can be separated by different writing techniques, like between third person and personal letters. It really all depends on the desired voice of the piece.