So I was talking to dru the other day and we were talking about chapter lengths for stories, or even lengths for one-shots and we saw eye to eye on the matter, but I was wondering what everyone else’s thoughts on this was.
In the end, we pretty much thought that if your story needs to be told in a specific way, that being long chapters, then you should just tell it that way. And if people don’t think that they can sit down for that long to read through your story, then that’s fine, but that also means that that reader may or may not understand the motif or secondary theme that connects the whole chapter together.
This all sort of started because of a new story that I’m writing In My Bones [shameless whoring, stfu ::tehe:] that has chapters that are longer than what I generally see here on mibba. The first chapter that I have posted already is just over 3k, and the second chapter is about 5k.
I feel as though those chapters need to be that length because if I cut them up, no point would be put across in a chapter and I’d just be splitting it up for my readers, which I don’t really want to do because, in the end, I’m writing for myself and if I’m not happy with the way my story is presented, what’s the point right? But sometimes, when I post in threads like the Story Comment Swap thread or even swaps here on journals, I feel like I’m ripping people off because they write stories that are much shorter.
I know that there’s a thread about this on the forums, but I just thought that I’d bring this to the journals because I know that some people on the journals don’t really go onto the forums very often. So, what is your opinion? Do you like shorter chapters (and by shorter chapters, I mean 1,000 words or so) or longer ones? And if you had an extremely long one-shot or long chapters, would you chop it up for your readers or would you say screw it, like me, and just keep it as is?
chapter lengths for stories
February 23rd, 2011 at 06:28am