On the Merits of Short Chapters
I might have mentioned this elsewhere in this blog, but Falling is long. Really Long. Like, It long, Stephen King’s classic 1985 doorstop. When I prepared the files for buyers to produce their own print on demand paperback copy on Amazon, it came to over 770 pages in length. No wonder nobody wants to read the fucking th-
No! No! I promised myself I’m not going to be negative in this blog for the time being, so this post isn’t even going to mention the embittered failure my professional life has become and how I wake up at four o’clock every morning in morbid fear of historical obscurity, sure I’ve spent 30 years of my life on a colossal creative white elephant and…
Anyway, back to the length. Somewhere along the line I figured out what I thought was an effective trick to counteract the length, and the answer was in the chapters. Despite the extent you’re entertained by what you’re reading and want to keep reading, there’s a particular phenomenon when we’re reading a book where we want to stop reading because we know we have to at some stage – real life must intrude again. The train arrives at our stop, we look at the clock and realise it’s far too late to be still up reading, etc. How many times do we explain, bleary-eyed to co-workers, that we’re just so tired because we stayed up way too late buried in a great book?
And one of the most effective markers that signals it might be time to put the bookmark in and stop is when a chapter ends, especially on an intense or emotionally involving note and we can see that the next chapter coming isn’t quite as punchy, maybe a little more full of exposition or description.
I haven’t seen studies, but as a former graphic designer I know something about readability in text, and we all know that when you open to a new spread and you can see short sentences and paragraphs, lots of dialogue and lots of exclamation points everywhere you adopt a very different mental stance than if you open to a new page and it’s all long blocks of text you know is description.
You’re not disappointed, exactly – if you are, the writer hasn’t done her job, but you know it’s going to take more work. If the book in general isn’t exactly grabbing you, I know from personal experience a spread like that is enough to tip me over the edge and put it down forever. Maybe you’ve found that too, not quite realising why you pick that exact point to give up on it.
All of which led to an idea I had that one of the tricks of ‘unputdownableness’ was to give the reader as much of an incentive as possible to keep reading when she gets to the end of a chapter. The one I came up with was short chapters.
If you know the next chapter coming is short and digestible but you know you should really stop, you’re more likely to just read one more before you finally put it down. If every chapter is like that you might keep promising yourself you’ll just read one more, and before you know it you’ve stayed up until four in the morning or missed your stop on the train and read the whole thing.
You need to anticipate and mitigate every excuse your reader has to stop reading. In Falling’s case, I hope short chapters does so.