Books vs Bathroom: The Lewis Law of Space-Time

I used to have a very simple philosophy about scene breaks and chapter breaks: One scene = one chapter, which should be fairly long and substantial, equally balanced with the chapters before and after.

But of course, no good plan goes unpunished and several complete novels later I have a new, less simple philosophy. Scene breaks appear wherever they are warranted, organically, by the nature of the story. Some scenes are many pages, some only a paragraph. They appear as often as the POV needs to shift to capture everything of interest (but only things of interest!).

Chapters are still mostly the same, somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 words, each containing between one and five scenes, roughly.

Now, I’ve seen writers talk about planning a 300-page book to have 10 chapters, each 30 pages long (or something to that effect). I think this is insane for two reasons.

First, human beings can be interrupted while reading all too easily, so I think it’s more helpful to provide natural breaks in the reading as often as possible, otherwise people get yanked out of the middle of the action when the phone rings, or nature calls. Shorter chapters means people can glance ahead, see that they only have three more pages to go, and then hold it until they finish the chapter.

Second, I can’t imagine why a chapter not written by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens needs to be 30 pages long. A single chapter should encompass a single event, or several events in a very limited span of time. Too much can happen in 30 pages, or on the other hand, too little! If you’re padding out a description of a single event to fill 30 pages, your event will be lost in the noise and the reader will definitely put the book down in the middle of the chapter to hit the head.

Perhaps that would make a good rule of thumb. A chapter should be long enough to describe an event, but short enough that the average reader would rather hold it until the end of the chapter than put the book down and relieve herself. This would require the writer to finely balance the compelling nature of the story against the economy of page space and reading time.

We’ll call it the Lewis Law of Space-Time.