Monday, April 1, 2013

On My Mind Monday (2) Long Chapters






On My Mind Monday with Paranormal Sisters!

Okay, so this is a new thing where every Monday we pick a topic and tell you our thoughts on it. It might be weekly or every other week. Haven't decided yet. And if you have a topic you want our thoughts on, post a comment and we might decide to do it.
 
 
Long Chapters:
 
Is it just me or are chapters getting longer? Or maybe it only seems that way to me as I am just now noticing the page length? *shrugs* All I can say is lately they seem awfully long. However no offence to the authors and what not but at the end of the day I’d rather feel like I actually accomplished something within the book I am reading. Okay, let me give you my page meter and how I feel about certain lengths so I can explain that sentence a bit better.
 
1-5 :D
6-10 ^_^
11-20 J
20-30+ L
 
As you can see with pages 1 through 5 I am freaking excited, like, let’s through a freaking party and give the authors a round of applause. 6 through 10 I’m happy, I can do that and I am fine with taking the time to do it as 10 pages seems to be an average chapter page length for books, so I’m chill. 11 through 20 is where I start to get wary, I’m fine with reading up to 13 pages but passed that I start to think this is going to take me forever and that’s when I start to feel less accomplished. 20 through 30+ is when I just want to throw the book and say forget it as I’ve got 20 other things I need to be doing throughout the day.
 
Why I’m like this with chapter page counts is because when I finish a chapter I feel a bit like I’ve actually done something worthy of my time and when I breeze through a bunch of chapters in a short amount of time then I feel freaking accomplished ha-ha. But when they are long I start to calculate how much time I’ll be taking while reading this one chapter (I even do that with page counting, especially when I am so freaking close to the end and I can just feel it) and so when they are 20-30+ that’s a lot of freaking time going into it, even if it is a damn good book. You see it takes me about 2 minutes to read a page, yeah I know I’m a slow reader. But it’s cool, it means I am savoring it ha-ha. So 10*2= 20 minutes for a chapter of 10 pages, 20*2= 40 minutes for a chapter of 20 pages, and 30*2= 60 minutes for a chapter of 30 pages. Now you can see why I like my chapters shorter.
 
But beside the point of how long it can take me to read it, reading a short chapter can be more awesome than reading a long one by it actually getting to the point of that specific chapter so much faster. Yes, character development and world building is all great and mighty however sometimes that can just drag on and on……and on and on. I know you know what I’m talking about. I’d rather have character development and world building be spread out throughout the book than dropped in one exploding bomb, I like seeing hints here and there which makes the journey of the story so much better.
 
Overall, I am just a fan of shorter chapters. Like I said, I actually feel like I am able to check off something off the list of 20+ things I have to do in a day. So questions,
 
Do you like shorter chapters or longer ones?
 
Do they seem to be getting longer?
 
Thanks for stopping by!
 


2 comments:

  1. I'm glad you brought this up, Ashley. I tend to write quite short chapters, averaging about 6 pages each, and I prefer reading them. It breaks up the text and makes it easier to take in. But my chapter length isn't typical, so I was starting to worry that I was doing something wrong here.

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  2. @Ros- You are doing absouletly nothing wrong and I think that's a better page count for chapters as it does break it up and it gives the readers a chance for a break or if they have to step away it won't make them feel too bad to set it down as long chapters do that to me haha

    Thanks for commenting! ^_^

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