The Power of Brevity
When I was a small child just first learning how to read, I asked my mother how many pages were in a chapter. It only made sense at the time, given that everything else I learned about seemed to exist in discreet units. There were 60 minutes in an hour, 5280 feet in a mile, 365 days in a year. Why shouldn't there be a set number of pages in a chapter? Instead, I found the average length of chapters increasing with my own age. The five-page chapters of kid's books gave way to the fifteen page chapters of young adult novels, then jumping up to as many as 30 to 50 pages in heavyweight literature by the time I got around to college. Then I started to discover writers who went against that particular grain, opting for extremely short chapters, or even alternatives to the concept of chapters, in their novels. Ever since then, I've been a proponent of keeping everything in fiction as brief and sharp as possible.
The first short-chapter author I read was Milan Kundera. The best way to describe the format of his work is Section/Segment rather than in chapters. Individual scenes exist in their own numbered segment, some of them stretching no longer than half a page. A series of segments are grouped into a larger titled section. In the case of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, each section represents the perspective of one character during a particular length of time.
The benefit of Kundera's system is it allows the reader to become wholly immersed in the mindset of a given character. Instead of having to keep track of the jumble of thoughts and emotions of a full cast, the Section/Segment method permits Kundera's audience to sympathize with each character individually. This eliminates the overly simplistic idea of protagonists and antagonists, while also keeping the novel from sounding like a philosophical mouthpiece for its author.
Another great writer who adopted unusually short chapters to great effect is Marguerite Duras. In her most famous work, the novel L'Amante, Duras travels dreamily through a series of hazy moments from her childhood as a French expatriate in Indochina, which is modern day Vietnam. The story is not entirely chronological and the narrative is more abstract that imagistic. As such, the generally shorter segments allow Duras's emotional expressions to remain dense and poignant, whereas longer chunks of text would become increasingly difficult to follow without anchors in concrete details and in-the-moment action.
Aspiring writers would do well to adopt short chapter formats considering their rising potential audience. With the average web page ranging between 300-1000 words maximum, the attention spans of readers are only getting shorter. Or, more to the point, modern readers expect a higher density of information in a smaller space. It's long been a regular lesson for writers to not say in ten words what they can say in two. It only stands to reason that one shouldn't say with ten pages what can be said in two.
