reminder that it’s okay for writers to have chapters that are ten pages long
reminder that it’s okay if your chapter is only one page long
reminder that it’s okay if your chapter is only one sentence long
as long as you can get across the point of your chapter, be it with ten thousand words, or just ten, then you do it.
your book is yours to write. there is no set formula.
Indeed this was something I worried about for a short while, but there are no formulas or conventions when it comes to chapters. Maybe certain publishers have guidelines that they prefer, but most of the time it’s completely up to the author.
For me, I usually write three or four scenes and decide that’s a chapter (I might try to end it when there’s a transition in time or something), but some famous and very successful authors, like Terry Pratchett in his Discworld novels, don’t bother having chapters at all.
Is it okay, on the other end, to have a 100-page chapter?
An average novel is, what, 200 pages or thereabouts. So you’d have two chapters. or one long chapter and a hundred one page ones. Don’t see why not – it could be something where half the story, or chapters, are just single tweets, then suddenly it breaks into a third person narrative. It’ll either crash and burn, or soar and be hailed as one of the greatest works of art of our time (it pretty much just depends on how good you are at marketing…)
Leave a Reply