Forum: Author Hangout

9,000 words sounds long for a single chapter. If you're inserting significant extra material as well, perhaps you should consider splitting it.

I will probably do that. I'm just annoyed as the scene I wrote, and really like pushes one of the characters beyond where she should be at this time. I'll probably just take a crack at rewriting the chapter and save the scene for later. Maybe I'll just retool the scene to limit the activities of the character who hasn't progressed enough yet. Maybe witnessing the other characters behavior will be one of the things that pushes her ahead in her growth.... either way, annoyed at the time spent writing something that I both like and dis-like at the same time.

Maybe I'll just retool the scene to limit the activities of the character who hasn't progressed enough yet. Maybe witnessing the other characters behavior will be one of the things that pushes her ahead in her growth.... either way, annoyed at the time spent writing something that I both like and dis-like at the same time.

What's good about that, even if you never reuse the segment, is you've learned enough about the character, that later on, they'll be more fully-formed beings, so when you have them do new things in the future, hopefully they'll seem more natural, and will seemingly flow into the story rather than being pushed into it.

In that case, those aren't 'wasted' scenes, but are instead, necessary researching into the characters' personalities.

And yeah, flashbacks are hard to write. Often, there are simply some stories where flashbacks work naturally, and where they just seem to fit, and others where, no matter how you try to work them, they just fall flat every time. The key, is to slowly learn the difference, so you can recognize the stories where they'll work, and then know when to utilize them.

9,000 words sounds long for a single chapter.

Chapters posted to SOL are split if the chapter exceeds a certain length. Chapters being split into multiple pages is a very common occurrence. I checked one story and the page break for the 1st of 3 pages was at about 7,500 words.

9,000 words doesn't seem long to me, I seem to average around 8,500 word chapters.

A quick trawl of 'writing expert' bloggers found a recommendation of 1000-5000 words to be common, with a 'sweet spot' of 3000-4000 words.

However an analysis of popular fantasy novels showed their chapters tended to be longer than average, with some averaging over 7500 words.

AJ

However an analysis of popular fantasy novels showed their chapters tended to be longer than average, with some averaging over 7500 words.

Traditionally, fantasy, science fiction and historical fiction tend to be the longest genres with also the longest chapter lengths, mainly because there is so much 'world building' involved.

On the flip side, mysteries and romances are traditionally the shortest, although we're now in an age of 'epic' romance novels, so all bets are off in that genre, as now ANY book with a romance element is now considered to be a 'romance book'.

Chapters posted to SOL are split if the chapter exceeds a certain length.

The official cutting place is 55 kilo BYTES.

My SOL pages typically broke around the 10,000 word mark, if I remember correctly, which is why I've always tried to keep them under that size.

now ANY book with a romance element is now considered to be a 'romance book'.

Not true. There are some very specific requirements for it to be considered in the Romance genre.

Not true. There are some very specific requirements for it to be considered in the Romance genre.

That depends who's counting. To be considered by a 'romance' publisher, they're very strict (i.e. "males need not apply"), but since most outlets allows books to be catalogued by multiple genre categories, the people who track those categories have stated repeatedly that "romance" is the most widely used book /genre category by far!

the people who track those categories have stated repeatedly that "romance" is the most widely used book /genre category by far!

Break a romance rule and the romance readers will never forgive you.

My first novel has two romance stories in it. I wrote it for a publisher that used to publish Romantica (Erotic Romance - they're out of business now). The editor told me adultery wasn't allowed and I had to change my wife to a fiancé. I explained why that wasn't possible and she agreed, but told me she couldn't publish it. Her readers didn't want the heroine committing adultery.

So it was heavy romance, but not a Romance genre novel.

Break a romance rule and the romance readers will never forgive you.

That's the same advice I'd heard repeatedly about mysteries, that you can't change what readers expect to happen without pissing off readers. Thus I was trepidatious when I published A House in Disarray, which as is my tendency, I turned the traditional genre on it's head to see what shakes out.

Luckily for me, my readers already know what to expect from me, and they trust me to carry it off (most times). Although they were skeptical when I changed up the basic premise, by the time the story unfolded, they were pleased with the results and already asking me to write more mysteries. I'm assuming a few of those were new readers who haven't followed my long list of sci-fi stories.

As we always say, before you can break the 'rules', you need to understand the risks, so you can understand what might to wrong and try to minimize the risks of losing control of your story.

Once again, the reason why many of us self-publish isn't that we can't get published (though that may be true too), but it's because many of us don't want to be limited by what publishers expect.

If publishers were so good at guessing what readers want, they wouldn't have lost the war with ebooks. They're still continuing, mainly because they can reach more readers than individual authors can, but they've always had a terribly track record for picking winners and losers.

I'm annoyed with myself for something similar. My current story has multiple subplots and I got the timing of one subplot out of synch with the other subplots in the chapter. I had to go back through 20 chapters and check the relative timing of the subplots to make sure I hadn't done that elsewhere.

That's why I always maintain a working timeline for my stories, so that my editors and myself can check it if there's ever a question of when something occurs within the story. This is especially true if you're dealing with flashbacks, flashforwards or time travel.

I also maintain a running character list, which identifies each character, including when they first appear in the story (which I then use to create an accurate chapter-by-chapter character list).

The extra details help keep the story consistent.

I always maintain a working timeline

I had one. What I missed was the scene depended on details that weren't presented so it didn't fit in the chapter I was writing. That was what made me go back and check other chapters.