![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Who does the talking?
Mar. 13th, 2011 11:38 amIn working on Daughter of Mystery I'd recently been getting the sneaking sensation that Barbara was getting substantially more POV time and that it meant I considered her the more interesting character at some subconscious level. So I added a rough word-count to my current outline-skeleton. (Not an outline in the sense of planning out the details of what is to come, but more in keeping track of what's been covered in what order, whose POV is involved, and getting a sense of the overall shape of where I'm going.) At this point, Barbara has 35,450 words and Margerit has 35,950. (Rounded to the nearest 50 in each POV section.) Huh. Guess I'm more even-handed than I thought! In fact, while Barbara gets about 15% more stage time than Margerit in Part I, in Part II (which is what my sneaking sensation was based on) it's Margerit that comes out ahead. So much for subjective perception.
Another item I hadn't noticed consciously before is that while my POV-sections (I'm not sure yet whether I want to use that as the definition of chapters or not) generally range from 900-3500 words**, the lengths of paired sections for the two characters are generally similar with a pair of shorter sections being followed by a pair of longer sections.
**In this range I'm not counting several 400-500 word sections that are explicitly noted to need expansion and I'm not counting the outlier pair of sections of 6750 words each which, I'll still note, come right next to each other.
So, fellow writers, what are your thoughts on consistency of chapter length in fiction? Do you think it's better to try to aim for chapters of relatively consistent length throughout your novel or should chapters find their own natural length? If you've done something with two (or more) alternating POVs, do you tend to segregate them to their own chapters? Does it depend entirely on the length of the POV sections?
My inclination in this work is to let the POVs guide chapter breaks and to let the chapters find their own natural lengths, but I still find myself uncomfortable with very short chapters and suspect I might feel tempted to plump them up with more exposition. (The POV alternation is mostly driven by who I want to filter the main action through, so that aspect doesn't feel as easy to manipulate.)
Another item I hadn't noticed consciously before is that while my POV-sections (I'm not sure yet whether I want to use that as the definition of chapters or not) generally range from 900-3500 words**, the lengths of paired sections for the two characters are generally similar with a pair of shorter sections being followed by a pair of longer sections.
**In this range I'm not counting several 400-500 word sections that are explicitly noted to need expansion and I'm not counting the outlier pair of sections of 6750 words each which, I'll still note, come right next to each other.
So, fellow writers, what are your thoughts on consistency of chapter length in fiction? Do you think it's better to try to aim for chapters of relatively consistent length throughout your novel or should chapters find their own natural length? If you've done something with two (or more) alternating POVs, do you tend to segregate them to their own chapters? Does it depend entirely on the length of the POV sections?
My inclination in this work is to let the POVs guide chapter breaks and to let the chapters find their own natural lengths, but I still find myself uncomfortable with very short chapters and suspect I might feel tempted to plump them up with more exposition. (The POV alternation is mostly driven by who I want to filter the main action through, so that aspect doesn't feel as easy to manipulate.)
