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Chapters

OrangeAipom

OrangeAipom

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Is there a difference between chaptering patterns in fanfiction and published works? How should things be divided up?
 
http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/2004-04-01-1.shtml

Chapter length is completely arbitrary. You can divide chapters however you want.

Robert Parker, for instance, uses very short chapters in his Spenser novels. Other writers have only five or six chapters in an entire novel.

Some writers divide chapters into sections from one character's point of view, so that the chapters change as often as the point of view shifts.

Some writers divide chapters after climactic scenes; others try to end them on cliffhangers or stunning revelations, so that the reader must turn the page and keep going.

Some writers (and now I'm speaking of myself) tend to begin a novel with short chapters, to create a fast-moving rhythm as the reader is just getting engaged in the story. Later chapters are much longer, on the presumption that the reader who gets this far is already interested and willing to read through much longer movements.

A chapter can be a single word, though this is a huge "special effect" that should only be done once in a career. But it's not rare to have a two- or three-page chapter at some crucial point in a book, because it needs to be set off from everything around it.

In other words, there are no rules. Just remember that each chapter break provides benefits - a sense of closure, of progress, of movement through the book - and imposes costs - a detachment from the story, a place where the book can be set down, an interruption in the onward flow. So you decide for yourself what rhythm and pace you want to establish, and when the costs of a chapter break are worth the benefits.
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Sharon Creech-Ruby Holler

There is a chapter in there that is two paragraphs long (Five seconds of reading). Whereas Tolkien has several 50 page chapters (which translates into about three months of reading time)
 
very boring....small print....I had better things to read...maybe I exaggerate...a teensy tiney bit.
 
If it takes you forever to read 50 pages, you need to read something else.

*points to self* 13th birthday. 4th Harry Potter book. 24 hours.

But ANYWAY, I personally like to make my chapters of varying size. (AKA, what Retsu said)
 
I generally consider a good-sized chapter to be 15-30 pages, maybe a little more. There are, naturally, exceptions to this (for example, there's a chapter in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" that's a good 80 pages or so), but this is the length I find most chapters in most books to be.
 
Personally, I don't worry about chapter length at all. I just finish chapters when it feels natural to do so; it's almost automatic (which is more than I can say for every other aspect of my writing). Figuring out a plot overview is, at least for me, far trickier than figuring out individual chapters.

If you know what you want to write*, where and how often the arbitrary divisions in the narrative come should really be no big deal. Short chapters, long chapters, whatever, as long as you tell the story you set out to tell, right?

* Or even if you don't very well. I was writing by the seat of my pants for most of NaNo 2006. On reflection, the story itself was a total mess, but I think the chaptering was fine, considering.

EDIT: Because I feel like I should mention this, for those who write short, lightning-speed chapters and then have it pointed out to them that their chapters are too short, the length of the chapter itself usually isn't actually the main issue. I'd say it's usually a matter of pacing. If your character has gotten up, gone out, been to the lab, obtained a starter, beaten their rival, left Pallet Town, battled a wild Pidgey, caught a Rattata and reached Viridian in the space of only a handful of paragraphs, sort out your pacing. You'll tend to find that if you pace it better, you will inevitably end up with a longer, generally better chapter.
 
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Full Metal Cookies said:
*points to self* 13th birthday. 4th Harry Potter book. 24 hours.
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That's nothing to brag about; I finished it in ~four/five hours. :S
(Also, I'm guessing that Ditto is merely referring to Tolkien's writing being incredibly mind-numbingly boring, not that he's particularly slow at reading.)

I finish my chapters when I get bored of it. This usually ends up with any prospective novel I've ever written looking very choppy and confusing. D: EVERYTHING I WRITE ONLY MAKES SENSE IN MY HEAD
 
Yeah, I'm a really fast reader...last Harry Potter book in 12 hours.

I'm writing a new 'short' story, the chapters in that are really short.
 
If reading the first and second HP books on the same day while at horse-back riding camp (although admittedly I did have a free hour and a half to read out of the eight and a half hours I was there) and while not on a horse, or reading an hour's worth of the seventh and finishing the rest in three or four hours at a friend's house is anything to go by... xD
 
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What about having no chapters?
I wrote all of my 2007 NaNo without a single chapter break. There wre some ~~~s, but they didn't really count as chapter breaks.

I end chapters when it... feels right. Sometimes I think "ok, enough has happened in this chapter" or "this is a good place to cut off". It comes to me, I guess.
 
Really, I think published fiction can have shorter chapters because you have the thing in front of you. Generally speaking, fanfiction is serialized, a bit coming out at a time, and so that chapter should be longer than a published piece. Usually.

And the only reason Tolkien has such long chapters is because it was older. He was describing places that most people had never seen - now we live in a world saturated by media of all kinds, and novels as well have a quicker pace to them.
 
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