Is 7000 words too long for a chapter? [closed]
Closed by System on Jul 16, 2019 at 06:29
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I've been working on a story for the last 4 years. It's just a personal project now and I've gone really in depth to clean up any plot holes I can readily see (thanks Cinemasins). I think I love this story almost as much as I love my boyfriend; it's a fanfiction (not the gross kind, a bringing-back-a-short-lived-90s-show-from-the-dead-because-it-was-great kind) of Ed Edd N Eddy. I'm in the editing stage now cuz this book needed a glow up, and I just finished the first chapter.
Based on Grammarly, it is 7,812 words long and has a 30 minute reading time and a 1 hour speaking time. My aunt, who is a 3rd grade teacher and doesn't seem to read more than the average elementary school chapter book, told me it was much too long and a chapter should only be about 10 pages long. This isn't an elementary school chapter book, and not even a middle school one. It's a book for Ed Edd N Eddy lovers to keep the show alive in their mind. My aunt seems to want me to feel bad but I still really love what I'm doing and it's making me happy. That's all that matters, isn't it? Should I really cut it down or is it fine to keep it how it is? It all seems to flow together, and when I read it, it didn't feel like it was that long.
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2 answers
I don't think it is too long, I write chapters nearly that long.
Some readers (even my own) complain that they use chapters to gauge their progress through the story and as stopping points, and very long chapters mess them up on that.
You don't have to break yours up, but in response to that I have broken a chapter somewhere in the 40% to 60% area, by finding a dramatic moment to end one chapter, but continue with exactly the same scene and dialogue in the next chapter!
In a way, it was just to emphasize something revelatory that one character said; making it the last line in a chapter, kind of like a cliff-hanger before another character responds. But anything that could use a "dramatic pause" will do.
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I put a paragraph break in your question as an edit, but it's still a huge block of text (now two huge blocks).
Chapter dividers are a grander version of that. They give your reader a chance to catch her/his breath. Don't make it hard for them to take a break. A lot of people like to stop at the end of a chapter.
Some books don't have any chapters at all. But a lot of people will choose not to read them for that reason.
So what's a reasonable range? Well it varies a lot. One comparison of well-known novels has a range from 942 words to 7226.
But...the 7226 (One Hundred Years of Solitude) is an outlier (and written in a language with a lot more use of articles than English). The next closest example is 6023 words, 3rd is 5294 words. The ones with the shortest chapters are young-adult/middle-grade or unusual formats.
The basic range seems to be 2000-5000 words for adult novels.
Sure, you can go over or under this as you wish. But I would break up your first chapter into two.
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