How many words per chapter? Plan your novel by chapter and scene

Words per chapter for common lengths

The average chapter length is simple division. These figures are averages for planning, not targets for every chapter: a short, sharp chapter after a long one is a tool, not a mistake.

There is no standard chapter length

No publisher, award or style guide sets a length for chapters, and you won’t find one quoted here. Chapters within one book often vary a great deal, and genres differ in pace. What a plan by chapter gives you is control: you can see early that the middle is swallowing the book, or that the ending has 6,000 words to do the work of 20,000.

The overall length is where outside expectations do apply. The Nebula, Hugo and Bram Stoker rules all start the novel at 40,000 words, and publishers who state a range on their submission pages ask for anything from 50,000 words for some romance lines to 100,000 or more for some science fiction; the story length checker lists examples with their sources. Pick the target first, then plan the parts.

How the planner shares out the words

• By act first. Each act gets its share of the target. The planner starts with three acts at a quarter, a half and a quarter, a simple split to adjust; if your shares don’t add up to 100, they are scaled so that they do. For story structure itself, such as three-act plots and the hero’s journey, Fresh Fable has planners and generators.
• Then by chapter. Each act’s words are split evenly between its chapters, in whole tens, and any remainder goes to the earliest chapters, so the plan adds up to your target exactly.
• Then by scene. Each chapter’s plan divided by its scenes gives the words per scene, shown in the table. Change a chapter’s scenes and its per-scene figure follows.
• Drafted against planned. Type what you’ve drafted for each chapter; the summary shows progress against the target, each act’s planned and drafted words, and whether your edited plan now runs over or under the target.

Saving and sharing the plan as CSV

“Export CSV” saves the chapters as a comma-separated file, the plain table format that spreadsheets open, with the columns Chapter, Title, Act, Scenes, Planned words and Drafted words. Titles containing commas, quotation marks or line breaks are quoted the standard way, so they come back intact. A title that starts with =, +, − or @, which a spreadsheet might run as a formula, is saved with a leading apostrophe, one of the protections OWASP describes, and the apostrophe is removed again on import. “Import CSV” reads the same columns in any order and skips rows it can’t read, telling you how many.

Worked example

The plan above is an 80,000-word novel in three acts of 6, 12 and 6 chapters. Act 1 gets 20,000 words: two chapters of 3,340 and four of 3,330. Act 2 gets 40,000 over 12 chapters: four of 3,340 and eight of 3,330. With two scenes to a chapter, each scene is about 1,667 words. Draft the first six chapters at 21,400 words and the summary shows Act 1 at 107% of its plan and the book at 27% of its target, which is your cue to trim, or to let the plan for a later act shrink a little.

Common mistakes

• Planning to the word. The plan is a budget, not a contract. Round numbers are easier to steer by.
• Letting the plan drift from the target. When you add a chapter or change a plan, the summary shows how far over or under the target the plan now runs.
• Counting scenes you haven’t planned. If a chapter has one long scene, set its scenes to 1, or the per-scene figure will mislead you.
• Keeping the only copy in a browser. The plan is saved in this browser’s storage, which clearing site data removes. Export a CSV now and then.