hi all, hope you all are having a great day!
how many words are in and avg scene mine run from 2079 to 488.words
how many scene should be in an avg chapter
and how long should a chapter main avg about 25 pages pep chapter.
thanks
Robert
6 pages.
Renfield means per paragraph.
But if you want the scientifically proven answer: Whatever works.
It will vary depending on whether or not you type out the full word instead of abbreviations.
Yeah it's pretty subjective. Some authors have huge chapters and others only use a couple pages.
"Yeah it's pretty subjective. Some authors have huge chapters and others only use a couple pages."
Extremely subjective.
In my novel the average page count per chapter was about four.
In this new one it's about sixteen.
I didn't plan it. I can't really explain it. That's just how it's turning out.
Well, Brandon--obviously the chapters in the new book had to be longer. You had to fit in the good sex AND the great prayers.
@Renee
This book has a weird stucture: there's the main narrative, the sub-narrative, the prayers, and the sex...so it's like shuffling a novel, a novella, a book of psalms, and a smut mag, and laying these out in a way so they're not only fluid, but relate to each other.
It's been a challenge.
I can't wait to see how you handled it.
I would say it's whatever works and makes your story better. I did hear David Morrell say that short chapters are a sort of writer's trick to get readers to read more in a sitting. You are sitting in bed and flip pages to see how long the next chapter is, "Oh, it's only six pages," so you read on and it hooks you.
Is there a rule though? I can think of very different examples. I think there are stricter rules in script writing.
@liana I dont think so. Maybe that whatever the chapter size is, it should maintain rough consistency in that book?
Yeah, there are no real rules. I tend to use a lot of chapters because I began writing as a screenwriter. I switch scenes at a fairly fast pace and think of them as setting changes in screenwriting.
I tend to lean on the side of David Morrell. The shorter the chapter, the more inclined the reader will be to continue on. But, Andrew Vachss' chapters vary. In one book I've seen chapters upwards of 10-15 pages, and two or three chapters on one page. His books average somewhere around 150 chapters.
I got with 2,500 words per chapter (ten pages) on average so that each chapter reads like a short story. Give or take 1000 words. That chapter can contain as many scenes as it takes, but I'd usualy keep it to one scene per chapter (unless the story calls for more).
That's my guideline, but by no means a rule.
Thanks all
greatly appreciated
I'm going to make a stab at an answer for Swordfighter. I have a kid in eighth grade who comes home with books he has to read. They have about ten chapters. Each chapter is 20-30 pages. Unless you are Faulkner have more than one paragraph on each page.
Clockwork Orange has 21 chapters in three sets of seven.
Then there's Proust. His senes are endless.
I've reached a happy average of about 4000 words per chapter. Sometimes it's just one continuous scene, but most times it's 2-4 scenes.
I don't know if I've convinced myself of the 4000 word 'rule' and now I'm unknowingly adjusting my chapters to that length, but I have found no instances yet where I still have things to say once I've reached the 4000, and it's not long enough to make it feel bloated, I think.
I've been using that approximate length for different genres, too (thriller, fantasy, literary fiction). The only case I toned it down to 3000 words per chapter was for a multi-POV manic novel. I found I had nothing left to say for each character after that length, and it was good because otherwise the pacing would have suffered a lot (it's a 100,000 word book with 4 main characters).
Hope it helps.
I my most recent story, I aimed for at least 2k words a chapter, which seemed big enough to fit a chapter sized amount of content in it. The last four chapters though were much longer, with the climax chapter coming in around 6.5k words.
As far as scenes, it varied for me. In some chapters, the scene was the entire chapter, in others I had two or three scenes that bled from one to the next in terms of time and narrative. As a general rule, I tried to have a chapter contain only one major action, with however many smaller beats were needed to deliever that action from setup to execution.
Of course, I didn't PLAN any of this. But I noticed that this seems to be how I write.
thanks all
