The Goldilocks Conundrum

Continuing our spirited discussion about reader preferences and how a reader's already preconceived likes and dislikes can alter the way they approach and interact with a story, I think chapter length is a fascinating example of something that really is quite ambiguous, having no real right or wrong value in and of itself, and yet there is typically a visceral divide between readers who prefer short chapters and those who love long chapters.

Both lengths have their advantages when it comes to pace and storytelling and the fans of each make excellent points as to why they prefer one to the other.

A shorter chapter, typically 3,500 words or less, will almost always move at a quick, crisp pace and really propel the reader (if it's written well) through a chapter that leaves the reader with that a sense of moving through the book at a good pace and thereby making good progress. In other words, they feel as though they are accomplishing something and the book "reads fast."

A longer chapter, usually somewhere between 4,000 - 7,000 words, has the benefit of really diving into that specific scene or event that takes place within that individual chapter, giving more weight and an almost "you can catch your breath and sink your teeth into this" feel where the reader can truly dig their toes into the sand and feel swallowed up in the world of the novel and experience a sublime suspension of disbelief that takes place in an excellent work of fiction.

Yet just like each length has its advantages, they also have disadvantages and like so many things in life the strengths of the chapter durations can also be their biggest weaknesses. A short chapter can feel too brief, incomplete and rushed if not handled delicately. And a long chapter can feel like a droning, directionless dump of description, aimless exposition and, for lack of a better word, drivel.

Those distinctly unique strengths and weaknesses are why I typically don't prefer either length as a blanket preference. To me, like most things involving writing and artistic construction, it is not the forms themselves that are right or wrong, good or bad, but how and where they are used. Ten back-to-back chapters that are less than 3,000 words each can seem a bit truncated and lacking depth no matter how much info is actually in them, just as ten back-to-back chapters over 6,000 words could seem monotonous and long-winded no matter how quick the story moves or how diverse the scenes are.

But why?

Well, take a glance over any good page in a book and I can promise you that you won't see everything fit uniformly together. Action is typically truncated, reading faster and choppier like the subject it is describing. Dialogue reads differently, shorter and to the fact at hand. Description is rich and more lengthy, flowing down a page. You get the idea.

We naturally want things we read or see to have an ebb and flow, a rising and falling action just like a great story does. This is why we have those wonderful things called paragraphs. We need, just as much as a narrative does, the separation of thoughts, of events, of dialogues, of description so that instead of it being a giant block of words that we must wade through on a page of text, the ink and paper feels like a flowing, meandering tapestry of movement through words and meaning.

That's why, even though I do enjoy shorter chapters more often than not, since they're a little more difficult to mess up, I believe that the scene and the arc of whatever story is being told in that chapter is what determines its length, not some preconceived method of chapter duration.

As it should be then, it is the story that organically determines the form. Not the other way around.