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.
if chapter one starts with the birth of the main charecter, you need to have a seperate start by the time they hit 3rd grade
When I run into a story that has chapters much over 50K, I generally pass on it. If I can't finish a chapter in one sitting, It takes too much time to find where I left off.
I post on some other sites and on Inkitt, they have a posting recommendation of 1500-2500 words for a chapter. I used to post in large blocks as chapters. It took me a long time write, edit, and post such large chapters. After finishing a novel on this site, I started posting there and I broke a 20 chapter book into a 60 chapter book and it genuinely made everything better. Long sections that were dead space suddenly became interesting because they became cliffhangers moving into the next chapter. Since then, I have concentrated on short chapters. I try to keep them under 3,000 words. I have found this actually helps a lot with anxiety, too. I can allow myself to write a massive block of text, as far as the stream of consciousness will take me, and then I can break up what would have been one chapter into 2 or 3, and since I post once a week, that gives me several weeks to be ahead.
Now that I've started doing it that way, though, I've noticed I've lost patience for long chapters. I started reading a story on here that was really long chapters, and I couldn't stick with it. Nothing wrong with the story, but my attention couldn't hold to 12k words, even if I was enjoying them. I have one chapter that's 5k+ words and I even get impatient with myself.
My stories hover around 5000-6000 words (about 30KB) per chapter, but I might try splitting up the next in my series into smaller blocks.
How often do/did you post?
You definitely can break up those chapters at least once. One way I made the mundane into interesting was let's say a conversation that went on long. If there was a question asked, that's where I'd make the chapter break so what was a long string of dialogue becomes a cliffhanger. Or if a new person shows up into said conversation. One chapter I broke off when a character shouts at another from afar and though there's nothing that's particularly interesting about it when it's one long block, cutting it off at '"Hey, Anubis!" cried a voice' suddenly made it more interesting. Inkitt has chapter analytics so you can see how often people click immediately to the next chapter after reaching the bottom, and I noticed as I moved chapter ends around (I updated so often, I got called out on it a couple of times by my few followers over there, ha) that those cuts got me the most clicks. Perfect for me to know before I publish.
As for how often I used to post, well, with those big chapters, I was lucky if I got once a month. Now that I started doing these short chapters, 2k words or less usually, I have started posting weekly. So far, I've kept up. And I'm posting 3 different stories. So I will write a long section, as far as whatever scene is willing to take me. If that's 2k or 20k words, I let it out. The big scenes take so long to write, but then I can focus on another story and write a big long block for that as well. Then I cut them up into those shorter chapters, and I have material for a couple of weeks ahead of time. And for those few times so far I've fumbled, the super short chapter length has saved my butt by making it easy to write a chapter in a single day. 1k words is so much easier to spit out even when grasping than 10k. A rough chapter is better than no chapter.
I happen to have some numbers handy from an old reddit post, so I'm just going to add that in trad.pub. the average chapter length will vary wildly by genre, region, and writing style. As an example:
The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton, part one of the Night's Dawn trilogy of space opera novels, is around 385,000 words with 30 chapters. That's an average chapter length of 12,834 words.
Guilty Pleasures, the first novel in Laurell K. Hamilton's long-running Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, is 93k words with 48 chapters, making an average chapter length of 1,938.
The difference is less about length, though, than how the two authors use chapters. Guilty Pleasures is entirely from Anita Blake's point of view with high interiority. Early chapters are very short, introducing one new character or world element. One chapter for an interview with a prospective client, one chapter for a phone call with her best friend's bridesmaid, one chapter as she looks at the body at a crime scene. There are scenes which take multiple chapters to detail because each chapter has a very specific purpose in the novel.
Reality Dysfunction is the opposite. It's a sprawling narrative with over a dozen major point-of-view characters, taking place across dozens of different worlds, all mostly at the same time although there are a few flashbacks that go back decades. Some chapters follow a single character through a series of connected events, others will switch between characters to give the reader a fuller understanding of what is going on during a given scene. Despite how complicated the world-building is and these long, complex chapters, it's a surprisingly easy read. This is space opera, just a very developed type of it.
It may also be worth noting that Peter F. Hamilton is British. I've seen multiple British authors who either have long chapters or don't use chapters at all, just page breaks. Early Terry Pratchett novels are an example of the latter style.
My point is that chapter length and usage actually serves a purpose in narrative structure, although different writing styles use them differently. A lot of online authors have adopted specific chapter lengths as a result of how early web sites (and usenet) worked. The chapter length wasn't a choice by the author, just a limitation of the technology.
It's fine to split a story in multiple small chapters if it fits your needs, but think about why you're doing it. Does it serve the narrative or help with ease of reading? Are you providing breaks between specific types of content, such as time jumps, scene shifts, POV changes, and so on? Are you providing breaks after busy scenes or highlighting an important change?
Or are you just putting a break every 3,000 words because you saw someone else do that?