Very true, though I do like writing chapter breaks that have cliffhangers, making it really hard for the reader to stop there.

It’s just a pity that people have become so focused on instant gratification. I know my issues, of course. I have dyslexia, probably ADHD, and with the amount of book review requests I get, I don’t have time to put up with stuff that drags on.

And that’s an interesting way of managing Wattpad. I haven’t tried it that way, posting each chapter as only a single scene. Of course, some of my scenes can be rather short, and I would never torture my readers by only posting what equates to a one page essay. But it is a good way to optimize the system to your advantage.

Yes, I agree. As a writer, I use page breaks to “leap,” and as a reader I like to encounter them. They function like the cuts between scenes in a film: shift of POV, shift of time and place.

If I have to stop reading, I’ll look for a page break for my stopping point, but I don’t LIKE to put the book mark there. It’s preferable to stopping in the middle of a scene, but it still feels like I left something hanging (and I have–chapters have a wholeness to them, or should), so I would much rather read to a chapter end. Just last night I had to stop at a page break, and it will gall me till I finish it tonight, as something unfinished and hanging.

So I guess I’m with you on the short chapters being more suited to modern reader tastes and attention spans.

When I posted my novel on Wattpad last year, I broke it into single-scene chapters by creating chapters at the page breaks. One thing it forced me to do was create cliffhangers at the end of each page break, which I think improved each scene, even when they went back to being parts of larger chapters. The Wattpad mini-chapters ended up being around 5 pages each, which made them easier to digest in a short amount of time.

In the published version, however, I reverted to the original chapters, usually 12-15 pages each, with one or two page breaks each, because each stands as a thematic whole. Not sure I’ll die on that hill, but that was my decision for the first edition. 🙂

Well, I personally have come to grow tired of Epic Fantasy. Every Epic Fantasy I’ve read recently seems to read exactly the same, feel exactly the same, with no real originality to make them stand out.

That being said, it does depend on the story. And you can use scene breaks just as much as chapter breaks to break up the action. I was surprised by how short James Patterson’s chapters are. I don’t write such short chapters either. Also, even with genres like Epic Fantasy, you should ask yourself if you might just be burdening down your readers just a little too much.

You should always ask yourself what do you NEED. What can you get rid of and still have a great story? What can you get rid of and have an even better story? Kill your darlings, and darlings don’t have to be characters.

Epic Fantasies can be pretty bad about dragging the events on when they shouldn’t. I was at a seminar recently where Carole Barrowman talked about skipping right to the important bits. She called it leaping. Basically, there’s no reason to include details that a reader can logically fill in for themselves. You can remove a lot of meaningless words this way, and make your readers a lot happier.

No, I haven’t read his work, but I’m aware of his prominence in the industry and on the soapbox.
But I’m a bit shocked at those tiny chapter lengths. Clearly, it is a powerful model of success, so writers ought to take note, but I wonder to what extent that technique might backfire with, say epic fantasy. Would such staccato chapters fit the epic form just as well as with a thriller, say, or would it jar with the expectations of epic fantasy readers?

You’ve never heard of James Patterson? He holds the Guinness record for most #1 New York Times bestsellers.

To give you an idea of chapter lengths, from the hardcover edition of 1st to Die:

Prologue: 2 pages

Book 1
Chapter 1: 3 pages
Chapter 2: 3 pages
Chapter 3: 3 pages

Another reason for it, perhaps, is that lots of people read those “chapters” on their phones while on the bus or whenever they have am minute, so longer chapters are sort of non-starters for them.

For those reasons, short, 5-page chapters were quite common on Wattpad.