Size matters

Readers often put down a book after completing a chapter and go do something else. I know I do. So it might seem to make sense for authors, who want to hold onto their readers for as long as possible, to write long chapters. Yet just the opposite is true. Short chapters, not long chapters, keep readers reading.

David Morrell

Thriller writer David Morrell explained why his chapters are often just a page or two long in an interview published in The Armchair Detective way back in 1984. After a long chapter a reader may be exhausted, put down the book and, sometimes, never pick it up again. "But in what I'm trying to do," he said, "the reader can see there's another chapter just on the other side of the page, so the reader will say, 'Oh, I'll give it just another minute.' Then he'll say, 'Ah, what the heck, another minute more I'll read.' You take enough of those minutes and I've got that person for two or three hours."

I recently finished reading The Fix by David Baldacci, another thriller writer who believes in short chapters, so I know that what Morrell said is true. This novel has 81 chapters. Some Baldacci books have more than 100 chapters.

One can save a 20-page chapter for another day. But a two-page chapter? Not hardly, especially when the book is as exciting as those by written Baldacci and Morrell. Reading their books is like eating potato chips one chip at a time. Pretty soon you've finished the whole bag.

Yet the short-chapter strategy works not just with thrillers. More serious literature and even nonfiction can hold readers more effectively when chapters are kept relatively brief. I just started reading Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile, which covers slightly more than 500 pages and has 100 chapters. That's five pages per chapter on average. Some chapters are barely one page in length. These brief chapters help make a history of Winston Churchill's family during World War II seem almost as exciting as a Baldacci thriller.

Bill Bryson has 23 chapters in The Body, making them 16.6 pages long on average. That's much longer than Larson, yet still unusually short for a nonfiction book. Most people can read 16 pages at a time. But when chapters are 30 or 40 pages each, one hesitates to start another chapter until there is sufficient time to finish, and how many of us have that much time? Books with long chapters are too easy to place back on the shelf and forget about.