Scene Length: How Long Should My Story Scenes Be?

I just recently read a great book called Story Engineering, by Larry Brooks. He suggests the following when breaking out your novel: three acts; beginning, middle, and end. The middle is split into to two sections at the midpoint. 

So imagine you cut your story into four sections, each one comprising roughly 25% of the novel (as seen above). So in a 400 page novel, Act 1 is 100 pages, Act 2 is 200 pages (100 for each half), and Act 3 is 100 pages (note: for screenplays this breaks out to 30 pages for each segment). As Brooks points out, major stories such as The Davinci Code follow this outline fairly well. 

Each quartile should consist of about 12-15 scenes. So based on pacing, that leaves average scene length between five to ten pages. Again these are rough guidelines and every story is going to be a little different. Many stories I've read will have very short scenes and chapters in the inciting incident, midpoint, climax, and pinch points of the narrative in order to make the pacing "feel" fast. Keep in mind, a scene could be no more than one line. In the end writers must go with their gut. If a scene feels too long, then cut the fat. If it seems too short, then add some meat. As long as you don't make all of your scenes the same length (probably the worst thing you can do), then your story should progress with good momentum.

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