Chapter Length

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Chapter Length

Postby Battlekrome » Mon Apr 27, 2009 12:25 am

what makes a good chapter length?

is it a variable length as long as story reaches a set point / cliffhanger whatever or should it be X kilowords

I've read fics that had very short chapters but many are decent length,
and then... well Bubblegum zone comes to mind with the last chapter of it at 1MB! of text (that took a weekend or so to read)
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Postby PCHeintz72 » Mon Apr 27, 2009 1:50 am

Officially... a chapter is supposed to convey a entire piece of a story, that can be a scene, or a concept, or a plot line. As such, length should not be taken into account.

LENGTH PREFERENCES

Having stated that... there are benefits to long and short chapter lengths.

- Short lengths allow potentially for faster updates, but can leave some readers frustrated.

- Longer lengths can be good for some readers, especially fast readers, and can take the time to draw a reader in, and make them want more. However... potentially, we are looking at longer periods between updates.

SIZE PREFERENCES

Some go by word count when referring to chapter length. For fan fiction I actually prefer physical file size in KB, especially for TXT. I like longer chapters, but shorter is acceptable to a degree... Not that average English word size is 5 characters, plus a space, so 6 characters overall. Thus 1kb, which is 1024 characters, is some 171 words on average.

HTML and other formats are always inflated numbers due to fact the formatting inflates the file size. Thus 100kb TXT is more to read than 100kb of HTML.

Unless it is on something like the Anime Addventure, I prefer chapters be at least 8kb. For me, longer is better.

SIZE STATISTICS

For all non-lemon stories I've downloaded over the years... I get:

TXT Smallest - 1kb
TXT Largest - 2409kb
TXT Average - 28kb

HTML (non AA) Smallest - 1kb
HTML (non AA) Largest - 824kb
HTML (non AA) Average - 47kb

HTML (AA) Smallest - 1kb
HTML (AA) Largest - 68kb
HTML (AA) Average - 7kb

I probably should have tossed out the top 10 or so TXT and HTML, since those skew the results slightly. But did not feel up to going to that much trouble.
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Postby mondu_the_fat » Mon Apr 27, 2009 2:12 am

Me, around 9-12kb words/chapter (of actual story).
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Postby Cheb » Mon Apr 27, 2009 3:06 am

>a chapter is supposed to convey a entire piece of a story,
When I write, this is exactly my goal at determining the chapter boundaries. But still, i aim for 25k characters (an optimal size giving a decent balance between the release rate and my control over the story). If my chapter bloats out of control, I usually cut it in half.

A few years ago when I was more prolific, having more free time, I aimed for a 50..60k characters per chapter.

But still, the chapter size ususlly varies according the author's muse along the story.

Note: as a part time translator, I dislike the word count, because it differs significantly between the equal English and Russian texts while the character count stays quite consistent).
Also, the official way is counting characters (except spaces), and the book volumes and payments are counted in the standard units called "auctorial sheets" comprising of 40.000 characters. If you open any book, in its technical data you'll find its volume counted in "conventional auctorial sheets". This system is used for at least half a century, AFAIK.
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HTML and other formats are always inflated numbers due to fact the formatting inflates the file size. Thus 100kb TXT is more to read than 100kb of HTML.

You should *not* use a HTML size in bytes. It could have been created with M$ Word, for all you know, which adds a mammoth formatting overhead.
Furthermore, *I* can't use the TXT size in bytes anymore! Becaue the modern encoding is Utf-8, which makes it two byter per a Russian character.

The only way to get a meaningful numbers nowadays is to past the chapter into Word (OpenOffice, etc.) and summon the statistics menu.
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Postby Dumbledork » Mon Apr 27, 2009 4:09 am

I don't care for the length as long as it's entertaining.
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Postby Konsaki » Mon Apr 27, 2009 4:16 am

My chapters range from 5k to 16k, depending on the ammount of story needed to get to point X, unless I find a good stopping point during the chapter itself while I'm writing like a scene change which is a good cliffhanger.
Looking back, all my early chapters for my stories have lower word counts than my later ones, each growing in size, but that might just be a factor of getting used to the story or the increase in writing experience.

Personally, when I'm looking for stories to read, I find my mininmum words per chapter seems to be around 3k per, but I've idly read a few that were 1.5k per, but not often. This might be because I'm a speed reader, as PCHeintz72 pointed out, but I find that longer chapters are more my thing.
There are a few requirements for longer chapters that I dont have for shorter ones, though. Mainly, scene breaks of some sort, be they dubble dash, number spam or what have you. If the formatting is wrong, blah... :x
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Postby Kilich » Mon Apr 27, 2009 5:39 am

If the story has chapters less than 1000 words and the story itself is shorter than 30k, I, most likely, won't read it.

My chapters usually describe events of a single day and are about 2k words. If I describe the life of more than one person, or a longer time period, like in my latest, chapter length grows to 5-6k.
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Postby Sunshine Temple » Mon Apr 27, 2009 5:52 am

I use 12,000 words as my own floor.

That being said, one should strive for at least 5-7,000 words.

Much of this is because of the medium. Unless you write the whole story ahead of time and then release it at once, or on a set release schedule, readers will be turned off by stubby chapters.

Posting in the internet is less novel chapters and more story installments in a periodical, like the old serials.

Take one of the easy FF.net rules of thumb.
Story word count divided by number of chapters.

That's an easy way to separate the one scene or the tiny (tell scene) stories from ones that have more work in them.
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Postby Kadunta » Mon Apr 27, 2009 6:40 am

I usually read fanfics with at least 2500 words per chapter. As for what I write... in RanmaTronic, I set maybe three plot points to happen per chapter, which resulted in about 7000-9000 word chapters. But in my future fanfics I plan on writing only 3000-6000 word chapters, which I expect to suit my sporadic writing schedule better.

15000 word chapters are pretty much at the upper limit of how long chapters I bother reading. After that they get too long to be considered a diversion.
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Postby KonokoHasano » Mon Apr 27, 2009 7:15 am

I tend to feel that 6k - 10k words is a reasonable length for story chapters. Any less and the chapters just feel too short.

I myself try to at least shoot for an 8k - 10k word minimum. Any less than that feels as if I didn't put enough effort into it.
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Postby Ellen Kuhfeld » Mon Apr 27, 2009 8:19 am

Writing, I try to get about three narratives into each chapter. (Spamfics don't count!) Given that, 2k words is my usual minimum, and I'm more likely to do 4-8k words. Sometimes I'll split a long chapter in two, for more frequent updates.

Reading
, I get fussy when the chapters are under 1.5k. I don't demand long chapters, but I prefer something in the 3-10k range.

On the professional side, the common mystery is on the order of 60k words and 20 chapters, at 3k words per chapter.
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Postby talonhunter » Mon Apr 27, 2009 8:43 am

because of time constraints, and my own inpatience, I originally set a goal of 1000 words, but the deeper I have gotten into stories, the more I try to convey. So while a innital offering may only be 800 words, the chapter lengthtends to grow after that, someimes confusing me and the reader. If you feel the story does what it needs to with shorter chapters, then use that format until you decide to go back and do a rewrite for whatever reason, be it to expand on the original idea at that point or flow and continuity.
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Postby Spokavriel » Mon Apr 27, 2009 9:33 am

Unlike most people here I'm not a writer. But while I do like reading allot, I've rarely taken the time to look at the actual chapter sizes.

For me a chapter is too short when it feels like nothing happened for the characters. There's this one fic that I read recently had a chapter that had a little conversation and hugging after getting back to Midguard after the previous chapter had a conversation with Kami-sama. Aside from that small talk and actually making the change of places then falling asleep. Nothing really happened there.

If it takes you 2Kwords of exposition to set the stage and get your characters ready for what will happen next I'd like it if you go to the effort and not leave it in a cliff hanger until after the events actually start.

Look at it this way if you build up a fight scene for half a chapter and then stop just before either party starts fighting all that energy and build up is diminished for anyone not reading after the next chapter is already posted.

Cutting off at a point where the battle is going to have a turning point or keeping you from knowing the way it turns out on the other hand is a much better cliffhanger. Because those moments tend to need a bit more writing anyway and gives a writing lul without really harming the scene.

I really hope I didn't cause a whole lot of confusion with that where to make a cliffhanger tangent...

But as far as length goes I don't care how many scenes you have, how long it takes in words to put it together. I just want to see enough in the chapter that I feel like I am getting somewhere in the story with each one I read.
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Postby Jomasten » Mon Apr 27, 2009 10:15 am

Well, my old writing style demanded that at most 3k words per chapter, and I deemed it done. This time around, I've been trying to break for 10k at most, about 5-8k at least.

When reading, I have a preference for uber lengths, such as about 10-20k per chapter of words. But, since such fics are usually rare, I usually settle for a 5-8k minimum.
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