Prisimpad: A Guide to Wattpad, Writing, and Whatever

ON WATTPAD: The Length of a Chapter

3/26/18

I debated on having this chapter during my on writing portion, but I decided it's better to have it now. One of the common questions I see in the IYW club is "How long should my chapters be?" The simplest answer is . . . as long as it needs to be for it to be done.

Now let's go into the long winded answer. For ebooks, shorter is better. That could be an attention span thing, a battery thing, or the fact Wattpad unfortunately hasn't added a bookmark option so reading a chapter in one sitting is harder when it's long. Whatever the reason, ebooks do have a shorter is better preference. However, not every chapter can be finished in 3K words or less and that's okay too. Wattpad recommends the chapter length to be (I believe) no more than 3K words. If you can finish your scene in that few words, go for it, but if you need more, go for that too. Write it as long as it needs to be to finish that scene. Don't force a chapter to reach a certain length or just randomly end it so you can break it up into shorter parts. Here's an example why for that latter reason:

When I first started out here I was strictly paper books where chapters tend to run longer. So when I posted Freelander I had so many comments that went along the lines of "OMG this chapter is too long" and it honestly boggled my mind. My average was 4-8K words, or 10 un-formated Word pages. To me that was normal. It was on par with an average fantasy book so I couldn't wrap my head around the fact people found them too long on Wattpad. I had zero experience with ebooks so I didn't know shorter was better.

Thus when I upload Ewah after Freelander, I experimented. Any chapter that went over 5K or so, I broke up into 2 parts. I did my best to find a "good" place to end it, but there really wasn't a good place to end a chapter that wasn't actually done yet. But I broke them up and labeled them clearly with a 1.0 and 2.0 and I announced that's what I was doing AND I uploaded both parts on the same day. Do you know what happened?

I got a ton of people complaining about how my 1.0 chapters just ended. They were right because the chapter wasn't done, but no matter how clear I was that it was a part one people still got confused.

After that I said screw it, I'm posting the chapters as they're written because I wasn't going to win no matter what I did. I tried, I really did, but it didn't work any better then me having long chapters. As I've gotten stronger at writing and can now identify some of my fluff words, I can make my chapters a little shorter then they were when I was starting out with both Brothers Blood and Freelander. Now my fantasy books average probably 4-5K a chapter, but I do still have some that get up into the 6-8K words range. If it's non fantasy then I can keep them shorter because I don't need as much world building. I think my chick lit experiments, How We Found Us and Awakening Kristmas, both wound up averaging 2-4K a chapter.

So write the chapter the way it needs to be written. Look at the chapter like a movie scene and finish that scene. Fantasy books especially get a bigger grace period then say a teen fiction novel because world building will typically be bigger in a fantasy book.

And don't just decide you want every chapter to be 2K words and thus you fluff it up in order to reach that goal. Not every chapter needs to be the same length. It can be however long or short it needs to be. You'll find yourself struggling with pacing if you try to force a chapter to conform to a certain length. Sure you could still struggle with pacing (pacing is hard) even if you don't, but it really limits you when you set yourself a goal like that.

So stop worrying about the length and just write. You can always fix it in edits.