I believe Brad answered this question in a Cohort meeting, but I wasn’t taking notes, so I forgot. How long to scenes have to be? Is it bad if one of my scenes is not even 800 words long. The exact number of words in scene 3 of my book is 779, is that a problem. It will probably grow to 800 when I go back and add more description, but still that’s pretty small compared to my first scene of 1750 words., and second scene which is 2102 words.
Or maybe my 1st and 2nd scenes are too long? I don’t know!
I was hugely grateful that Brad answered that question in the meeting. I am all over the place in scene lengths because I had no boundaries or rules when I wrote them. He also commented that the best writers have a purpose to each sentence. That was a pretty convicting statement. Love that he said tell the best story.
Hey Colleen. There is no firm answer to this question.
Write the length of scenes that will serve the story. Most of the time, scenes will end up roughly equal in length. But don’t base your content around the length of the scene, instead just tell the best story you can, and the scenes will be the length that they need to be.
For planning purposes, if you don’t know how long of scenes you tend to write, 1,500 words is a good estimate for beginning writers.
But that number just helps you to plan the number of scenes you’d like to write, it doesn’t mean that you should try to stretch or shrink your scenes to hit that mark. Once you’re into the writing, your highest priority is just to tell the best story–the scenes will be however long that takes. 🙂
Hey Sara. Really, it’s all about the feel you want. 3k+ scenes are longer than we would typically see for a lot of sci-fi, but it’s not totally out of the ballpark. It’s just going to give you a little bit deeper feel to the story.
It also matters if you’re talking about scenes or chapters. Some of the same logic applies, but it’s going to nuance the nuance the answer a little bit. A chapter can be made of more than one scene. If your chapters are already that long but are made of more than one scene, it would be a really simple solution to just break the scenes into separate chapters.
So going off of her question: I’m writing an action adventure/Sci-fi and it has a lot of internal monologue and emotional narration in the first half. Most of my chapters are around 3k but in the second half everything takes a sharp turn as the dark plot starts to reveal itself. Would I need shorter chapters to keep the scenes moving and is 3-4k too long for the first half? I also have a dramatic death scene and how my protagonist deals with it internally in the first half of the book all in 1 long 3500 something chapter. Should I cut it so there are 2 or 3 chapters instead of 1. Currently I only have 10-11 chapters total that span about 40k.