Chapters - How Long, What To Do With Them

 When I decided to write a novel, I had no idea on what to do with chapters. Like how long they should be. What was their purpose? When I read Moll Flanders way back in high school, I was surprised at it having no chapter breaks. In prison, I read James Joyce's The Thin Red Line which, if memory serves, has four chapters, covering the days of the battle.

From Penguin's website, I noticed What is the ideal chapter length?  It has an interesting hisotry of the chapter, cites plenty of examples (with links), and concludes:

With our phones offering us immediate dopamine, books now have to work harder to keep us engaged. 'Busy-ness' has become an increasing distraction, through work and parenting as well as social media. That's why you may have noticed shorter chapters in more recent books, especially ones aimed at readers of millennial age and below (that's pretty much everyone under forty).

As any writer will find, however, there is no magic button when it comes to chapter length: the 'right' one is a blend for each novel being written. There's no point in worrying about the length of your piece of string if the string itself isn't useful or compelling.

Here I want to criticize this short-chapters-are-a- modern-thing theory. I tried reading James Patterson in prison and failed. He writes short chapters. He sells a lot of books. We, those members of my writing group, scorned him. Well, take a look at Tolstoy's War and Peace, and you will see he used short chapters. I think 20 pages is a long enough chapter, while giving up entirely with chapters in my "Love Stinks" story - I planned that one as a collage. If I ever get it typed, maybe we will learn if I was right to do so.

Don’t start a chapter without these six essential elements from Nathan Bransford has this to say about length:

More than that, since each chapter is (ideally) almost like a mini-novel unto itself with a beginning, middle, and end, it’s helpful to prime the reader around what the protagonist is going to try to accomplish and why it matters.

 I find myself wondering if I have done enough with numbers 5 and 6. Especially since I am on here and not working on any of my fiction!

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