Readability

I have 11,000 words now in my vernacular chapter, discussing flamenco and other approaches to musicalizing Lorca, so I think instead of 12, my original plan, this chapter is going to have 18,000 or so. It is nice to have more to say than you thought rather than less. The problem in a book like this is going to be keeping it short enough, on the theory that nobody wants to read a 400-page book on this.

We've all read those books, based on dissertations, with 3 of 4 chapters, and each chapter doesn't seem to amount to much. The entire book will discuss 4 novels and a film. If I said everything there was to say about four musical works, that could be a book. Or another books that runs rapidly over 100 works. There is no right way to do this, but I'm thinking in terms of proportionality. How much space the topic deserves over all, and then how much attention to devote to each segment. There is no objectively correct amount of words to write about any given thing. What matters is what you want to communicate to the readers, and what you think they will want.