There are not very many hard and fast rules in creative writing. In fact, most people who talk about the rules fall into two camps: those who tell you that there are no rules, and idiots. As we gain more experience in our writing, we come to develop our own sense of the structures, practices and guidelines that apply within our own particular niches. We gain confidence in our own particular way of doing things, and over time, we stop worrying about the little, mechanical things so we can focus on the story problems.
But beginners have no such confidence, and in their minds, each word they write is potentially “the problem” – the thing they are doing that makes their writing crap, that earns them rejections from publishers and snickers of derision from their peers whenever they are out of the room. We can tell them that there are no such rules, but they tend to dismiss us, worrying that we’re only saying that to perpetuate the joke, testing to see how long it will take them to catch on, as some sort of initiation rite. It isn’t true of course, but just try telling them that.
Take chapter length, as an example. When I first started writing, I wondered how long chapters were supposed to be. What’s the rule that tells you when one chapter is over and the next is ready to begin? All the sage advice I could find said the same thing: there is no rule. Take a look at a shelf full of books, and you’ll find all kinds of variation. One book might have 10 chapters, and another book beside it, in the same genre, and the same length, might have 72. But instead of seeing that as liberating, most beginners see it as terrifying. There must be a rule, but they can’t see it.
So, in an attempt to provide some reassurance to my writing students, peers, and any fans who might have number fetishes, I have embarked on this series of articles that don’t seek to convey rules, but instead, try to put ranges on a number of the “how many”- or “how big”-style questions that newcomers might have when they first begin to put stories onto paper. In previous articles, I’ve explored “How long are paragraphs?” and “How long should dialogue be?” Today I’ll be talking about how long chapters tend to be.
As with the previous articles, I won’t be providing any rules. What I will tell you is how the numbers shape up in other authors’ works. I’ve selected a collection of books from across the fantasy genre, and measured the lengths of their chapters. By sharing these numbers, I hope to give some writers a bit more confidence. You might not have a rule for how long your chapters are, but if you can see that your chapter lengths are in line with the averages for the genre, or are very similar to some author you’ve always admired, a lot of fear and uncertainty evaporates.
The Collection
Before we get started, here’s the list of books I’ll be examining. It’s the same collection as last time, with the addition of Dune, and a few titles omitted, for technical reasons. (Translation: the code I wrote to examine chapters does not work well with the structure of the ebook I have, and I’m too lazy to figure out how to fix the code. :-) The included titles are as follows:
- The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit, both by JRR Tolkien
- The Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin
- The Final Empire (Mistborn #1), by Brandon Sanderson
- The Black Company, by Glen Cook
- The Prince of Nothing, by R. Scott Bakker
- Assassin’s Apprentice, by Robin Hobb
- Strange Places, by Jefferson Smith
- Lord Foul’s Bane (Thomas Covenant #1), by Stephen Donaldson
- Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree, by S. A. Hunt
- The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
- Dune, by Frank Herbert
- and Santiago, by Mike Resnick
Basic Stats
Longest Chapter: The Last Unicorn takes the prize, with a longest chapter of 23,000 words, followed closely by The Black Company, at 21,000 words. At the other end of the spectrum, The Final Empire had the shortest chapters, with a max chapter length of only 8,500 words, followed by Dune, with a longest chapter of 9,500 words. This was a bit of a surprise to me, as I remember Dune as a sprawling novel, but apparently, that sprawl did not carry over to chapter lengths. All the other titles in the collection had max chapter lengths between 10K and 16K words, and the average longest chapter was 11,700 words.
Average Chapter Length: The title with the shortest chapters, on average, was Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree, averaging just 2,900 words each. But again as a surprise to me, Dune was a close second, averaging just 3,800 words per chapter. The longest average chapter lengths were Lord of the Rings (7,500), Prince of Nothing (8,700), and the beefiest chapters were found in The Black Company, with an average chapter length of 11,300 words. The collection as a whole posted an average chapter length of 6,100 words.
Mostly Less Than: If we’re trying to tease any rules of thumb out of these analyses, I think it’s this category: the mostly less than level. If 95% of all the chapters in this collection are less than 11,000 words (as they are), then we can perhaps advise beginners that aiming to keep their chapter lengths under that value would be a good target.
If you’d like to examine the numbers yourself, I include the chart here, for your sorting pleasure.
| Book | Num | Max | Avg | Mostly Less Than |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree | 45 | 5163 | 2936 | 5108 |
| The Wizard of Earthsea | 10 | 5701 | 4573 | 6004 |
| Santiago | 28 | 6556 | 4108 | 6439 |
| Dune | 50 | 9551 | 3789 | 7717 |
| Mistborn | 39 | 8544 | 5460 | 8516 |
| The Hobbit | 19 | 10188 | 5018 | 9874 |
| Assassin’s Apprentice | 25 | 11300 | 6289.0 | 10504 |
| Thomas Covenant | 25 | 11571 | 6461 | 11385 |
| Prince of Nothing | 20 | 11096 | 8733 | 12185 |
| Strange Places | 16 | 12399 | 7273 | 12272 |
| The Lord of the Rings | 62 | 16316 | 7553 | 12671 |
| Last Unicorn | 14 | 23193 | 6071 | 16071 |
| Black Company | 8 | 21272 | 11270 | 24724 |
Patterns
When we look at the graphs of how chapter lengths stack up in individual books, I had expected to see them all with a typical “hump” curve (a Bell curve, for those who prefer the technical term). But I was surprised to see that many titles did not follow this trend.
The Final Empire (Mistborn #1) shows the classic Bell curve distribution, or nearly so, with most of its chapters being between 4,500 and 6,500 words long, and a smaller number of chapters less than 4,000 or greater than 7,000 words. Other titles, such as Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree, Santiago and Assassin’s Apprentice had similar tendencies to cluster in the middle. Although Assassin’s Apprentice showed a rather extreme tendency for chapters to lie between 4,500 and 7,000 words.
Other titles, such as The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Wizard of Earthsea, The Last Unicorn, and Dune, showed a Bell-shaped curve, but skewed heavily toward the shorter chapters. I find it interesting that all of these are from a markedly earlier period than the other books in the collection. This might suggest that modern styles are shifting toward fewer short chapters, pushing the hump to the middle ranges, but I can’t think of any reason why this might be the case. It almost seems to fly in the face of the notion that modern audiences are conditioned to want their entertainment cut into shorter segments.
Two books in this review stood out, seemingly alone with respect to their chapter length distributions. The first, Lord Foul’s Bane, had a good number of chapters scattered among the shorter lengths, and then a bunch piled up right around the 8,000 word mark, skewing its graph toward longer chapters. The other oddity was my own Strange Places, which seemed to have two humps: one between 5,000 and 6,000 words, and another at 10,000. Or maybe that’s just an anti-preference for the middle range. I’m not sure.
So there it lies. Chapters seem to range all over the place, in terms of length, and whether yours tend to be 3,000 words long, or 12,000 words, you are not alone. There are precedents that you can point to that should make you feel more comfortable about your style.
But not if you write 200-word chapter-ettes. Or 60,000 word bricks. If you fall into either of those extremes, you may want to ask yourself if you are using the same definition of chapter that the rest of us are using.
Nice work on this.
Thanks. Be sure to check out the other related posts, like the paragraph lengths, and even proportion of dialogue to narration. There’s no right or wrong number for any of these, but it can be reassuring to find that your own tendencies fall well inside the norm. :-)
This really helped me, as an aspired writer in high school, it’s sometimes it can feel like I’m forcing things. Writer’s block is always a major obstacle, any advice?
I’m glad you found it useful, Nathanael. As for writer’s block, I firmly believe there is no such thing. What most people call “writer’s block” is actually a symptom of not clearly understanding how stories work. A story comes from having a protagonist who wants something important, but who is in conflict with an antagonist (or a situation) that is blocking their ability to reach their goal—usually because the antagonist has conflicting goals with the hero. So if you find yourself saying, “I don’t know what should happen next,” this is because you don’t yet understand what your hero wants. Because once you know that, you always know where to go next—your hero needs to find a way to confront the obstacle you’ve placed in front of him. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but this should give you the basic idea. TL;DR: When you think you’re blocked, it’s almost always because you don’t understand your hero and/or the urgent need that drives him.
I know this is super later, but I figure if I’m reading this now, someone else probably is too. So my “writer’s block” if you will, happens when I’m trying to make a character act or do something that doesn’t suit them. In my final book of the Rebecca James Series, I had her step-father doing something that completely out of character and the only option was her to kill him if I continued in the way it was going, and so I found myself unable to write and unable to figure out where to go next.
I sat down one day, looked at the chapter, and thought, “I have to be doing something wrong if I can’t move forward, this is how Rebecca would act… so what is wrong with this scene? Oh. Her step-father isn’t the coward I’m portraying him as in this part. That’s the problem. He wouldn’t do this.” So I deleted that entire scene and changed how they all dealt with the situation at hand, and was able to complete the chapter and then the entire book to finish the series.
So, sometimes, it’s as simple as a character responding to a situation in a way that normally they would not.
This is a subtle twist on what I meant by not understanding the character. In its most common form, I see blocking as simply not knowing the character well enough to understand what they would do next. But you make a good point that, in your case, even though you know the character well, you temporarily lost sight of that deep knowledge and had them do something out of character, and now current you is unable to reconcile those choices.
Do we say current you is blocked because of your strong understanding of the character? Or did previous you cause it by losing sight of that understanding? I’ll let the judges decide how to slice that one. Meanwhile, I think the important takeaway for new writers is that, either way, blockage arises from a lack of clarity on what drives the character.
I also think writer’s block is a myth.
As someone who has also worked in the commercial field, when a client says, “I want this written by Friday,” Friday is when you write it by. Writer’s block is simply not a thing.
I believe it is a symptom. And you are right, it could be something wrong with your story, or your character, or plot twist; something that is creating a barrier.
But it also can be something external. Worries about life, not feeling very good, and so on.
I did my own take on the problem here: https://cchogan.com/i-dont-have-writers-block/
By the way – very useful article!
Holy damn, I fall in the “200-word chapter-ettes”. For me, chapters exist when I change the POV. My chapters never go greater then 3,500 words. Something wrong or I don’t have to concern about that?
Chapter lengths are a matter of style and of genre, Sara. As long as you’re consistent and within the reasonable ranges of your genre, there should be no issue. Although I will point out that you don’t need to change chapters to change POV. That is one of the traditional purposes of a scene break. (The others being an abrupt change in time or setting.)
The longest chapter I’ve ever seen in a fantasy novel is in Robert Jordan / Brandon Sanderson’s A Memory of Light. The chapter, entitled The Last Battle, is the final battle between the good and evil armies near the end of this 14-book epic saga. The chapter runs some 189 pages and 80,345 words long.
This analysis is extremely well-organized and overall well-done, and it really helped me a lot! I’m writing a fantasy/fiction story right now and I was worried that my chapters were too long when I searched online and found that, collectively, a “good” chapter length for a story was considered to be between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Obviously, that’s not the case with the books you analyzed. Thank you so much for making this!
Glad you found it useful, Pepper.
Useful analysis as I go through my finally-finished novel to try to ascertain if my chapters are too long. The engineer in me from the day job says that you wouldn’t quite expect to recover a bell curve as you don’t have a large enough sample size! Perhaps given a series of books with an infinite number of chapters, you may recover a normal distribution …
Thanks, Dave. I’m glad you found these data helpful. Sometimes it’s reassuring just to know that, by some metrics anyway, your own work is not way out in left field.
This was very helpful.
I am doing an online fiction writing coarse that started last week on Futurelearn.com and had to work on my notes regarding the shape of a possible novel. I shared your link on the page comments cause I think this was allot of help.
Thanks again
Jannie
Thanks for sharing, Jannie. I’m glad you found it helpful.
The longest chapter ever written (that I know of) has to be from “The Princess Bride.” From the time Buttercup is kidnapped to the time she is recaptured in the Fire Swamps, is one chapter, at 100 pages!
This was a great analysis. Any chance you could re-run it for 2016 with a larger fantasy sample?
I’ve considered it once or twice, Mike, but I’m not sure we’d learn much of use. The averages would shift a bit, and the outlier numbers might expand a bit, but overall, I’m not sure that the take-home information would change much at all. But I remain open to a counter-argument, if you see some possibilities that I haven’t considered.
Very entertaining. A rare example being fun and instructive at the same time.
Thank you for this!! I’m writing a fantasy novel and was worried when my chapter ran in to the 7,000 word mark.
My friend and I were discussing chapter length, and one site suggested 3,500 words (general fiction). I feel that’s too short when there’s a lot going on at certain points in the story, and it wouldn’t make any sense to change chapters just to stick to length.
Glad you found it useful. It’s funny how reassuring it can be to know that what you’re doing is not outside the range of what has been done before.
I’m writing a novel at the moment, and my chapters are averaging at just over 3,000 words a chapter
Thanks for the very useful analysis. I’m nearly finished with my novel, but not being as familiar with fantasy (which I now love) as literary fiction (which I’ve loved forever), I was curious. Mine run from 2800-11,000, but I’m working on breaking up the longer chapters now. Why? A fiction editor once told me that people’s attention spans are not what they used to be, so even shorter paragraphs have become more popular. I decided to try it with my novel and see what it reads like.
Long chapters can be daunting, but variety is also important. Just as sentence lengths should vary to keep the prose engaging, chapters lengths should also have some variety to them. It helps keep the reader engaged.
Fascinating and very useful. With this, I can consider “¿what mood did that book/ author put me into?” and “¿what mood do I want for my reader?” and look at chapter length based on what has worked before.
I haven’t started putting chapters together yet – still writing in scenes and half scenes. Actually, I know what order the scenes are but not how they group anyway, and although my current scenes are 600-1200 words each, once rewritten they could lose half of their words to editing
The Last Unicorn takes the prize, with a longest chapter of 23,000 words. Okay, so…I just finished a chapter in a novel I’m writing (that I’m already painfully aware will be very long once finished)…anyway, the chapter is 51200+ words (don’t remember the exact count off hand). The chapter sets up, and ends with, the first plot point in the novel…which is the beginning of the main character’s transition from childhood to his teen years (adolescence)…from being an old kid to a very young man. It’s the longest part of the book, thus far with no breaks…not even drop downs. Anyway, I belong to a writing group and they all loved the ending and said it was appropriate for what I was going for.
So, from what I read here, if 23,000 is long…then…51,200+ is extremely long? Like noteworthy long? Like OMG WTF?
There are absolutely no rules in fiction, so it’s possible that even 100K words could be put into a single chapter and readers would just eat it all up. But it’s not likely.
As you’ve already suggested, 51K words in a single chapter seems excessive. And when you say “not even drop downs,” I suspect you mean that you haven’t even broken that chapter into scenes. I can’t comment on the quality of the prose or the grippiness of the plot, but I CAN comment on the reading experience: and in my experience as a reader, 51K words of unbroken action is an Everest to be climbed. A Bataan Death March. The purpose of scenes and chapters is to feed the story to your readers in bite-sized chunks. Give them morsels they can fully chew, swallow, and digest before tackling the next bit. But 51K all at once—an entire novel’s worth of story in one long spew—is more like force-feeding them with a word cannon. Some might get through it, but how many more are going to fill up and explode along the way?
My guess is that your chapter would benefit from a critical restructuring. Find the key arcs of conflict in it and then break it down at least into a few scenes, just to give readers the chance to chew and swallow before diving back in.
And if none of your beta readers told you that, I’d also advise you to add some new blood to that committee as well. The ones you have now are not telling you what you need to hear.