How long should a chapter be?

When I started writing seriously I often asked the question how long should a chapter be or how long should a scene be. There are definitely specific total word counts for a novel depending on what genre you write in. However, how long should a chapter or a scene be? I am currently reading Siren Song by Cat Adams. Lovely book. However, as I was doing my usual, I’ll just read until the end of the chapter as I was nodding off one night I noticed something. Chapter Six in that book is as long as the previous five chapters combined. And here folks is a visual:

So next time you ask yourself that question you know the answer is, however darn long it needs to be. And in the background is Bjork reminding you to be violently happy.

3 thoughts on “How long should a chapter be?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s