[HN Gopher] What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)
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What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)
Author : samclemens
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-08-08 13:39 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.penguin.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.penguin.co.uk)
| jayski wrote:
| 20
| novosel wrote:
| I bid you 21 good Sir.
| gandalfgreybeer wrote:
| Assuming all chapters are the same length, I think 10-20 is the
| sweet spot where I can randomly pick up the book
| beAbU wrote:
| Long enough that when I'm reading at night and I'm getting
| sleepy, that the chapter end is always a reasonable amount of
| pages away.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > 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.
| Conscat wrote:
| Slightly tangential, the longest single chapter of anything I've
| read so far is Fallout: Equestria chapter 37, at 51.5k words.
| Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons is the longest single
| novel, at 1.8m words, but in terms of chapter count (which seems
| to be what the article means by "length"), I doubt either of
| those come close, since they merely have 50-odd chapters.
| Counting the number of chapters seems like a strange measurement
| to me, in light of that.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Why does clover keep on growing Why are there flies in my
| hay Don't they know it's the end of the world It
| ended when you clopped away -- "Horsefly" Davis
| (as heard on DCR)
| captn3m0 wrote:
| A Memory of Light (last book in Wheel of Time) has a single
| chapter at 79000 words. Quote from the author about the
| chapter:
|
| > The chapter is just shy of 79,000 words. It contains (by my
| quick count) 72 scenes-but only 31 distinct viewpoints, as
| numerous ones repeat.
| trescenzi wrote:
| I need to actually finish these. Robert Jordan passing and,
| at the time, me having no clue who Brandon Sanderson was,
| meant I stalled out. But now that I know how incredible
| Sanderson is, and the TV show seems like it's actually solid
| I've recently been toying with the idea of reading them all
| through.
|
| I love the insanity of that quote. Sanderson has an awesome
| ability to write things like a chapter with a dozen
| viewpoints that still flow so incredibly well.
| ryanar wrote:
| I read through the wheel of time last year and enjoyed it.
| It is a commitment, I think the series slows down a ton and
| then Sanderson comes in and it picks up, and it was amazing
| to see all the building of plots see their conclusions. So
| it is well worth the journey.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| You could fit an entire novel in that chapter.
| amateurCoder5 wrote:
| Chapter 11 in the book Gremlins was just (spoiler) "Pete forgot."
| jb1991 wrote:
| The larger question for me is the long-term effect of rapidly
| vanishing attention spans in our population. The short-form
| format across tweets, tiktok, much on youtube, instagram, SMS vs.
| voicemail -- even email is often considered "too long" for newer
| generations -- what is the likely consequence of this? It seems
| dangerous in the long-term, but maybe not. Is it just a temporary
| cultural shift, or is it resulting in a permanent shift to
| humanity's ability to concentrate?
| rvba wrote:
| There are much more things to consume. There were of course
| books and newspapers in the past (in fact even more press and
| higher quality than now), but I think for average person there
| was much less of everything - you had one book, one newspaper,
| few tv channels to choose from.
|
| So people want the essence. Also the quality of modern writing
| is often poor - you dont learn much from articles, since the
| people who write them must pump few per day
| jb1991 wrote:
| That's an interesting observation -- perhaps the
| proliferation of quantity is encouraging audiences to care
| less about engagement time so they can maximize exploration
| of all that is available.
|
| The ability to speed up the playback speed of Netflix content
| would be an example of this.
| lumb63 wrote:
| I worry about the same thing. I will say, however, that I worry
| more about this in the context of news articles, conversation,
| and other shorter-duration activities. Books are a big
| commitment, and it is highly disappointing to find out someone
| stretched a 50 page book into 250 pages to get it published.
| Sometimes it helps to instill the idea, or provides useful
| elaboration, but sometimes it is filler with no discernible
| benefit to the reader. Our time is important and as such, I
| think there ought to be a referendum against wasting it. That
| is not to say all content should be short, but that it should
| be no longer than it needs to be, and that information density
| should be as high as is tolerable.
| iambateman wrote:
| This is largely an issue of trust and priority, not attention
| span, right?
|
| The same people who fly through TikTok videos also regularly
| sit through a two hour movie or read the entire Harry Potter
| series.
|
| I think that people can pay attention if they want to, and
| the cultural shift is _what_ we expect to give attention to.
| adonovan wrote:
| I too used to believe that, but I've since met too many
| children who have told me they don't like going to the
| movies because you have to pay attention for two continuous
| hours during which you aren't allowed to use your phone.
| reidjs wrote:
| Perhaps it's the movies fault for not being interactive
| or engaging enough
| forgotacc240419 wrote:
| Or for being unnecessarily long; 90 minute films seem
| scarce nowadays even for kids
| wongarsu wrote:
| If we take fanfiction as indication of how younger people
| produce and consume content then the effect is that chapters
| get shorter while books get longer.
|
| Of course take that with a grain of salt because *waves wagely
| at the statement full of issues*. But it tracks with other
| trends in social media. Many people will be able to tell you
| more about their favorite tik-toker than their favorite long-
| form-content producer. The length of the snippets doesn't
| dictate the depth of the story
|
| You could even draw a comparison to the rising popularity of
| series over movies. People now prefer 6 45 minute segments over
| one 3 hour installment.
| camel-cdr wrote:
| > If we take fanfiction as indication of how younger people
| produce and consume content then the effect is that chapters
| get shorter while books get longer.
|
| Except, that assumption might not be true.
|
| To set a baseline I looked at LOR statistics:
| 62 chapters 1255 pages 381103 words
| 7759 words/chapter 20 page/chapter
|
| Then I looked at the 100 most bookmarked fanfics on AO3 in
| one of the most popular fandoms (Harry Potter):
| 218401 average word count 33 average chapters
| 9435 average words/chapter
|
| Now 15 of the 100 fanfics are one-shots with only one
| chapter, if we exclude those we get the following numbers:
| 253386 average word count excluding one-shots 39
| average chapters excluding one-shots 7544 average
| words/chapter excluding one-shots
|
| For reproduction, I used the following for scraping and
| processed the data further in vim: lynx
| -dump 'link to ao3 filter page' | grep -A2 'Words\|Chapters'
| | tr -d '\n,-' | sed 's/\[[0-9]*\]//g;s/ */
| /g;s/Words/\nWords/g'
| jll29 wrote:
| I was hoping for some statistics about avg. (mean, mode) chapter
| length, and changes over time, given that this post comes from
| Penguin, who have plenty of data at their fingertips.
|
| Still, an interesting blog post.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Humanities department generally / traditionally haven't
| believed in insights that come from mathematics.
| keiferski wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by traditionally. This division is
| largely a consequence of the battle between scientific-
| technical education and classics/Latin-Greek education in the
| 19th century. Prior to that, there was definitely a ton of
| overlap between humanities and mathematics - consider Leibniz
| as a prime example.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
| passion__desire wrote:
| Conside the "Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis" theory. It is
| nothing but Synthesis = l x Antithesis + (1 - l) x Thesis
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| I wouldn't say "believe" is the most accurate way to describe
| it.
|
| They're just very skeptical of the insights from statistical
| analysis of works in the mediums because there usually aren't
| very good large data sources. Cinemetrics.lv was amazing
| before the domain was stolen and had a large community of
| film academics using it. In literature, a big problem has
| been the way that publishers do not allow access to any of
| their data, some public access programs are starting to try
| to overcome that though.
|
| In general, though, most humanities academics aren't
| interested in statistical analysis or its insights, not
| because they don't believe in them, but because the insights
| generally aren't that useful or likely so general as to be
| not that useful for very specific research programs.
| bccdee wrote:
| Mathematics can only give you insight into things that can be
| quantified. When people try do things like (say) perform a
| statistical analysis of the tone of a narrative, they have to
| either go through and numerically quantify the tone of each
| passage (time-consuming & of dubious value) or feed the whole
| thing through sentiment analysis software (practically
| useless). You'll learn much more from a close subjective
| reading of a few interesting passages.
| persnickety wrote:
| Ironic that they prefer to _tell_ us stories rather than _show_
| the facts.
| asplake wrote:
| (In fiction)
| camel-cdr wrote:
| For me 10k-15k words is roughly the optimum, where it isn't to
| short, but you still have ampel oportunity to stop at a chapter
| break.
|
| Although for serial works it's generally the longer the better.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I like it best when a chapter takes between 10 minutes and a half
| hour to read through.
|
| Textbooks you're surely going to focus on one chapter at at time
| and you don't want it to take very long to re-read, which most
| students will likely be doing, especially when you may have hours
| of problems to solve for a single chapter. You want to be able to
| re-read without a lengthy commitment compared to the problem-
| solving.
|
| Regular non-fiction may not be as universally re-read but it
| would be more often than with fiction.
|
| With fiction or storytelling a half hour is a good max so there
| will always be a stopping point within reach, with two chapters
| not being out of the question lots of times. People may not re-
| read a fiction chapter as they go along very much, but why not
| make it easier anyway.
|
| Then again people probably like a chapter that takes whole hour
| or more but is such a page-turner that it seems like a half-hour
| or less :)
| sambeau wrote:
| I am writing children's books. One mantra I try to keep to is to
| make my chapters ~15 minutes long when read aloud by a parent at
| bed time. This gives them the ability to be consistent in their
| bedtime routine.
|
| This way children don't get short-changed and adults don't find
| they have committed to something they can't get out of. It also
| allows them to easily give in and do another chapter -- after
| all, it's only 15 minutes.
|
| 30 mins reading out loud is about 4,500 words, so 15 minute half-
| chapters are 2,250 words.
|
| A 2,250 word chapter is also very manageable by a child.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| As a parent that's grappled with this: thank you!
| thih9 wrote:
| > there is no magic button when it comes to chapter length: the
| 'right' one is a blend for each novel being written
| sebastiennight wrote:
| When I was re-writing one of my books in 2016, I spent the whole
| summer asking successful entrepreneurs (my reader audience) what
| was their favorite business book, and why.
|
| It turned out that the "favorite book" answer was fairly varied
| (aside from a couple of big-name bestsellers), but the "why"
| answer almost always revolved around:
|
| - "bite-size chapters"
|
| - "really quick read"
|
| - "short and to the point"
|
| - "one idea, one example for proof, and that's it, go to next
| chapter"
|
| My book went from ~120 pages to ~150 during that rewrite, but
| also went from ~10 chapters to ~80.
|
| Not only did the new version outsell the original by a 10x
| factor, but I'd estimate the completion rate also shot up
| considerably (based on reader comments about the final chapters).
| qingcharles wrote:
| James Patterson's books are generally the worst I've ever read,
| but his short 2-3 page chapters are surely one of the reasons
| for his success. They're like popping M&M's -- you're thinking,
| "I can just do one more."
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| happy for you you got that bag, but oh my god do I weep for
| mankind
|
| tiktok and its ilk surely did a number on our collective
| attention spans (and along with it the capability for nuanced
| and complex reasoning)
| SllX wrote:
| Nah, most business books or "ideas" books really are too
| long. Something I used to do when I was interested in a book
| is I would go to the local book store, skim the introduction
| and chapter listings to get a feel for the book, find the
| chapter that had the same name of the book and just read
| that. Never walked away feeling like I didn't get the
| author's main idea, and usually most of the rest of the book
| is trying to pre-sell it and examples of where to apply their
| idea. Maybe some anecdotes about how it helped them in their
| life or how other people do it too.
| dark__paladin wrote:
| For me personally 5k-10k / chapter and 20-30 chapters per book is
| optimal.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I'm 2/3rd of the way through _Love in Time of Cholera_ and it
| 's only chapter four (@200+pages, so far)... otherwise, an
| absolutely beautiful story of unrequited/parasocial love.
|
| By far _the worst_ chapter structure (and "book") is _The
| Sound and The Fury_. It seems like an exercise in-the-second-
| person, gone wrong. Sensorial overload... and _isn 't the point
| of a good story <TO MAKE SENSE>?_
| Yawrehto wrote:
| 1. I wonder how much of the reason people seem to like shorter
| chapters is because shorter-chapter books tend to have quicker
| pacing. Would there be some way of controlling for pacing? 2. The
| title is a bit misleading. I went in assuming it would be some
| sort of analysis - average chapter length vs number of copies
| sold, for instance. It's certainly a lovely read and decent
| history, but it doesn't answer the central question. 3. The
| username of the poster (samclemens) is a fitting username for a
| post about books with a particular focus on older 'classics'.
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