InvidiaRed

This is one of those questions that plague writers everywhere. Readers struggle with it as well.

There is a school of thought that chapters work at anywhere from 3-5k words per chapter. Any longer, and it’s hard to find a stopping point, since most readers don’t have the luxury of reading a book through in one sitting. Any shorter, and you hit the same problem people have with flash fiction in general: how do you convey sufficient information to hold the reader’s attention and make them want to read the next chapter?

Personally, I like 4-5k words per chapter. That’s my comfort level as a writer. As a reader, as long as you hold my attention, I’ll keep reading. I’ve stayed up half the night to finish a particularly engrossing book.  

As the faatus who assembled that 100k+ chapter way earlier, I thought it a point of pride at the the time when I had consolidated a whole bunch of smaller chapters into that mega chapter during a rewrite.  However, with a lot more experience under my belt, I’ve since realized it’s “a wall of text”, and it sort of trivializes any particular scene in the chapter when it’s as about long as JKR’s entire third book (not to mention there was *no* separation between scenes so it was all kinda “squashed” together).  An additional drawback to those writing 100k+ chapters on FF.net is that its word counter caps the per-chapter count to 65k for the story’s total word count.

I never used to really think about it, but when I re-did a couple of my old stories I did split them into chapters rather than large massive oneshots. Seemed easier to read!