Quote:
Originally Posted by Bilbo1967
I guess that's why I see so many books with a ridiculous number of chapters. Thrillers seem to often be 300 pages long with 100 chapters or more.
Or is that to do with somehow addressing people's short attention span nowadays?
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I think chapter length has always varied widely. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings may average around 30 pages a chapter, but Agatha Christie was usually under 10 and P.G. Wodehouse often under 5.
And there are modern thrillers—see, for instance, Matthew Reilly's
Ice Station—that are 500+ pages consisting of 7 chapters plus a prologue/epilogue.
The Hardy Boys did the same stupid “never end without a cliffhanger thing”, which really amounts to “mislabel your chapters to confuse the reader”. As a youth, I quickly learned to ignore their chapter labels and quit reading when the scene ended (invariably mid-chapter).