Chapter length is totally up to the author and I've seen it done all sorts of ways. Having a bunch of really short chapters kind of annoys me, too, lol. The last book I read had them only a few pages long each. A couple were just a page and a half. It was kind of weird.
There's kind of standard thing about 250 words on a page give or take (there will be more if there are a lot of short dialogue obviously).
Taking that into consideration I think a lot of your chapters could be split into two parts. Some even more based on the scenes. Right now they still feel choppy to me because of the way they show something then surge ahead in time, show something else, surge ahead in time to show something else. It feels like stop and go, stop and go. At least to me.
Having chapter breaks works better for me in showing a time jump. From reading I think one time jump per chapter is pretty typical. And it's usually not a huge time jump. More like a few hours, maybe a day if nothing interesting happens but the topic hasn't changed.
The fanfic I'm writing right now jumps ahead quite a lot because I just want to show the interesting things that happen to the characters over a 5 year span without detailing every little thing. It's still crappy and I'll need to segue the sections better to make it work. It's a short story technique because you have a limited amount of space to show everything.
I was also thinking that maybe time should be condensed. Instead of these days and weeks between scenes it would work better if they just flow one to the next as if only moments have passed. It's a hard balance to figure out because you don't want things to be too tedious either. I think splitting up the chapters when there are big time jumps is a good idea.
The word counts and page numbers and all that are an individual thing. I'm sure there are people out there that love long involved chapters. Just as there are some that like quick little chapters.
For Wes' POV... I have no clue really. I'd probably add a scene from his POV during chapter 2 (or whenever you have Devin's POV in the rewrite). I'd chop it up and show some of it from Wes' POV. But that's just me. I'm still having problems figuring out which scenes I should make from Colby's POV in my novel since they're all written from Zoe's and work great as they are. It's a pain in the ass to add POVs after the main bulk of the writing is done. Doing new scenes for him is easy (mostly) but when I need to rewrite a scene...ugh, someone shoot me, please.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
Re: scene 3
Date: 2013-03-25 07:19 pm (UTC)There's kind of standard thing about 250 words on a page give or take (there will be more if there are a lot of short dialogue obviously).
Taking that into consideration I think a lot of your chapters could be split into two parts. Some even more based on the scenes. Right now they still feel choppy to me because of the way they show something then surge ahead in time, show something else, surge ahead in time to show something else. It feels like stop and go, stop and go. At least to me.
Having chapter breaks works better for me in showing a time jump. From reading I think one time jump per chapter is pretty typical. And it's usually not a huge time jump. More like a few hours, maybe a day if nothing interesting happens but the topic hasn't changed.
The fanfic I'm writing right now jumps ahead quite a lot because I just want to show the interesting things that happen to the characters over a 5 year span without detailing every little thing. It's still crappy and I'll need to segue the sections better to make it work. It's a short story technique because you have a limited amount of space to show everything.
I was also thinking that maybe time should be condensed. Instead of these days and weeks between scenes it would work better if they just flow one to the next as if only moments have passed. It's a hard balance to figure out because you don't want things to be too tedious either. I think splitting up the chapters when there are big time jumps is a good idea.
The word counts and page numbers and all that are an individual thing. I'm sure there are people out there that love long involved chapters. Just as there are some that like quick little chapters.
For Wes' POV... I have no clue really. I'd probably add a scene from his POV during chapter 2 (or whenever you have Devin's POV in the rewrite). I'd chop it up and show some of it from Wes' POV. But that's just me. I'm still having problems figuring out which scenes I should make from Colby's POV in my novel since they're all written from Zoe's and work great as they are. It's a pain in the ass to add POVs after the main bulk of the writing is done. Doing new scenes for him is easy (mostly) but when I need to rewrite a scene...ugh, someone shoot me, please.