Do any of you mind if I start making the Friendships and Fandoms chapters shorter? I think my problem at the moment is that I have this ridiculous chapter length paranoia whereby all my chapters must be the same length otherwise I have not put the necessary amount of care and effort into them, and the thought of trying to spin out the current chapter 14 of F&F into 6.5K words is what’s stopping me from doing it.
So, would people be ok with more shorter chapters that hopefully appear more regularly, or should I stick to the 6.5K for neatness’s sake so that people new to the fic don’t start out thinking “Oh goody, long chapters” and then think “wtf?” when they get halfway through and suddenly the chapters halve in length…
Answers on a postcard please. I am desperate to get this fic updated.
Baby, no matter the length, when you feel the chapter is over, then it is 🙂
When someone asks me how long a chapter should be I usually reply with “how long is a piece of string?” Mind you that is also my response for the question about how long a story should be.
Basically when you reach a natural breakpoint and you feel it should split then do that. I have written chapters that are less than 1000 words and I’ve written ones that were 10k. I did wind up splitting the longer one but my point stands, split it where it feels right.
If it helps I read somewhere that the average chapter length for popular novels was about 4k. So I usually aim for 3.5k-4.5k but that depends on scene length. If I don’t want to split the scene then it could be shorter or longer.
In my opinion don’t stress the numbers. Your story is awesome. I personally don’t care whether the next update is 500 words or 5000. I’m all about the story and the characters, I’m not thinking about how long it is, just that I’ve got another glimpse into what happens next in the world of Star Force.
Any update you make means that you care and have put effort in. You are giving us a story to read. I like that whatever sized chunks it comes in.
So yeah just have fun with it 🙂 enjoy the writing!