Call me anal retentive, black and white or living in autistic mode. But... I am just starting on my second fiction novel and I have also written half a dozen technical books. Starting again I decided to look at word counts and chapter counts. i find it useful to have an approximate target. The problem for my little black and white brain: ne'er a grey thought allowed entry, is that the numbers don't add up. The standard word count for mystery is somewhere around 80k to 100k. The standard word count for chapters is 1500 to 5000 words. The standard number of chapters is 10-12. I am aiming for 3000 words plus or minus 10% for the chapters. That would mean about 30 chapters to get to 80k to 100k total words for the novel. At this point my brain melts down. How do I resolve this? Many thanks in advance. Paul
The answer here is that I can’t remember the last time I read a novel with only 10-12 chapters. I’ve just pulled 6 roughly 100k books off my shelf: 22, 32, 29, 37, 33, 20. No idea where your source pulled the 10-12 chapter number, but if it was once true of older books, it’s certainly not true of modern ones. The flip side, the word count is the only thing that’s actually standard (and even that’s flexible), chapter count and word count per chapter have always been at the authors discretion as a tool for structure and pacing.
I read a novel once that started a new chapter -- on average -- every 2-1/2 pages. The funny thing is, it wasn't a great book but it was quite readable, and I never noticed how short the chapters were until I had finished the book and went back to look at it some time later. Don't get hung up on numbers. Write the story.