Mastering Chapter Length: How Long Should Your Chapters Be?

Stop us if you’ve experienced this before: the clock strikes 8pm and you realize that you really need to pick up your drycleaning. But you’re right in the middle of your book! Well, you’ll put the book down when you get to the end of this chapter, you reason.

30 minutes afterward, you can’t resist taking a quick peek to see where you are. That’s when you discover: you’re only a quarter of the way through.

If you’ve ever felt this sinking feeling before, you’ve already got a sense of why sectioning word count should be so darn important to writers. Lengthy chapters can make readers want to give up on reading a story.

So, what’s the sweet spot for an average chapter’s word count — and why should it matter to you? Let’s find out.

If you'd like to download our free cheat sheet on word counts, skip ahead to the appropriate section below! Otherwise, read on. 

Why does the word count of a chapter matter?

Chapter breaks aren’t blocks of space that the writer just arbitrarily decided to insert. Instead, they:

1. help keep your readers in the story;
2. help reset the story so that there’s no information overload. (Imagine watching all of The Lord of the Rings at once!);
3. help you adjust the pacing of the story and craft a feeling of suspense.

Knowing this, why does chapter length matter? Imagine that you’re a conductor for a moment. If your story is a melody, its sections make up the underlying beat or rhythm. So the length of these affects the pacing of your story, and the way the reader experiences it. Do you want the pace to be brisk to the reader and skip in a staccato? Or do you want to keep your readers suspended on a whole note that carries on for some time?

A break also tells the reader to mentally prepare for some sort of shift. If your chapters are too short, that might make for an erratic experience. You might not be able to build up the forward momentum that your story needs to click for the reader.

Long chapters, on the opposite end of the spectrum, risk dropping the reader out of the story forever. That’s because a break between sections allows readers to take a quick breather in between words. If we made this one block of text go on for twenty pages or thirty pages on end, for instance, our best guess is that your eyes would glaze over and your skin would fall away and your fingernails would rot while you turn into The Skeleton With a Burning Cigarette, forcing yourself to continue reading a slab of text that just never seemed to stop. Or — worse still — you’d give up and put the text aside altogether.

Therefore, the word count of a novel is crucial if you want your book to be fit for publication. But the word count of a chapter matters if you want your story to flow right. Of course, when you're writing the first draft of your story, you want to just get your words out on paper. But chapter word count is something that you want to keep in mind for future edits.

So, with all of this in mind, is there actually an average word count you should aim for?

PRO-TIP: Have you ever wondered how long your novel should be? Take our short quiz below to find out!

How long should a chapter be?

To determine how long should a chapter be, we examined books from a wide variety of genres. Based on this dataset of novels, we can establish some guidelines for chapter length: the average word count of a chapter generally ranges between 1,500 words to 5,000 words, with 3,000-4,000 words being the most common sweet spot. 

Does this mean that every chapter must end up somewhere in this range? Heck no. Books with much shorter sections become bestsellers all the time. (Kurt Vonnegut or Dan Brown, for instance.) And are there books with chapters that consistently score above 5,000 words? Of course! May we introduce you to J.R.R. Tolkien?

But it's safe to say that 1,500-5,000 is the normal range for most books. In any case, to see how authors use this tactic to set their pacing, we also mapped out the word count of every chapter in four famous books:

And as you can see, it varies, depending on the story. The average chapter word count of these novels falls within the 2,000-5,000 range. As Persuasion progresses, Jane Austen seems to elongate hers, building them up on a crescendo. George R.R. Martin and Harper Lee keep things more evenly paced in A Game of Thrones and To Kill A Mockingbird, respectively. The chapters in The Fault In Our Stars, meanwhile, grow shorter just as Hazel's time with Augustus shortens. Ultimately, the way you section your book depends on the effect that you want to achieve at any given point in your novel.

CHEATSHEET: What Should Your Word Counts Be?

If you're thinking right now that these are a lot of numbers to wrap your head around, don't worry! We created this cheatsheet to help you visualize the data. It has everything you might want to know about your novel's word counts — including how long a novel in full should be. Simply enter your email below to unlock it.

How do you write the chapter break?

Of course, sometimes the best way to chapter your book won’t crystallize until you start editing. So if you want your chapter breaks to pack a punch (whether it’s your first, second, or even fifth draft), these are a few of the ways you can frame the end of each section.

1. The Promise

Broadly speaking, a break does one of two things: look forward or look back. The former promises more intrigue in the next chapter, often by foreshadowing things to come. This is from the ending of Chapter 3 in The Hobbit:

The next morning was a midsummer’s morning as fair and fresh as could be dreamed: blue sky and never a cloud, and the sun dancing on the water. Now they rode away amid songs of farewell and good speed, with their hearts ready for more adventure, and with a knowledge of the road they must follow over the Misty Mountains to the land beyond.

— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

This passage promises the reader plenty of upcoming adventure. Of course, its strategic placement at the end of the chapter also sets a reader’s irony senses tingling, telling them that things might not be all so bright and cheery for Bilbo and the gang soon.

2. The Resolution

Looking back on past events is another common way to end a chapter. This technique can simply bring the scene to a close, or it can be a way to summarize. In the exposition of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling re-familiarizes us with Harry Potter, an unusual boy wizard who misses some school friends. In this case, the conclusion nicely wraps up the themes and motifs she’s just introduced:

Deciding that he’d worry about the Hogsmeade form when he woke up, Harry got back into bed and reached up to cross off another day on the chart he’d made for himself, counting down the days left until his return to Hogwarts. Then he took off his glasses and lay down; eyes open, facing his three birthday cards.

Extremely unusual though he was, at that moment Harry Potter felt just like everyone else — glad, for the first time in his life, that it was his birthday.

— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Though it’s normally a bit of a cliché to close a chapter by getting the character to fall asleep, Rowling does a clever twist on it by making this an occasion worth describing.

3. The Cliffhanger

You bet we’ve all experienced our fair share of screaming matches with this sort of ending. Charles Dickens, whose serialized novels got readers in the 1800s coming back every week, was a master at writing cliffhangers — sometimes even in the middle of a fight.

Here is an example from Chapter 5 of Great Expectations:

But I ran no farther than the house door, for there I ran head-foremost into a party of soldiers with their muskets, one of whom held out a pair of handcuffs to me, saying, “Here you are, look sharp, come on!”

— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

This time, the chapter ends mid-scene. In addition, this particular cliffhanger rests on a physical act — the soldiers approaching Pip. But it could just as well be a dawning mental or emotional realization that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. Whatever shape the cliffhanger takes, it’s the anticipation you generate that will keep your audience eagerly flipping those pages.

One caveat: you can only use this technique sparingly, or else it’ll start to grow repetitive and lose its impact.

4. The Era or POV Jump

If you’re writing a book that uses multiple perspectives or jumps time periods, the chapter break is an obvious opportunity to switch things up. One of the most prominent practitioners is George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which cycles between a total of 31 characters. Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park also uses a break effectively to shift POVs:

Park couldn’t think of a way to get rid of her on the bus. Or a way to get rid of himself. So he put his headphones on before the girl sat down and turned the volume all the way up.

Thank God she didn’t try to talk to him.

— Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

Then the next section segues smoothly into Eleanor’s take on things, keeping readers intrigued by revealing a new angle on previous events. When there are more than two POV characters, you'll need to make sure that you distribute time equitably between them while making each character interesting in their own right, so that one 7,000-word chapter with a boring character doesn't slow the whole story down.

That said, there are always exceptions, which takes us to our next important point...

Guidelines, not rules

As with everything else when it comes to writing a book, these are only guidelines—not rules. Though the average word count of a chapter is around 2,000 – 5,000 words, it all depends on your story. (We can't emphasize this enough.)

There are plenty of books that purposefully play with the word counts of their chapters. The Luminaries, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2015, has 12 sections that steadily decrease in word count to mirror the waning of the moon. (The first chapter of The Luminaries is 360 pages, whereas the final is two pages.) Then there’s William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, in which Vardaman’s famous five-word sentence, “My mother is a fish,” is the whole of Chapter 19. Or consider Fahrenheit 451, which contains a Part I and Part II — but no chapters.

So, don’t write a chapter with only one eye on your story and the other on your word count. When you're outlining your book and writing your first draft, concentrate on making the content of your story the best it can be. Then you can always circle back to adjust word counts afterward, with pacing and reader experience in mind.

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What do you think about chapter word counts? Have any tips for your fellow writers? Share your thoughts in the comments below!