Your novel's chapters

A combination of Twitter conversations, client work, and working on my own latest novel have put it in my head today to talk about approaches to chapters: length, breaks, and titles.

First let me say that there are no hard-and-fast rules in storytelling. As with any aspect of craft, choices about how to do chapters are driven by the experience we want our readers to have. It's about the effects our choices have on how readers understand and experience our stories. Decisions about chapter length and breaks are mostly about pacing. Since I like reading fast-paced page-turners, that's the effect that I go for in my own writing. I want my books to be unputdownable, so that's my mindset when I'm making decisions about chapters.

Chapter Length
There's no minimum. No, really. I've seen a one-word chapter done successfully before. (See also these examples, which include several chapters that one-up the one-word chapter by containing zero words.) That said, if I'm reading a book that has a bunch of super-short chapters, each one is going to have to be riveting and compelling to prevent me from getting frustrated or fatigued.