of or relating to the outside or outer part; outer: an external surface. 2. Medicine/Medical. to be applied to the outside of a body, as a remedy: for external use only. 3. situated or being outside something; acting or coming from without: external influences.
New writers tend to assume that a chapter must be a certain set length in order to maintain the average novel length of around 80,000 â 95,000 words, but in truth, chapters can be as long or as short as you need them to be. There is no formula.
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth has 1,349 pages and approximately 3,374,000 characters. It's claimed to be the longest single volume novel ever published in English. Before Seth's novel, others turned to Samuel Richardson's Clarissa as the longest novel with over a million words (and about 5,500,000 characters).