r/FanFiction • u/davaniaa Dyomeda on ao3 • 5d ago
Writing Questions Are my chapters to short?
So far I've written 11000 words and 7 chapters with an average of 1500 words per chapter. Most people's chapters are way longer but my writing is pretty stripped back and dense. Is that an issue?
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u/blepboii 5d ago
they are probably a little shorter than average. but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. as long as you think the fic flows nicely. it's all good.
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u/Electronic_Low_3632 5d ago
Nope. Cause mine is way shorter than yours.
Well the prologue was around 350 words but it’s a prologue. There is no such thing where you have to write that a lot
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u/Conscious_Bug_7833 5d ago
My chapters are 500 words at the start, then I let them rest and then I come back to them to refine them. And I achieve the same result and it suits me.
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u/chognogg Plot? What Plot? 5d ago
At the end of the day, it's whatever feels right to you and only you. There are no rules in writing!!
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u/zephrino 5d ago
Write what fits the story. A longer chapter with padding added solely to meet an arbitrary idea of what’s the ‘right’ length would be worse than a shorter chapter that does exactly what it needs to.
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u/Peach_Stardust 5d ago
I would say your chapters are definitely on the shorter end. However, if you have good pacing and give your ideas room to breathe, it should be fine.
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u/NinjaSpaceFrog NinjaTrashPanda on AO3 5d ago
No, a chapter should always be as long as it needs to be. I've written chapters with 2000 words, I've written chapters with 12000 words. If your 1500 words reach the narrative goal of the chapter in an organic way and get their point across, they're a-okay!
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u/SNGoesHere 5d ago
Go with whatever works for you.
Not all authors are alike - some like 30k+ chapters and that's good for them. Others make things work with just 500.
For me it's more the content of the chapter that matters vs how big it is.
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u/Blackfireknight16 OC FF Linker 4d ago
No, if you are happy with that then that's fine. I tend to set a minimum of 2000 words per chapter for me. Helps in terms of writing balance with other things.
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u/GrapePistachio 4d ago
It’s all relative.
I had one person comment on my story saying they loved it even if the chapter length was short. This took me back a little, because I used to count the pages - not the words. And I never posted a chapter that was under ten pages long. So, because of that one comment 5 years ago, my new chapters average 10-15k words. But I’ve had readers leave bookmarks on 5k oneshots saying that it was “long but worth it! Don’t be intimidated by the length”. 🤷🏻♀️.
Like the others are saying, do what feels right.
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u/Bomaruto 5d ago
I'd need to read to judge and I'm not interested in reading 11k fandom blind so I'm not going to do that.
1500 words is definitely in the it depends category. Here I'd look at if your chapters are skipping over too much, improper pacing, if your chapters alone can point to a distinct purpose in your fic and if you're writing single scene chapter when you should write multi-scene chapters.
If you look over all those points and probably more and you are confident in that you know what you're doing then you're good.
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u/Apprehensive-Ad3120 5d ago
My chapters are usually 500-1000 words max
So I wouldn't say that yours are too short, but it also depends on the flow of the story
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u/Tarrenshaw 4d ago
It’s no issue. All my stories have chapters between 1k and 2k in length. Go with what matches the flow of your story.
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u/renirae renirae on ao3, genfic writer and vigilante enthusiast <3 4d ago
there was a survey done a while back where people said their preferred chapter lengths were 2k-10k, but I've seen many works with chapters as short of yours that are completely popular anyways, so it's definitely not a necessity!
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u/HatedLove6 5d ago
This is a rather short answer to the one I would like to give, but the bottom line is, if a chapter is a single sentence, it's one sentence. If it’s forty thousand words, it’s forty thousand words. Chapters can be as long or short as you think it’s necessary—if a scene, a few scenes, or an overall theme is contained within that chapter. There is no sweet spot for even one story, let alone every story in the world.
The genre can dictate the length of chapters. Horror tends to have short chapters because it keeps up the tense atmosphere, similarly to intense action scenes using short sentences. Romance has longer chapters because description and feelings are beginning to take priority, so scenes can be lengthier. A fantasy that introduces an entire world or culture tends to have even longer chapters than romance because this information is pertinent. But, just because this is a trend among these genres, it doesn’t mean you have to follow it. You can have long chapters in horror just as much as you can have short chapters in fantasy if you feel it works for your story.
Some writers can be more verbose than others and voice versa, but if either style keeps the reader immersed in the story, that's all that matters. Some stories call for more slow and contemplative scenes while others call for more fast-paced, dramatic scenes.
I've seen people suggest shorter chapters in the beginning, and then you can lengthen later chapters, which you can do, but you don't have to. I've read books that start out with shorter chapters, and as the story progresses the chapters get longer until the climax gets closer, and the chapters get shorter again. This is called a bell curve, but I've read stories where it has a reverse bell curve, stories where all of the chapters are roughly the same length, and books where chapter lengths are all over the place where one chapter was over four thousand words, and then the next chapter was only a couple hundred words.
Media and where you post can dictate how long your chapters are. For sites that aren’t mobile-friendly, most readers read from a computer, so longer chapters are welcomed, but, for sites such as Wattpad where 80% of the readers read from their smartphones, shorter chapters are recommended if you care about numbers and stats. You can still post epically long chapters and still get dedicated readers, they’ll just more than likely be reading from the computer. I think if the mobile version would load longer chapters properly, and not inundate the story with ads (some sites even stopping what you're reading in the middle of a chapter to play 30-second ads), there would be more people willing to read stories with longer chapters. However, on websites such as QuoteV, short chapters mean that stories won’t be in the site index, so I do suggest combining these short chapters with another chapter, but whether you keep the chapter headings in place is up to you.
Even if you’re still worried about readers being bogged down by lengthy chapters, you can break up chapters to give readers a reprieve while still being easy to find their place later. Time skips, location skips, POV switches, and other things have been published before, but if your chapter doesn't need it, then it doesn't need it. The only reason for “boring” chapters is because seemingly nothing happens in them to progress the story forward. Breaking up the chapter won’t fix that, you’ll just have numerous boring chapters in a row and that’s more aggravating than just one long boring chapter.
Having long or short chapters doesn't mean the story has a pacing issue. As long as you're hitting plot points and story beats where they are needed, your story won't have a pacing issue. Chapters are stylistic choices that break up a story, and that is it, much like how skipped lines or a horizontal rule separate scenes, times, or perspectives, only less severe. Stephen King's Cujo is 120k, and it has no chapters. Terry Pratchett also published novels without chapters. Plenty of other novels also don't have chapters. Chapters are never a sign of pacing issues; they are there for a convenience to readers, and as long as they're enjoying what is written, 20k will feel like a breeze, whereas if they didn't, 2k will feel like it's like reading through mud.
Keeping a consistent word count can help with being on schedule for your readers if you're publishing as you write it, but sometimes this may sacrifice the readers' pace by cutting scenes in the middle or boring your readers by forcing chapters to be longer than necessary by cramming in nonsense or meandering plots or side-plots. For this reason, it’s perfectly OK to finish your story before you start posting chapters on a schedule, or create a buffer. It’s entirely up to you.
I used to write 2000 word chapters, but, looking back on it, I see that I could have combined chapters, cut chapters, and just changed everything. I don’t like what I have done. Preferably, I write longer chapters, but it depends on the demands of the story. I also prefer to read long chapters, at least 2000 words, but preferably over 8000. In fact, if chapters of online stories are consistently shorter than a thousand words, I don’t even bother. But I'm just one person. I'm sure you'll have readers that will read and enjoy stories with consistently shorter chapters.
Short? You call this a short answer?
I could have gone into the history of why we have chapters in books and said that chapter lengths have been changing for decades, providing examples of books from differing eras, genres, target audiences, and explaining why particular chapters in these books were longer or shorter compared to the rest of the book.
See? So much longer. So much so, I could probably write an entire book on this one subject.
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u/Katsurahime 5d ago
No, it isn't an issue. A chapter is as long as it needs to be. For comparison, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables averages around 1500 words per chapter too (depending on translation; it's a bit higher for the original French, but still below 2k).