What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)
penguin.co.uk
penguin.co.uk
This way children don't get short-changed and adults don't find they have committed to something they can't get out of. It also allows them to easily give in and do another chapter — after all, it's only 15 minutes.
30 mins reading out loud is about 4,500 words, so 15 minute half-chapters are 2,250 words.
A 2,250 word chapter is also very manageable by a child.
If you read before bed it's handy to know that a chapter has, say 8 minutes to go.
It turned out that the "favorite book" answer was fairly varied (aside from a couple of big-name bestsellers), but the "why" answer almost always revolved around:
- "bite-size chapters"
- "really quick read"
- "short and to the point"
- "one idea, one example for proof, and that's it, go to next chapter"
My book went from ~120 pages to ~150 during that rewrite, but also went from ~10 chapters to ~80.
Not only did the new version outsell the original by a 10x factor, but I'd estimate the completion rate also shot up considerably (based on reader comments about the final chapters).
https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-f...
tiktok and its ilk surely did a number on our collective attention spans (and along with it the capability for nuanced and complex reasoning)
Still, an interesting blog post.
They're just very skeptical of the insights from statistical analysis of works in the mediums because there usually aren't very good large data sources. Cinemetrics.lv was amazing before the domain was stolen and had a large community of film academics using it. In literature, a big problem has been the way that publishers do not allow access to any of their data, some public access programs are starting to try to overcome that though.
In general, though, most humanities academics aren't interested in statistical analysis or its insights, not because they don't believe in them, but because the insights generally aren't that useful or likely so general as to be not that useful for very specific research programs.
Or they just don't understand it. ~115 IQ field vs ~130 IQ field.
This is exactly what is the problem - none of the stuff you suggest has remotely anything to do with what the actual question is.
Of course, these ways don't exist. "What is an effective chapter" isn't even a question with a single answer—it depends on the author's goals (to inform, to entertain, to provoke a very specific feeling, etc). So anyone who tried to pull out a "chapter idealness in relation to word count" graph in an academic context would be laughed out of the room, and justifiably so.
Also, misapplied statistic is not "objective" despite containing numbers.
The measure still might be interesting, but it shouldn't be used as a target to guide decisions about what is or isn't a good book.
So people want the essence. Also the quality of modern writing is often poor - you dont learn much from articles, since the people who write them must pump few per day
The ability to speed up the playback speed of Netflix content would be an example of this.
The same people who fly through TikTok videos also regularly sit through a two hour movie or read the entire Harry Potter series.
I think that people can pay attention if they want to, and the cultural shift is _what_ we expect to give attention to.
Of course take that with a grain of salt because *waves wagely at the statement full of issues*. But it tracks with other trends in social media. Many people will be able to tell you more about their favorite tik-toker than their favorite long-form-content producer. The length of the snippets doesn't dictate the depth of the story
You could even draw a comparison to the rising popularity of series over movies. People now prefer 6 45 minute segments over one 3 hour installment.
Except, that assumption might not be true.
To set a baseline I looked at LOR statistics:
62 chapters
1255 pages
381103 words
7759 words/chapter
20 page/chapter
218401 average word count
33 average chapters
9435 average words/chapter
253386 average word count excluding one-shots
39 average chapters excluding one-shots
7544 average words/chapter excluding one-shots
lynx -dump 'link to ao3 filter page' | grep -A2 'Words\|Chapters' | tr -d '\n,-' | sed 's/\[[0-9]*\]//g;s/ */ /g;s/Words/\nWords/g'1. the commitment for one more 45-minute episode is a lot less than a 3h movie, even if you then spend 6h bingeing it because you're hooked.
2. Netflix allowed binge watching which wasn't possible before, except after the series ended and you got the complete DVD collection.
I agree it is possible only due to technologically advancement.
Why does clover keep on growing
Why are there flies in my hay
Don't they know it's the end of the world
It ended when you clopped away
-- "Horsefly" Davis (as heard on DCR)> The chapter is just shy of 79,000 words. It contains (by my quick count) 72 scenes–but only 31 distinct viewpoints, as numerous ones repeat.
I love the insanity of that quote. Sanderson has an awesome ability to write things like a chapter with a dozen viewpoints that still flow so incredibly well.
You'll understand what I mean by this once you've read the books...
Sanderson also does a horrible job of wrapping up the series. I won't spoil it but there's a 50/50 chance that you will regret investing time in reading the series once you get to the end. This isn't entirely Sanderson's fault; he only wrote the final 3 novels based on the outline he was given by Jordan's widow. Unfortunately, Jordan did not wrap up all of the story lines in the outline and Sanderson makes not attempt to do so.
Textbooks you're surely going to focus on one chapter at at time and you don't want it to take very long to re-read, which most students will likely be doing, especially when you may have hours of problems to solve for a single chapter. You want to be able to re-read without a lengthy commitment compared to the problem-solving.
Regular non-fiction may not be as universally re-read but it would be more often than with fiction.
With fiction or storytelling a half hour is a good max so there will always be a stopping point within reach, with two chapters not being out of the question lots of times. People may not re-read a fiction chapter as they go along very much, but why not make it easier anyway.
Then again people probably like a chapter that takes whole hour or more but is such a page-turner that it seems like a half-hour or less :)
Although for serial works it's generally the longer the better.
By far the worst chapter structure (and "book") is The Sound and The Fury. It seems like an exercise in-the-second-person, gone wrong. Sensorial overload... and isn't the point of a good story <TO MAKE SENSE>?