Chapter Lengths · 7:49pm Nov 8th, 2013
Alright, I know this question gets asked around a lot, but for the life of me, I can't remember what people prefer.
Right now I have around 4500 words for the first chapter of my new story (that's right, I'm actually writing something that actually has meaningful chapters), and it looks like the rest of the chapters will end up being between 4500 and 6500 words. The first chapter is pretty much complete, I just need to send it off to my editors, which I can't do on my phone.
I originally wanted to make them longer, with a minimum of around 8000 words (I love getting large updates to stories I'm following), but it turns out that I can't really do that with the current outline for this fic without joining multiple scenes into one chapter (effectively reducing the number of overall chapters, but with about double the length).
I'm hesitant to go and combine scenes, as I feel that a chapter should take the place of a line break, in a sense. Each chapter should be as continuous as possible without jumps in time, charactes, or location (to a reasonable extent). With the single scene chapters, I'm running into problems with making them longer without adding too many unnecessary details and events.
Longer chapters won't really mean longer times between updates for me, as I spend more time on editing and refining more than I do writing the draft. With that in mind, what are your thoughts on the matter? Do you like longer chapters with multiple scenes per update, or shorter chapters focused on one scene at a time?
As someone who writes shorter scenes, I tend to have no trouble with multiple scenes per chapter. I usually have between two and three scenes per chapter of an ongoing fic (a habit I got into writing my novel.)
BUT I also prefer shorter chapters (3000 to 6000 is the sweet spot for me, actually.) I get distracted reading longer things, and it's hard to find a place again in the middle of a long chapter, so seeing chapters that I know I can read in a few minutes in between the blog posts and news sites I follow is a treat. Even if I'm starting something new that's complete, I like shorter chapters, as they give spots for setting down the fic for the evening or taking a bathroom break.
Which goes to show that it really is personal preference. There will be people who like shorter updates, and people who like longer ones. One thing you could do is to keep the chapters short but release them two at a time-- longer updates, but broken up for the convenience of the short attention span crowd.
I find as long as the chapter is reasonably substantial - as long as it was worth the price of admission - then the word count matters little. I've fluctuated between five thousand to over ten thousand for a chapter. Until the chapter is actually complete though, it doesn't see the light of day. I usually have one set thing I want to do with a scene, then any number of scenes in the chapter itself.
Following along that pattern has never let me down in the past.
Happy writing!
-TUC
1492102
That two chapters at a time thing is actually a really great idea. I just might start doing that from the second chapter onwards. That's a really nice way to satisfy both preferences.
1492122
I also subscribe to the belief that it should be as long as it needs to be, and that's what I do end up writing. I just can't shake the feeling that I haven't done enough, even though it's a complete chapter. The more I think about it, the more I like bookplayer's suggestion to release two chapters at once, and I'm pretty sure I'll end up doing just that.
Personally, my chapters tend to vary in length between 2k and 5k words, on the shorter end for comedy and the longer end for romance. I largely agree with 1492102 as to why shorter chapters are desirable, just because they're much more digestible. As a reader, I think the way Cloudy Skies released Taken For Granite was pretty much ideal; 2 4-5k word chapters released approx. twice a week.
As a writer, I like to end each of my chapters with a strong button, and therefore I tend to let myself arrive at the end of a chapter whenever it feels like I'm at the end of the current sequence of ideas. I know some people write 10k word chapters that contain a lot of different plot threads, but I'd rather keep each chapter as two or three scenes that are all connected back to one idea, and move on to the next chapter when I'm starting a new plot point.
1492157 1492102
Writing two chapters at a time is a good idea. Helps take your mind off one so you can work on the other and vice versa. I have at least snippets of upwards of five different stories going all at once - most won't be written for months yet. When I say "five at once," most of those five (or more) are just a few notes of lines and such that I've jotted down that I'd like to use at some point in the chapter/story itself. I think imagining things and such that I want to write help motivate me to write up to the point where I actually want to write. It's helped me quite a ways through the different stories I've told so far, and hopefully that will continue.
Keep up the good work ladies/gentlemen/hermaphrodites/eunuchs/etc. (Apologies to ladies, gentlemen, hermaphrodites, eunuchs, and etceteras everywhere.)
1492269
I'm not quite that fast at getting chapters out, but it seems the consensus is shorter is preferable, which is exactly what I wanted to know.
1492288
I'm going to be trying to reclaim some of my writing days that my family keeps stealing from me, so hopefully two chapters at a time will be doable.
1492360 Well, he wrote the entire story before he started releasing them, which is the model I have now adopted for the 50k+ fic I'm working on at the moment. >_> I'm presently on chapter 6, have about 16k words written and an estimated finished length of 53.5k. I'm only going to start releasing them once I have at least the first draft done of every chapter.
When writing a long story, I think this is extremely advisable, because it gives you the opportunity to a)avoid writing yourself into a corner (like I did with my story Buzzkill
) and b)take as much time as you need without feeling like you have to get a chapter out pronto to avoid disappointing your readers.