Novel What would you consider the ideal chapter length?

I got curious as I often struggle to get my chapters over 2500 words and apparently most people recommend chapters be 5000 words long, which, how???

How long do you like your chapters to be?

 

I like chapters that are long enough to fulfill their function and no longer. Word count really doesn't matter to me.

 

As @big soft moose said, there's no set answer.

However, I believe that word counts about the length of a short story are easy to read. Shorter and you need to compress a lot in a few words, longer and the reader might either don't have time to finish it or would have information overload. That's exagerated, but you get my point. I also believe that varity is the spice of life and lots of very successful novels disregard what I said about chapter lengths. Only seldom theories survive contact with the real world

 

I like short chapters for thrillers, any length for anything else. To keep a lockdown on my wordcount/page count I'm only allowing 5 pages per chapter for my WIP.

 

I prefer long chapters. I probably am right around that 5k mark if not longer for my chapters. It's also what I prefer as a reader. For me, too many short chapters break up the story.

 

5k+ is fine.

Since I have little applicable knowledge, I kinda just
follow the lead of the ladies in group that round each
to about 3-3.5k, with some shorter than that.
Honestly I think that it is subjective, and I don't really
have an answer since my first book doesn't have them.

Good luck.

 

Chapters are just necessary breaks to me. They set a scene and play it out, then conclude, so length varies from approximately 1,500 - 8,000 words. I once wrote a 25-page chapter (roughly 10,000 words?) and that was too long. Tolkien did the same in his Lord of the Rings trilogy and I remember struggling to read those chapters in one go.

Short chapters, on the other hand, can be used to great effect, depending on the aim.

 

I don't think there's any "right" answer as long as it's not unreasonably short or long. Personally, I prefer reading chapters that are long enough that I can read just one chapter and still feel like I've been entertained for a while. However, there must be paragraphs and breaks within the chapter so that I can stop at almost any point.

I do have a follow up questions for all of you, though. When you write a book, should you make sure all the chapters are the same length? Or can you have some short and some long chapters? In my own manuscript my shortest chapter is about 8 pages in MS Word, but my longest is over 20.

 

You can totally have both long and short chapters. No Country for Old Men had chapters that are 20 pages long and a few that are a page or less long. Chapter breaks are similar to paragraph breaks in that they should be where it's most natural for them to be. This can be for a change of scene, change of POV, change of arc, change of ideas, because something big happened and you want to give the reader some time to think about what it is, or you need to change the pace up a bit. Stretching chapters out of cutting them to make them a uniform length is not really a great idea. And I'm not saying this to be mean or anything, but if someone's hung up on the physical length of a chapter, they probably don't have a solid understanding of what the actual function of a chapter is and I would recommend they grab a book on structure.

 

Thanks for your thoughts. I totally agree, and I would never artificially cut or extend chapters to make them more uniform - I think that would make for a bad read.

 

Chapter 1. Dear God this is a long chapter.
Chapter 2. The end.

Something like this probably won't work but anything else should be considered okay. If the pacing and information presented are all relevant to say one development, then I say don't worry about chapter size and just let it go as long as it needs too.