Write Better: Tips and tricks

Chapter Length

A common question I see on wattpad is "How long should my chapter be?"
We're going to take a look at that today.

Wattpad is a little different from regular novels and books, for a couple reasons. One of them is that it's a reading platform with a heavy percentage of mobile readers.

1. Consider your audience. If you're printing a regular book or publishing to Amazon or something that's extremely e-reader friendly, you can get away with longer chapters. On wattpad, you have a lot of younger users who may only have a cellphone or computer as their resource. For them, shorter chapters are usually easier to scroll through and read.

2. Consider your story. If you have the entire thing written, wonderful! You can break your story down into chapters and figure out about how many parts there will be. A lot of writers on wattpad post as they go, so they may have trouble breaking parts into even segments (or make them too small, and wind up with 120 chapters when it should be 45).

3. Consider the scene(s). Chapters consist of a scene or sequence of scenes that work together. They're a cohesive unit of story that is tied together in some way to each other, and to the larger work as a whole. [For example, in baking a cake, you have wet ingredients- egg, milk, melted butter; vs dry [flour, baking powder, salt, etc.]

4. Consider your average chapter length for that story. Look back through previous chapters. About how many words is each one? If you're averaging 1800 words per chapter and the next one is 4200, consider breaking it into two parts. You don't have to, but staying within 500-1000 words of the other chapters tends to result in a reader-friendly, smooth experience [so if you're averaging 1800, 2800 is the point where your readers will really start to notice that this chapter is really long].

For full length novels  on wattpad, the average or recommended length is generally 2000-3000 words per chapter.

That's generally considered enough information to make a reader feel like an update was worth it, it's long enough for most people to read in under ten minutes, it's mobile-device friendly, and it's plenty of time for things to happen in your story.

Rather than force your chapter to meet a certain word count, end it where it naturally ends. It might be a little longer or a little shorter.

Note: Some of you might push chapters to 5000 or 6000 words or more, and that's okay, but if you ever wonder why some people aren't reading your story, remember that on Wattpad that is a lot of text to scroll through in one sitting, no matter how fantastic of a writer you are. There are people on here who will refuse to read a chapter that long. They don't mean to offend you, just like you don't mean to offend them! Just remember where you're posting.