THE L&L BLOG / Scrivener

How Chapter and Paragraph Length Affect the Pacing of Novels

The length of chapters in a novel can affect its pacing, how readers perceive the speed at which the plot moves. You can change the pacing of a novel by intentionally writing shorter or longer chapters.

You’ve certainly read a novel that is a page-turner; when you get to the end of one chapter, you can’t wait to read the next one. Page-turners often have short chapters; they might be six or eight pages long, and you find yourself flipping through them quickly, rushing toward the resolution of the story.

Chapter length has an important effect on the pacing of a novel. Pacing is the speed at which a story unfolds, shaping how readers perceive events and actions. By controlling the pacing of a novel, a writer can influence how readers engage with a story. Short chapters can give readers the impression that a lot is happening, and quickly, whereas longer chapters can provide a more contemplative story.

Chapter length, page count, and word count

Page count doesn’t tell everything about chapter length. The number of words on a page depend on the page and font sizes, and there aren’t even any actual pages when reading ebooks. It’s the word count, and the time it takes to read a chapter, that determines its length.

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has 105 chapters in around 140,000 words, or an average of 1,300 words per chapter. That’s about five manuscript pages for each chapter. The novel starts with an exciting event and doesn’t slow down until the end. In any format, you see new chapters frequently, and this contributes to the fast pace of the novel.

On the contrary, longer chapters tend to slow down the pacing of novels, and much literary fiction contains longer chapters because these novels strive to have deeper character development and emotional introspection. Many science fiction and fantasy novels have longer chapters too, in part because of the need for detailed world-building and introducing unfamiliar concepts. For example, chapters in A Game of Thrones, the first novel in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, vary from about 2,000 words to 7,000 words, with an average of around 4,000 words per chapter. This isn’t to say that there’s no action in the novel, but that the action is more developed and extended over time.

It’s not just chapter length that affects pacing; paragraph length does as well. You often see short paragraphs in fast-paced novels, along with short chapters. Dialog contributes to faster pace, especially dialog that only takes up one or two lines. Readers move down the page – physical or virtual – more quickly in scenes with a lot of dialog.

Fast-paced novels also often have cliffhangers at the ends of chapters. These don’t have to be big cliffhangers, moments where the protagonist’s life is in danger or where she needs to save someone. They just need to be the type of sentence that makes the reader want to go on and read more. For example, the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code ends with this:

“Wincing in pain, he summoned all of his faculties and strength. The desperate task before him, he knew, would require every remaining second of his life.”

This sentence propels the reader forward, and asks a captivating question: how will the protagonist accomplish this perilous mission? And it’s those questions that drive the reader to keep on reading and find out what happens in a novel.

How to write short or long chapters

Chapter length is often genre-dependent. Thrillers tend to have short chapters, whereas police procedurals have longer chapters. Fast-paced fantasy novels can have short chapters, whereas fantasy fiction with a lot of world-building, characters, and locations may have longer chapters.

But this depends on the pace you want for your novel. You may want to write a fast-paced romance novel, where each chapter is just a few pages, to show how the characters are overcome with excitement at their budding relationship. Or you may want a more pensive approach to this type of story, and write longer chapters.

For many writers, chapters are entire scenes. If you have long chapters and want to speed things up, try splitting them into shorter chapters, perhaps making each important beat a chapter on its own. Fast-paced thrillers often do this to maintain momentum.

Even if you aren’t writing a thriller, it can be useful to try splitting chapters, especially as a counterweight to longer chapters where there is a lot of description or exposition. The contrast of the two types of chapters can help keep a novel interesting. And finding a place to split the chapter that asks a question can help keep readers engaged.

If you usually write short chapters, it can be useful to try to write longer chapters and see how that pace fits your story. You can combine multiple scenes in one chapter, perhaps with line breaks to separate them. These separations aren’t quite like chapter breaks, but they do pause the action, and give readers a place to stop reading if they want to take a break.

You can control the pace throughout your novel, alternating between short and long chapters. After a few short chapters with a lot of action, a long chapter, where characters reflect on what has happened to them, can give the reader a bit of respite from the faster-paced sections. And medium length chapters can provide balance; they can be useful for transitions or for building momentum toward climactic moments. Leading into an action-packed chapter with a slower-paced chapter can make the action seem even faster.

If you’re working on a manuscript, it can be a good idea to try splitting or combining your chapters and paragraphs to see what effect they have. You can control the way readers move ahead in your story with some simple changes to these elements.

Kirk McElhearn is a writerpodcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.

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