In my last blog, I wrote about using an AI tool to edit and critique my latest novel. As I mentioned, the software will run one Chapter Critique a day, providing extremely useful feedback on the overall effect of the writing. My plan was to work through the whole novel, one chapter a day, until the whole thing had been critiqued and reviewed.
Well, that was back in June, and the novel is twenty-five chapters long, so obviously, I finished it. But the subscription to the software goes on for another year, so I did what any author curious for feedback would do – I started running the critique reports on my other novels. One report a day, chapter by chapter, day by day. Except, it’s not ‘one chapter’ per day, because my chapters are too long!
The AI critique tool, while very useful in so many ways, has a word limit of 4000 per chapter. It will still run a report on a chapter that is longer, but it stops ‘reading’ after 4000. I had noticed this while running the reports for Novel Number 6, but because this was a YA novel, I had already made a conscious effort to make sure the chapters weren’t too long, so it didn’t pose much of a problem. However, since running the reports on my novels After the Rain and The Most Beloved Boy, I became aware that in writing those, I had favoured much longer chapters. Many chapters are between 6000 and 8000 words! This has meant splitting most chapters into two parts to get the most productive feedback.
That’s not really been a problem; it makes the process take longer, but I have plenty of time. But it has made me consider why my chapters are so long, and whether this is a problem. A quick search on Google suggests that I am not the only one considering this issue – there are multiple videos and articles offering advice to writers on chapter length, using comparisons with published work as a guideline. One thing that comes up a lot is that the genre can influence chapter length. Classics and literary fiction tend to have longer chapters, allowing time and space for contemplation and immersive details, whereas thrillers and crime have shorter chapters to heighten tension. Obviously, books for children and YA have shorter chapters to reflect the perceived attention span of their readers – though a long chapter never put me off when I was a young reader.
This probably explains why the chapters in my earlier works are so long. I’ve read a lot of classics – Dickens, the Brontës, Austen, Trollope etc – where the chapters are generally long, packed with depth and detail. Similarly, Fantasy novels do the same thing – I’ve seen the stats on Tolkien, and his chapters average out at between 7000 and 8000 words. I’m used to reading long, complex chapters, so it’s only natural that I would use long chapters in my own writing. Plus, with ATR and TMBB, with their historical settings, I have tried to emulate classic fiction, so the lengthy chapters are fitting. And I guess I’ve always liked writing long chapters. Even in my own YA novel, the chapters might be shorter than normal (for me) but they are not short. To me, a chapter is an episode, a scene, and I like them to be contained rather than ending on a cliff-edge.
To be honest, chapter length was never something I gave any thought to during the writing process. However, amongst the advice online about chapter length, there is a suggestion that modern readers prefer shorter chapters, indicative of shortening attention spans and a preference for instant gratification. They call it the TikTok effect. Personally, I don’t agree with this patronising viewpoint; every generation has been accused of damaging their attention span through modern habits, without there being any evidence of the collapse of the human mind! But does it matter what I think if that’s what agents and editors think? Am I condemning my novels to obscurity just because the chapters look too long?
Well, it’s something to think about. I recently read an excellent YA novel with some extremely short chapters, and it made me race through, eager to find out what happened next. I could chop up my chapters, halt them in the middle of the action to build the suspense, and make them more in line with modern tastes. But it’s not as simple as that. I spend a lot of time planning the structure of a chapter, and to arbitrarily break them up might disrupt the pace and flow that I worked so hard to achieve. Besides, I don’t believe that literature needs to be ‘dumbed down’. The quality of the writing is the most important thing; get the quality right and it will appeal to any reader. I truly, honestly believe that and this is the hill I will die on.
And there are no rules about chapter length. All the advice, all the precedent, all the guidelines, that’s all they are – suggestions, not rules. A chapter is as long as it needs to be. If the story is good enough, readers won’t be counting the pages.
M J Schofield 