Having declared “Guilty until proven”, my dime novel number five, sufficiently rewritten and done, I retrospectively wonder about the structure.

One more LinkedIn forum discussion got me started. Lots of real, proper, professional writers are exchanging extremely well founded views on chapter lengths. One is supposed to consider an improbable number of variables  defining the optimum: Genre traditions, attention span of the target audience, stylistic requirements, hardcopy publishing constraints,…

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. An me never not even noticing the stuff I read comes in chapters. With hindsight, I’m one of the readers who tend to finish a chapter. As I often read at night, I do indeed lose focus if the author belongs to the long chapter crowd and often need to reread a couple of pages on the following night, but this never bothered me. If I like it, I cope. If I don’t, shorter chapters won’t help.

Seems this is a very amateur view. And not doing proper chapters in my dime novels is an embarrassment. But I like announcing a switch of locations by using an explicit title. The resulting structure displays some of the properties of proper chapters, but they vary in length: At the start of the novel, they can add up to dozens of pages, well beyond maximum professional length, because I need to introduce the cast and its stage. Whereas in the endgame, there’s a far faster switch, and my not-really chapters shrink to a few pages.

I’m hopeless, as a writer. Or can this lack of consistency be considered style? That feels nice. Chapters are for sissies.