Be the Change

NaNo Day Six

I'm slowly catching up! I'm almost at the normal daily word count goals!

I've been reading the NaNo forums (as a distraction, I guess) and I see a lot of people asking about chapter lengths. People want to know how long a chapter is supposed to be, and what other people have for their chapter word counts.

Last year, I did the track titles from a CD as chapter titles. The CD I used had ten songs, so I had ten chapters. Each one averaged about 5,000 words or so. To me, those were really long chapters!

This year I'm going for shorter ones, and I enjoy the pacing much better. I don't feel as pressured to write a ton and I feel like I move from one thing to the next fairly quickly. (Thankfully my plot allows for lots of movement and fast-paced scenes)

I'm reading Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston right now, and his chapters seemed super-short, like many of them are only 2-4 pages. I went through the book to find it has 96 chapters!!

I like that, though. For some reason, I really enjoy short chapters. I think it makes the book easier to read. I know here on WDC, when I find a book with really long chapters, I find myself fleeing.

Strange.

Back to writing! I'm trying to reach 10k today!

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