Is there a normal cap on how long a chapter should be? I typically separate mine into chapters but this past story I left as a whole 10k words single story. Is that okay? Or should I have broken it up?
Is there a normal cap on how long a chapter should be? I typically separate mine into chapters but this past story I left as a whole 10k words single story. Is that okay? Or should I have broken it up?
I typically separate mine into chapters but this past story I left as a whole 10k words single story.
That's fine. A short story doesn't have chapters and is typically 1,500-10,000 words.
Is that okay? Or should I have broken it up?
I don't think there is a rule governing how long a story or chapter should be. I can't speak for others, but I like to break my stories into chapters of about 20 pages (7-8K). I do this because I find it simpler to work with chapters of that size, than to work with a single file.
However, there are times when a single file is convenient, such as when I want to standardize the spelling of a word or when I find that I have been using different names for the same character. For those occasions, I use a file containing links to the chapters that merge all of the files into 1 document.
Do what works best for you.
When I first migrated my stories here, I received a message from the site that one of them was over the normal length - it was 30k. They still posted it but noted that they prefer chapters be 10k or less. Since then, I've adhered to that and have actually found that it's much easier for me proofreading shorter chapters rather than a long story.
I have seen stories with over 100k words without chapter divisions, as well as a single chapter in a long story that exceeded that length as well.
Both of those would be what I consider 'to long' to not have chapter divisions.
Personally I don't think 10k words is an excessively long chapter or undivided story - granted that's my personal opinion.
I don't know if it still happens, but in some of the older stories there's a note that it was posted as one chapter, but was broken up for, I think, browser compatibility.
Mostly I think it depends on what you want, and what fits your stories. Up until Going Postal (I think), none of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books were broken into chapters. I don't remember anyone saying that they missed them.
I don't know if it still happens, but in some of the older stories there's a note that it was posted as one chapter, but was broken up for, I think, browser compatibility.
Go back a bit in time, and some browsers had difficulty with very long pages - and such pages could take a long time to download if the connection was slow. Things are different now, so the code for artificial break-up into chapters was disabled/removed. It's still helpful to readers to ensure chapters are not overly long, though!
I don't know if it still happens, but in some of the older stories there's a note that it was posted as one chapter, but was broken up for, I think, browser compatibility.
It was still one chapter, but the chapter was broken into multiple pages.