How-to: Make Your Story Page Interesting — Part 5: Chapters · 6:15pm May 21st, 2014
Holy crap… we’re already at the end? Well, “already” put in a relative perspective. I’ve just written the longest blog series of my life. A blog series about fifty words and some small pictures. That is actually pretty humiliating if you think about it.
But anyway, we are done with most of everything. The only thing ahead of us now is a small trivial fact and by far the least important one. However, that doesn’t mean it should be neglected entirely, so bare with me on these last few lines about chapters and word count!
Your story has the most awesome, most eye-catching title and cover art ever. The tags and description just scream that everyone stupid enough not to read it will miss the chance of their life. So why are you still only getting 25 views and three upvotes?
There can be a number of reasons, but from my personal experience I’m pretty sure it’s because of one and/or two reasons.
Word Count
I gotta be blunt here for a second: humans are lazy fucks. That’s not even an opinion, it’s a scientifically proven fact; the average human person has an attention span of about 12 minutes. After that time has run out, many people will start losing interest or at least don’t pay full attention anymore.
That’s where word count comes in.
Now, I need to point out that I’m a terribly slow reader in comparison to many other people (a fact created by the sad truth that I never actually read fiction before this website came into my life). At an average of 230 words per minute, even a short story will take a respectable amount of time. Still, I want to take regular breaks and not be forced to work on reading one chapter for multiple hours straight.
Therefore: Don’t make your chapters too goddamn long!
And with “too long” I’m pretty much talking about anything that has more than 10,000 words.
Now hear me out, because I can already see people raising their pitchforks and torches. This is not a limit that ruins your story entirely if you go above it. All you need to know is that the average reader is a hungry guy who wants his stuff in chunks so he can swallow it more easily. You can have a long story with hundreds of thousands of words, but please make the stuff readable.
Personally, I’d try to keep it below that number as well. 6,000 words is the personal limit for me.
That is the main reason that keeps me from reading stories like Fallout Equestria. Even though it does everything I discussed in the past four blog posts just fine and just screams to be an awesome story, it fails here for its partially insane chapter lengths that just scare me. When a single chapter has over 50k words, which would require me to read for four or five hours straight, something is very wrong. Just recently I saw this, a guy updating his story with an 80k chapters. What. The. What.
To come back why exactly I chose 6,000 words as personal limit, the reason is very simple. At an average attention span of 12 minutes (to which we can add a few for good measure) and an average top reading speed of, say, 300 WPM, we get about 4-5k words to work with. Add a little something to that as top limit and we get 6k. That is the time the average person like me will be at full attention; anything beyond and you’ll lose their full focus.
Clearly this doesn’t mean anything above this number is bad. All I’m saying is that it can discourage a lot of readers from even giving your story a try. I know I have countless unread chapters in my favorites list from updates I didn’t get around to read yet, solely because their length would require me to sit down for way longer than I want.
However, do note that “less is more” does not completely apply here. A new story that is marked as incomplete and has below 2,000 words gives me the image of someone who didn’t want to wait until their stuff reached some basic ground. Of course you are free to do whatever you want, but I know from personal experience incomplete stories shouldn’t be barely above the minimum word count if you want to get it into a good light (well, unless your name is Aku).
Consistency
There isn’t much to say here that I don’t expect you to know already. Still, it’s something that needs to be mentioned, as I still see it a lot of people messing it up.
Consistency in this case describes the act of keeping all chapters in your story in a similar way. That means, for example, that all the chapters should have a similar formatting type and naming type. Most importantly though, they all should have a similar word count.
If you’ve been writing a story for years now where each chapter had a length of maybe 1k or 2k words and suddenly you’re releasing an update with 7k words, the entire thing just feels out of place and would just discourage people like me. Likewise, always writing long chapters and then me seeing a short one in my updates list makes me feel like the chapter is completely unimportant.
For naming it’s pretty self-explanatory. Just keep the style of each chapter similar. How to not do it:
Chapter 1: Apples
Chapter 2: Peaches
Chapter 3: Bananas
CH. 4 — Oranges Are Fucking Awesome!
The name variation can be okay in certain situations—especially if you really want to make the fourth chapter stand out because you love oranges that much (hey, I won’t judge). But please keep the syntax (“Chapter #: Fruit” in this case) in tact! I personally dislike the usage of saying the chapter number too, but this is really just me.
Formatting
You know… sometimes it’s nice to look back at your life and realize everything comes full circle eventually. If you think about it, every story of your life ends where it began, in a way. The same goes here.
In the first blog as the first aspect I talked about how to properly format the title using techniques of proper nouns and their types of capitalisation. The same goes for chapter titles, although there are two things to keep in mind:
You have complete freedom over what to name your chapters, and it usually doesn’t matter what you name them or how you format them (as long as you keep the already mentioned consistency). The only mentionable thing is that it’s always recommended to write with the same rules as the story title (capitalization). In a way, the name of a chapter is also a title, and as such deserves equal treatment.
And that also includes another part: Since you don’t put any meta information in the story title, you also don’t do it with chapters! Don’t tell me which characters appear in this chapter. Don’t tell me if a chapter contains heavy sex or gore. And definitely don’t tell me this and this chapter is unedited and that you are looking for editors. If you really feel like any of this is worth mentioning, put it in the description or the author’s notes. The only things you are “allowed” to add beyond the chapter title is a chapter number (if you use those) and if the chapter is a prologue/epilogue/interlude/whatever. Beyond that, don’t do anything.
Aaand I think that’s it. Wow. So many words on so few ones and a little picture…
Well anyway, I hope you could learn something and that you were entertained while reading this series. I can definitely say that I had a lot of pleasure writing this. (Trivial fact: Apart from the chapter about descriptions, everything was written on a phone while laying in bed without autocorrect. I do that way too often.)
Would be cool if you could leave a comment saying “Dicks everywhere” or something. I’d like to know if somebody actually made it all the way to here. :V
The next and definitely last blog of this series will be a short summary of everything we’ve discussed in the last five blogs, just as some sort of checklist.
Princess Tuna!
Selbi is literally made of dicks.
Also, wuv u
Well this was informative. Thanks.
DICKS ARE EVERYWHERE!!!! ...
Bro, read Fallout Equestria. Maybe spend twelve minutes reading a chapter, take a break partway through said chapter to wrestle some alligators, then go back to the middle of the chapter to read. It is absolutely amazing.
You know, the over 10k word chapters are the reason why knightly implemented the bookmark tool for stories, so we can go back to where we left off. Unfortunately for me, it only works on MY OWN stories.
(talking about this btw)
fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/279/a/0/dah_bookmark__dat_doesn_t_work___2_by_chaoticnote-d6pgiua.jpg
2142431
I'm perfectly aware of that. The problem is that it's not cool when the reader himself must decide where to take a break, instead of chapters. You never know if the information you read five minutes ago is vital for what happens later, so after taking a break yourself because of incredible lengths you could risk forgetting those things.
The other problem is that this feaute only works on a PC, and I personally prefer my E-Reader and smartphone.
2142468
Yes, but still it's rather nice to have it working. Also I'm on PC and this doesn't work for me. I don't know if its because of Firefox or not.
Princess Tuna is best princess.
That is all.
2142474
I think it's pretty much just the site. Chrome does the same and there's no reason that it would work on just your own stories.
<<Warning Shameless Self Promotion>>
If you need bookmarks you can try [this].
2144625
Please post your thing here.
2144625
Thanks dude! Although you have to explain to me what the Sweetie Sceptre does.
2144682
Sorry, It's a secret. Have fun!
2144637
Oh cool. I hadn't realised you founded that group.
I'm not good at making threads.
I'll try making a post there.
--Sollace
2144637
I've got some other scripts. Can I just put them together, or would you rather I make separate posts?
--Sollace
2146078
Well I figured it out... and damnit, I thought we left this behind.
2146101
The Sceptres shall rule forever. Also I would estimate it does roughly different three things.
Edit: Make that four.
--Sollace
2146096
One thread for each script would be appreciated.
2146228
You mean it doesn't just bow and change?
2146765
Nope. Changing is just one of the minor things.
Edit: You're actually really close.
--Sollace
2146936
Um... ok i'm lost then
I have no clue how I even got here, but I just binged this little series.
Followed you so hard.
A German speaking parasprite alerted me to this informative collection of words... All words have been read and assimilated.
Might want to add a bit about the importance of having chapter titles.
It's not that critical, but having real, interesting chapter titles is better than just chpter 1, chapter 2, et cetera.
Why?
Because for anyone seeing your chapter updates in their feed (your followers or people who faved the story), the chapter title is all they see.
And for a lot of them, "Chapter 4 – The Fluttershy's Secret Box" will be likely to get them to immediately read the new chapter, while just "Chapter 4" is boring and doesn't grab attention. They'll be more likely to go on doing other things, intending to come back to it later... and then forget to.