Who does the talking?

[hrj]

In 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.)

Comments

[karinfromnosund.livejournal.com]

900 to 3500 is about the range I usually get, and I think that's perfectly reasonable. There's nothing wrong with chapters of different length (or short ones).

That said, having chapters of similar length in pairs sounds like a interesting feature in a novel. If you can make it work. I wouldn't worry too much at this stage, though. Keep track of your words if you want to, but don't let them get in the way of your work.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

The paired chapter lengths was purely coincidental -- I wasn't even aware of it until I started filling in the counts against my outline. But I'm definitely not worrying too much about it for the first draft. And now that I've confirmed that I'm not favoring one character over the other significantly, I may not bother updating the counts. Nah, once I've played with some numbers I can't leave them alone.